Critical Disposition Research Articles

Basil Anthony Moreau (1799-1873) and His Philosophy of Christian Education

This article examines Basil Anthony Moreau’s philosophy of education, and particularly his idea of Christian education. Moreau is the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross that has been working on education and evangelization since 1853 in different countries of the world including Bangladesh. His philosophy of education plays a significant role in guiding and running Holy Cross educational institutions across the globe. Moreau’s educational philosophy envisioned three aims for all students in Holy Cross education: to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to function in the world and the hereafter; to nurture an appreciation for individual responsibility and social connectedness to advance social justice issues; to stimulate those critical dispositions of mind and heart essential to the sustenance of a peaceful society. He had the vision to educate both the hearts and minds of Christian students to grow in Christ’s love and make the world a better place. His views on education also have inspired Holy Cross education the pursuit of academic excellence within a family’s atmosphere that binds the student, faculty, staff, and alumni. Although Holy Cross educators did not implement the specific teaching methods of Moreau in all of their institutions, Moreau’s views laid the foundation of educational philosophy in Holy Cross education. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#63-64-; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2018 P 65-80

Propaganda in the Guise of News

Abstract In the late 1940s, conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. was embroiled in controversy after publicly criticizing consumer cooperatives for taking advantage of a federal tax loophole. Coinciding with the Federal Communications Commission’s reconsideration of its Mayflower doctrine—a ban on broadcast editorials—the dispute served as fodder for New Deal–era progressive media reformers. This article unpacks Lewis’s mostly forgotten role as an unwitting catalyst of progressive media regulations through reconsidering the FCC’s 1948 Mayflower hearings, which resulted in the fairness doctrine (1949–87). This doctrine mandated that broadcasters present controversial issues of public concern in an ideologically balanced manner. Lewis’s news-breaking thus became framed as a problem in need of federal regulatory solution by reformers who sought to sublimate radio into an idealized liberal public sphere. These reforms, however, framed political disagreement as an epistemological crisis and, in doing so, unintentionally bolstered a conservative critical disposition toward the mainstream press, exemplified in the “liberal media” trope.

Digital student agency: Approaching agency in digital contexts from a critical perspective

Developing student agency is a critical aspect of higher education and, in particular, digital education. In this sense, the capacity to understand what constitutes agency in digital contexts of education and evaluate students’ digital agency is now crucial. In contrast to traditional approaches to student agency in digital contexts that subsume technologies to educational intentions, media research has illustrated a more complex interplay between humans and technology. Drawing on this insight, the paper argues for a more critical disposition to digital student agency, wherein relational, cultural, and technological dynamics are central to agency. Specifically, the article proposes a framework for digital student agency that distinguishes five critical domains to student agency in digital contexts: (1) agentic possibility, (2) digital self-representation, (3) data uses, (4) digital sociality, and (5) digital temporality. The article concludes by outlining the implications of the framework for educational practice and academic research around student agency and student learning. Specifically, adopting the framework implies changes in how we investigate student agency in digital contexts and enables critical investigations of student-centred teaching practices.

Helicopter emergency medical service dispatch in older trauma: time to reconsider the trigger?

BackgroundHelicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) respond to serious trauma and medical emergencies. Geographical disparity and the regionalisation of trauma systems can complicate accurate HEMS dispatch. We sought to evaluate HEMS dispatch sensitivity in older trauma patients by analysing critical care interventions and conveyance in a well-established trauma system.MethodsAll trauma patients aged ≥65 years that were attended by the Air Ambulance Kent Surrey Sussex over a 6-year period from 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2019 were included. Patient characteristics, critical care interventions and hospital disposition were stratified by dispatch type (immediate, interrogate and crew request).Results1321 trauma patients aged ≥65 were included. Median age was 75 years [IQR 69–89]. HEMS dispatch was by immediate (32.0%), interrogation (43.5%) and at the request of ambulance clinicians (24.5%). Older age was associated with a longer dispatch interval and was significantly longer in the crew request category (37 min [34–39]) compared to immediate dispatch (6 min [5–6] (p = .001). Dispatch by crew request was common in patients with falls < 2 m, whereas pedestrian road traffic collisions and falls > 2 m more often resulted in immediate dispatch (p = .001). Immediate dispatch to isolated head injured patients often resulted in pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia (PHEA) (39%). However, over a third of head injured patients attended after dispatch by crew request received PHEA (36%) and a large proportion were triaged to major trauma centres (69%).ConclusionsMany patients who do not fulfil the criteria for immediate HEMS dispatch need advanced clinical interventions and subsequent tertiary level care at a major trauma centre. Further studies should evaluate if HEMS activation criteria, nuanced by age-dependant triggers for mechanism and physiological parameters, optimise dispatch sensitivity and HEMS utilisation.

