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Freedom of speech in universities is currently an issue of widespread concern and debate. Recent empirical findings in the UK shed some light on whether speech is unduly restricted in the university, but it suffers from two limitations. First, the results appear contradictory. Some studies show that the issue of free speech is overblown by media reportage, whilst others track serious concerns about free speech arising from certain university policies. Second, the findings exclude important issues concerning restrictions to speech on campus that fall outside the traditional debate around violations to free speech rights. This is particularly the case when certain voices are excluded from important policy conversations, and in issues around diversifying the curriculum. This article overcomes these two limitations by developing a novel conceptual framework within which to situate current debates concerning speech-related matters in universities. It does so by developing a taxonomy around the concept of 'silencing'. It then considers the current issue of speech matters in universities within this framework to determine whether, and to what extent, speech is indeed unduly restricted, and where this is a concern for free speech violations, and where it falls outside this issue.

Background: This study argues for displays of affect by people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities to be analysed in the course of everyday interactions with the people who support them. Method: Conversation analysis is applied to the affective displays of residents of a social care service for people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities to identify how such displays are taken up and form the basis for further action. Results: Three types of orientations to affect are identified: where the cause of the affect is unknown; where there is a proximal cause; and where the proximal cause is a prior action by a member of staff. Staff orient to affect as expressions of both feelings and cognitions, thereby providing the basis for self-determination. Conclusions: Displays of affect are a communicative resource for those with severe or profound impairments and must be studied in situ if they are to inform policy and everyday practice.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK is one of the main sources of funding for postgraduate study in human geography. For some years now, the ESRC has offered funded students the opportunity to apply to undertake a short internship in a government department or with a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). This paper provides a collective reflection from the perspective of four former postgraduates who completed different ESRC supported internships in the UK. We discuss the enhancement of writing skills for diverse audiences, the advancement of knowledge in diverse subject areas, and the opening up of employment opportunities as key benefits of participating in the ESRC internship scheme.

Adolescent future values--beliefs about what will matter to them in the future--may shape their adult behavior. Utilizing a national longitudinal British sample, this study examined whether adolescent future values in six domains (i.e., family responsibility, full-time job, personal responsibility, autonomy, civic responsibility, and hedonistic privilege) predicted adult social roles, civic behaviors, and alcohol use. Future values positively predicted behaviors within the same domain; fewer cross-domain associations were evident. Civic responsibility positively predicted adult civic behaviors, but negatively predicted having children. Hedonistic privilege positively predicted adult alcohol use and negatively predicted civic behaviors. Results suggest that attention should be paid to how adolescents are thinking about their futures due to the associated links with long-term social and health behaviors.

This article critiques learning design as a representation for sharing and developing practice, based on synthesis of three projects. Starting with the findings of the Mod4L Models of Practice project, it argues that the technical origins of learning design, and the consequent focus on structure and sequence, limit its usefulness for sharing practice between teachers. It compares practice models with two alternative, more flexible, representations, patterns and bundles, based on the outcomes of the Pattern Language Network (Planet) project and of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Active Learning in Computing (CETL ALiC). It concludes that while practice models may be useful in mediating between teachers and technical developers, they cannot encompass the range of practice teachers require to represent. A pattern language is more comprehensive and has the advantage of being generative, but is difficult for teachers to acquire, and bundles may provide a more adoptable representation. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table and 1 note.)

Background: At the level of policy recommendation, it is agreed that people with intellectual impairments ought to be given opportunities to make choices in their lives; indeed, in the UK, the Mental Capacity Act of 2005 enshrines such a right in law. However, at the level of practice, there is a dearth of evidence as to how choices are actually offered in everyday situations, which must hinder recommendations to change. Method: This qualitative interactional study, based on video recordings in British residential homes, combines ethnography with the fine-grained methods of Conversation Analysis. Results: We identify six conversational practices that staff use to offer choices to residents with intellectual disabilities. Conclusions: We describe the unwanted consequences of some of these practices, and how the institutional imperative to solicit clear and decisive choice may sometimes succeed only in producing the opposite.

This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the services. Issues discussed include conflicting service values and agendas, inspection regimes, an attention to the bigger decisions in a person's life when empowerment could more quickly and effectively be promoted at the level of everyday practice, problems of communication and interpretation and the pervasiveness of teaching. We offer a range of suggestions as to how these obstacles might be tackled.