Entering the Fifth Dimension: modular modernities, psychedelic sensibilities, and the architectures of lived experience

In this paper, we elaborate on the Fifth Dimension, an extraordinary, largely overlooked architectural example of 1960s psychedelia that was installed in a small Scottish resort town. Made up of 17 domed chambers, each designed to stimulate psychedelic sensory experiences for its intrepid visitors, the Fifth Dimension was the creation of London‐based environmental artist Keith Albarn using his experimental “Ekistikit” modular building system. We argue that the qualities and impacts of this highly inventive, utopian “fun palace” interrogate stereotypical depictions of countercultural, psychedelic creativities. We discuss how they also intersect with current geographical scholarship concerned with sensation, play, and the built environment. Two key elements of the Fifth Dimension are examined. First, building on critical geographies of architecture, we focus on Albarn's innovative system to exemplify how pioneers of environmental design used advanced modular technologies to radically re‐configure the possibilities of dwelling and working in flexible building structures. Second, drawing on aesthetic theories of the sensory, we demonstrate how the structure was designed to stimulate transformative psychedelic sensibilities as a novel form of disruptive politics to induce critical dispositions towards the built environment. Our argument is underpinned by the call for a recuperation of sensational and affective experience in the design and inhabitation of built environments. We contend that this bears particular significance for an emergent geography of play and enchantment.

Desperate Responsibility: Precarity and Right-Wing Populism

This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations that create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy of popular education. Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences alongside critical accounts of today’s general work culture, this “critical-popular” procedure yields a conception of precarity with two defining characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s conception of “political literacy” and Bridget Anderson’s notion of “migrantizing the citizen,” in turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and multiracial appeal of Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse of national economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro and Romand Coles. Day laborers’ worker centers, I argue, refunction precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen. A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the worker center network were expanded throughout the economy.

The Necessity of Imagination: Using the Counterfactual Method to Overcome International Law’s Epistemological Limitations

To advance movement toward the cultural recognition and political representation that critical international legal scholars seek, I propose in this article mainstreaming the use of the counterfactual method. It is an attractive device for renewal-minded scholars for it facilitates the exploration of alternative legal imaginaries. By crafting what if scenarios, use of the counterfactual method creates opportunity to engage not just with different regulatory possibilities, but also with different underlying epistemologies. Despite the contingency of many features of international law, we present and practise them as though they were sacrosanct. This presumption undermines our efforts toward renewal as we take for granted the prejudicial precepts we rage against. As I argue, the counterfactual method provides an escape from the conundrum. If deployed well, critical international legal scholarship add a new dimension to the critical disposition. What critical scholars often lament is the absence of creation or of imagining alternatives to the status quo. For example, this is the essence of Bhupinder Chimni’s Manifesto where he gently chides critical scholarship for failing “to effectively critique neo-liberal international law or [to] project an alternative vision of international law.” While I think Chimni is over-egging the pudding, I take his point: identifying shortcomings within the extant regime is vital but no more so than methodically exploring how it could be otherwise. By centring the contingency of international law, on one hand, and (temporarily) suspending our commitment to it on the other, the possibilities for renewal multiply.

ProCAD: Looking at a Fuller Picture of the Teacher Candidate

Definitions of effective teaching focus on three primary areas: performances, essential knowledge, and critical dispositions. While no one measure provides a complete picture of teacher effectiveness, empirical inquiry into critical dispositions lags behind what is known about essential knowledge and performances. We found this underdevelopment true in our own educator preparation program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which led to the development, testing, and implementation of the Professional Competencies, Attitudes, and Dispositions (ProCAD) assessment. In this article, we introduce the ProCAD assessment, describing each piece of the ProCAD framework and its alignment with InTASC critical disposition substandards. We present findings from the analysis of ProCAD data and close with implications for better understanding effective teaching and future research.