Describes an experimental literacy class for socially and economically disadvantaged parents in the United Kingdom. Looks at the many factors affecting these adult students' participation and learning. Notes that the literacy students wanted more than functional literacy--literacy had to fulfill the need to express feelings, the need for recreation, and the need for escape. (SR)

Examines current Adult Basic Education teaching and assessment methods in the United Kingdom and the United States to help define what constitutes success in adult basic literacy tuition. (SR)

Around the globe, people seeking asylum are subject to ever-increasing levels of securitisation, surveillance, hostility and violence. In the UK, successive Labour and Conservative governments have sought to create an increasingly 'hostile environment' for people without leave to remain in the country, generating and perpetuating anti-immigrant sentiment in the process. This paper centres attention on the implications of this politics of hostility, which has combined with sweeping levels of austerity, for third sector organisations in and around a city situated in the North East of England. We specifically focus on organisations offering cultural, sporting and artistic activities to gain an insight into how the ways they operate are affected by the UK's immigration and austerity politics. Through researcher volunteering and observation at several organisations and interviews with people associated with them, we document some of the shared practices of quiet care and solidarity, in spite of the significant funding challenges they face. We show how these organisations are providing a crucial support structure to people seeking asylum, offering shared spaces that facilitate the 'doing together' of various activities. However, we also show how these third sector responses, and the people who attend them, are shaped and constrained by this hostile politics. We examine how organisations initially set up to focus on the provision of cultural and artistic activities are increasingly having to tailor their services to provide vitally important forms of support through the provision of, for example, food, clothing and assistance with bureaucratic (but essential) form-filling. The paper makes a key contribution to the relatively scant literature on cultural and artistic initiatives in the third sector set up for people seeking asylum and calls for sensitive academic critiques of the sector that forefront state structural violence and the socio-political contexts in which asylum sector organisations operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction People with co-occurring mental health and substance misuse problems are among the most excluded in society. A need to feel connected to others has been articulated in the occupational science literature although the concept of belonging itself has not been extensively explored within this paradigm. This paper reports findings from research that explored the meaning and experience of belonging for four people living with dual diagnosis in the United Kingdom. Method Researchers employed an interpretative phenomenological approach to the study. Four semistructured interviews were carried out. The interviews were guided by questions around the meaning of belonging, barriers to belonging and how belonging and not belonging impacted on participants’ lives. Data analysis facilitated the identification of themes across individual accounts and enabled comparisons. Findings Data analysis identified four themes – belonging in family, belonging in place, embodied understandings of belonging and barriers to belonging. Conclusion The findings add further insights into the mutable nature of belonging. A link between sense of belonging and attachment theory has been proposed, along with a way to understand the changeable and dependent nature of belonging through ‘dimensions of belonging’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Weight loss is the most commonly used metric in comparing outcomes after bariatric surgery. This is frequently presented in the form of percentage of excess weight loss (%EWL). Patients'' weight is measured at several time points prior to surgery. The time point selected as the preoperative weight can have significant effects upon the measurement of %EWL. This study aimed to investigate whether there was any standardization in the selection of preoperative weight amongst UK bariatric surgery healthcare professionals. Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted among the delegates at the British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (BOMSS) meeting in January 2011. Results: A total of 54 delegates (consultant & trainee surgeons, bariatric specialist nurses, dieticians and psychologists) responded to the survey. A wide variation was noted in which preoperative weight was used in the calculation of %EWL, both among various disciplines and also among the same disciplines. The majority (61%) used the preoperative weight recorded at the bariatric surgical assessment clinic prior to surgery. 20% of delegates used the highest recorded preoperative weight. The remainder of delegates used weight recorded on the day of surgery (17%) or the weight recorded during the first visit to a medical physician led weight management clinic (2%). Conclusion: Variation in the measurement of the preoperative weight will lead to variations of calculated %EWL between different bariatric units or even between different disciplines in the same unit. This will make comparison of published outcome data difficult. This study highlights the urgent need for standardization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A 1mm-long Spirostomum with symbiotic chlorellae has been found in the oxygen-depleted sediment of a shallow fen pond in the South of England (UK). The ciliate lives amongst sediment debris, where it builds a lorica that covers about half the length of the ciliate. It is common to find several of the green Spirostomum cells sharing the same patch of sediment particles. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]