The environments of environmental impact assessment: Transforming neoliberal environmental governance from within

The transformation of neoliberal environmental governance is beset by conceptual and empirical complexity. Utilising a governmentality conceptual and analytical framework, this piece seeks to illustrate how, on their own terms, environmental governance interventions create the potential for change via a modality I have labelled the temporalised environment. Through a discourse analysis of select guidance and regulatory documents, a programmer’s view of environmental impact assessment in England and Wales is generated. As both an object and a technology of governmental power, I show how the environment can reinforce extant neoliberal logics (as ‘artefact’) or be productive of a new re-socialised, globalising form of biopower (as ‘aspiration’). I explore the risks posed to the transformative potential of the latter ‘aspirational’ environment in terms of difficulties distinguishing between its neoliberal and non-neoliberal effects, its capture by neoliberal institutions, and the scalability of its transformation from local to global. I argue that these can only be adequately mitigated if a continued critical disposition is adopted towards the defining features, purpose and functionality of an environment. I propose a series of straightforward questions to aid this process. Overall, this distinction between artefactual and aspirational environments is intended to be heuristic, orienting those strategising against neoliberal environmental governance towards the instabilities internal to the logic of specific interventions.

Assessing the learning needs of physical medicine and rehabilitation residents to develop a geriatric medicine and rehabilitation curriculum

ABSTRACT Background Older adults with functional impairment are cared for by physiatrists in rehabilitation, but physiatrist training in geriatric-related competencies remains suboptimal. To develop a geriatric rehabilitation (GR) curriculum and explore opportunities for improvement, a needs assessment of stakeholders was conducted to understand physical medicine and rehabilitation (PMR) residents’ comfort levels and learning needs in geriatrics. Methods A mixed-methods design was employed. PMR residents (n = 18) and practicing physiatrists (n = 40) completed a questionnaire; and PMR residents, physiatrists and key informants (n = 9; n = 4; n = 6) participated in focus groups and semi-structured interviews to explore geriatric experiences of trainees and educational needs in geriatrics and rehabilitation. Data were qualitatively analyzed using constructivist-grounded theory. Results Residents and physiatrists highlighted similar topics as areas of low comfort in knowledge. Interviews prioritized critical geriatric topics (gait assessment, falls, cognitive impairment, movement disorders, and polypharmacy) and highlighted disposition planning and end-of-life care as areas needing further curriculum support. Challenges in delivering geriatric education were also identified. Conclusion What emerged from the needs assessment was a series of critical geriatric educational priorities for the development of a GR curriculum for physiatry trainees – arising at an opportune time given the shift toward competency-based residency education.

Análisis probabilístico de seguridad para laboratorio secundario de calibración dosimétrica

Se aplicó la metodología análisis probabilístico de seguridad para la cuantificación del riesgo radiológico asociado a la operación del irradiador del fabricante HopeWell modelo G-100 en el Laboratorio Secundario de Calibración Dosimétrica del Servicio Geológico Colombiano. El irradiador cuenta con una fuente radiactiva de 60Co con actividad nominal de 185 TBq, considerada una fuente extremadamente peligrosa para las personas, según el Organismo Internacional de Energía Atómica. El análisis contempló la identificación de los sucesos iniciadores mediante la metodología de diagramas lógicos maestros, la determinación de las secuencias accidentales y su frecuencia mediante árboles de fallo y la estimación de la magnitud de la consecuencia de cada secuencia accidental en función de la probabilidad de causar la muerte de un individuo asociada al escenario de exposición planteado. El riesgo cuantificado fue de 1,6 x 10–5 por año para una exposición mortal, que es inferior a la restricción establecida de 1,44 x 10–4 por año. Finalmente, se encontró que las disposiciones de protección y seguridad más críticas son las relacionas con la capacitación sobre el significado de las señales de advertencia del inicio de las secuencias de último hombre afuera (LMO, por su sigla en inglés) y de inicio de irradiación, seguidas por estas señales de advertencia.

Re-framing the Past: Framing as a Stance in the Writing of History

This article brings the work of cultural theorist Mieke Bal and historian Hayden White into a conversation, inviting the reader to consider framing, re-framing, and un-framing as historiographical dispositions. The concept of framing was used as a substitute for context in cultural analysis. The article argues that the concept of framing could be adopted as a stance or could become one’s critical disposition in history writing, often coexisting, overlapping, and inseparable from context and contextualization. Time and chronology aren’t necessarily the only organizing principles in history. This is where context and contextualization come together in history writing and are inherently present within framing. History is never really free from context, but the concept of framing presents an opportunity to identify and enact the frames, putting the frames themselves to work. In framing differently, other contexts might emerge. The delicate balance between framing and context will continue to remain entangled in history writing, disrupting the way history tends to be written, and thus presenting an opportunity to really get beneath it, opening our own door to imagination.

The ideal-actual gap in the roles of research in teaching

This study aimed to create an image of how research integrates in university teaching particularly in STEM education in a state university in Philippines. The participants were 104 teachers from five campuses of the university that offers STEM undergraduate programs. A quantitative research design was employed to address the central theme: The identification of the gap between the beliefs and perceptions of STEM Educators regarding the role of research in university teaching. T-test was used to test the difference between the actual and ideal beliefs of teachers. Cohen’s d values were computed to determine the effect sizes. The present study revealed that the STEM teachers highly valued the role of research in teaching. They especially considered the development of creative and critical dispositions as the most important goals of integrating research into teaching. However, the teachers reported low actual integration of research into their current teaching, revealing a major gap between their beliefs and the perceived actual integration research into their own teaching practices as evident in the result of the statistical tests. It further showed that institutional background appeared to be critical in the integration of research in teaching. Ultimately, STEM education in the university is emphatic on research content in the delivery of instruction while creating opportunities for learners to participate along the learning process. However, a research-based approach remains to be unpopular, much less for a research-oriented classroom. Strengthening research support and widening the scope of research culture are recommended.

Youth reassembling difficult topics through humour as boundary play

ABSTRACT Humour, when engaged in the classroom, tends to be used as a means to hook youth into the ‘real’ material of school, when officially sanctioned at all. Humour can be dangerous, not-the-least in its potential to produce chaos, presenting difficulties in the rigid climate of accountability and standardisation. As we animate, humour can trouble sedimented boundaries of the ‘acceptable’ as youth participate in sense-making of their worlds. As we argue, this boundary play is crucial to critical literacy dispositions. This paper considers the ways in which students navigated the boundaries of Martin Luther King (MLK) and the hijab in two research projects through assemblage as a methodological experiment. Our purpose is to map the embodied entanglements of humour as a pedagogy of affect for critical literacy in diverse urban classrooms. We suggest that humour can re-contour affective terrains of literacy encounters and, thereby, the embodied possibilities for urban youth, opening spaces in the classroom for alternative senses of belonging and attachment.

A Bayesian decision support sequential model for severity of illness predictors and intensive care admissions in pneumonia

BackgroundCommunity-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the USA. Our objective was to assess the predictive value on critical illness and disposition of a sequential Bayesian Model that integrates Lactate and procalcitonin (PCT) for pneumonia.MethodsSensitivity and specificity of lactate and PCT attained from pooled meta-analysis data. Likelihood ratios calculated and inserted in Bayesian/ Fagan nomogram to calculate posttest probabilities. Bayesian Diagnostic Gains (BDG) were analyzed comparing pre and post-test probability. To assess the value of integrating both PCT and Lactate in Severity of Illness Prediction we built a model that combined CURB65 with PCT as the Pre-Test markers and later integrated the Lactate Likelihood Ratio Values to generate a combined CURB 65 + Procalcitonin + Lactate Sequential value.ResultsThe BDG model integrated a CUBR65 Scores combined with Procalcitonin (LR+ and LR-) for Pre-Test Probability Intermediate and High with Lactate Positive Likelihood Ratios. This generated for the PCT LR+ Post-test Probability (POSITIVE TEST) Posterior probability: 93% (95% CI [91,96%]) and Post Test Probability (NEGATIVE TEST) of: 17% (95% CI [15–20%]) for the Intermediate subgroup and 97% for the high risk sub-group POSITIVE TEST: Post-Test probability:97% (95% CI [95,98%]) NEGATIVE TEST: Post-test probability: 33% (95% CI [31,36%]) . ANOVA analysis for CURB 65 (alone) vs CURB 65 and PCT (LR+) vs CURB 65 and PCT (LR+) and Lactate showed a statistically significant difference (P value = 0.013).ConclusionsThe sequential combination of CURB 65 plus PCT with Lactate yielded statistically significant results, demonstrating a greater predictive value for severity of illness thus ICU level care.

Critical cosmopolitanism in participant dialogue: grappling with essentialism, negotiating difference and resisting closure

ABSTRACTThis article explores email dialogue between students from the University of Guanajuato and the University of Leeds who shared critical incidents from their personal experience and travels. While the students struggled with essentialism in their exchanges, they retained a willingness to critique specific local cultural practices and challenged some of the usual discourses and familiar tropes associated with mobility and intercultural contact. The data highlights the importance of place in the students' reading and navigation of the world, the dialogic and iterative reformulation of their positions, their ability to deal with complexity through a critical cosmopolitan perspective, and a growing reflexive and ethical consciousness. This affirms our belief in the value of open-ended student dialogue as a strategy to encourage critical cosmopolitan dispositions, and underlines the need for greater nuance around conceptualising essentialism.

Hope in the Wobbles: Negotiations into, Out of, and between Critical Dispositions

ABSTRACTThere is an ever-present need for scholarship that addresses how to prepare preservice teachers to approach literacies as political, learn with children who have different cultural, linguistic, and racial identities than them, and navigate the continual becoming inherent in equity-oriented practice. This article explores the affordances of participating in a place-based practicum and connected university course, the EPIC program, to negotiate critical dispositions. University partners negotiated critical dispositions through engaging in the child-driven creation of fictive superhero worlds at an afterschool club and through mediation of those experiences in a connected university course. The afterschool club is grounded in sociocritical literacy practice and serves as a practicum site for a elementary teacher education program. I used a critical literacy framework to analyze negotiations of critical dispositions by university partners. Findings highlight how one university partner wobbled along a spectrum of equity-oriented practice. The study illuminates the value of an analytical framework in naming dispositions as people wobble in order to surface and mediate them. Wobbling is a conceptual tool that can support both teacher educators and preservice teachers in moving further toward equity across the many settings in which they will teach and learn.

Aspects of Free Market Economy &amp; Autonomy in Applied Philosophy

The aim of the course is to engage students in a wide variety of activities and experiences that will assist in the development of critical thinking, analysis and problem solving skills. Through exposure to a wide range of historical perspectives across different domains of knowledge (including History, Science, Art, Ethics, Psychology and Literature) and the opportunity to discuss problems and scenarios from everyday life, students will develop a deeper understanding of their personal values and the perspectives of others. This course aims to develop students into inquirers with a critical disposition and a thirst for knowledge.

The analytical lens: developing undergraduate students’ critical dispositions in undergraduate EAP writing courses

ABSTRACTThis paper comprises findings from three parallel case studies within the broad framework of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). These provide results from classroom-based action research conducted over two years working with Semantics, Specialisation and axiological cosmologies from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Each author shares how one or both of these LCT dimensions have guided their practice in the teaching of English for academic writing and specifically, the development of their students’ critical dispositions by teaching them how to apply lenses to analyse texts so that they may make informed judgements. Data from classroom interventions and student writing are provided. It is hoped that this paper elicits further discussion in the growing field of applying LCT and may draw attention to the role of the EAP teacher as expert in linguistics and the need to focus more on knowledge in EAP writing courses.

Een pleidooi voor radicale liefde

Abstract In this paper I make an analysis of the dominant ideas on love in Belgian society, based on the narratives of men and women in (predominantly heterosexual) non-monogamous relationships. The narratives of these men and women show that although their practices do not conform to the ideal of the monogamous couple relationship, they often reproduce the gendered power relations inherent in the romantic love complex, thereby privileging the doctrine of detached individualism and invulnerability over notions of responsibility and care. Building on feminist critiques of the romantic love complex, this paper questions the subversive potential of these non-monogamous lifestyles as they seemingly fail to adequately challenge underlying patriarchal structures and mechanisms. The paper proposes an ethics of intersubjective vulnerability, which is defined by both a critical disposition and responsiveness to our own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others, as a prerequisite for radically rethinking love.