Professional Imagination Research Articles

Achieving Balance in Graduate Progreams: Negotiating Best Practices

Dealing with this recurrent, nearly archetypal, issue of finding balance between the practical and the theoretical in graduate programs is the task of English language arts educators and the requisite activity of graduate students in our field. The relevance of best practices in instruction is clear, but that is not the end goal of graduate school. Instead, graduate schools must help practitioners rediscover their curiosity and their professional imagination. English educators must create the time and space for inservice teachers who are our graduate students to discern the value and relevance of tying best practices to theory and theory to effective practice.

Journalists Imagining the European Public Sphere

This article aims to analyse journalists’ professional imagination in connection to EU news. A special attention is paid to the variety of ideas about European public sphere that inform (or fail to inform) journalists’ work. The article is based on 149 semi-structured qualitative journalist interviews conducted in the home offices of mainstream news organisations in ten European countries.The article takes up Charles Taylor’s idea that public sphere belongs to the key social imaginaries of modernity and treat journalists as important carriers of these social imaginaries. These professional imaginaries are traced by looking at how journalists perceive the locus of news, how they define their professional role vis-á-vis their audience, and finally, how they would describe the political and communication problems within the EU. From this reasoning three relatively coherent lines of thought were derived: classical professionalism, secular discourse, and cosmopolitan discourse. As a conclusion the article attempts to map out these different discourses in connection to modes of political communication.The three discourses detected in the article can be seen as contemporary versions of professionalism in European news organisations. As such, they do not give much ground to assume that a European public sphere would emerge out of national journalistic cultures. Given the emergent nature of publics and public spheres, this does not mean that such practices may not be developed outside journalism.

Developing practice through the professional imagination.

How can the perspective of the service user be made real and helpful in the professional education of community nurses? This article presents one answer to this question through encouraging nurses to write fictional accounts of how their practice appears to their own service users. Arising from a research project on the "patchwork text" assignment format in a professional degree course at Anglia Polytechnic University, the article presents two such accounts by community nurses undertaking the course. Their accounts illustrate the insights into professional issues that are produced by an explicitly imaginative exercise. A particularly important outcome, not expected by the researchers, was that the commentaries written by the nurses on their imagined scenarios, led, not to a discussion of "issues" (as in many cases) but to a precise and practical critique of their actual practice, suggesting a further dimension of the educational value of writing fiction as part of professional education courses.

Feedstock aids microPIM parts production: Tiny cogs test the imagination of powder professionals as small parts demand ever-finer materials…

With commercially available PIM feedstock reportedly unable to fulfill the requirements for the microPIM components under investigation, researchers at the Institute for Materials Research III (IMR) in Karlsruhe, Germany, have developed new binder systems for feedstock based on both nanoceramic and ultrafine metallic powders. In the case of ceramics (zirconia) the powders can be as fine as 300 nm, and for metals in the 3μm–5μm particle size range. The powders are used to develop PIM gearwheels ( Figure 1) and other components for a demonstrator micro annular gear pump design ( Figure 2); however, the technology is also said to be applicable to micro gears used in watches.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis as a novel source of embryos for stem cell research

The generation of human embryonic stem (hES) cells has captured the public and professional imagination, largely due their potential as a means of overcoming many debilitating and degenerative diseases by cell replacement therapy. Despite this potential, few well-characterized hES cell lines have been derived. Indeed, in the UK, despite several centres having been active in this area for more than 2 years, there are as yet no published reports of human embryonic stem cells having been generated. Part of the reason for this lack of progress may relate to the quality of embryos available for research. Embryos surplus to therapeutic requirements following routine assisted reproduction treatment are often of poor quality and a large proportion may be aneuploid. This study reports a new approach to hES cell derivation. Embryos surplus to therapeutic requirements following preimplantation genetic diagnosis were used. Although unsuitable for embryo transfer due to the high risk of genetic disease, these embryos are from fertile couples and thus may be of better quality than fresh embryos surplus to assisted reproduction treatment cycles. Embryos donated after cryopreservation were also used, and putative hES lines were derived from both sources of embryos. The cell lines described here are thought to be the first reported hES cell lines to have been derived in the UK.

Foreword: Preventing Medical Accidents: Is “Systems Analysis” The Answer?

Few publications in recent memory have had the impact of the 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, To Err Is Human.1 Neither the alarming statistics nor its central message, that errors are caused by faulty systems not by faulty people, was new. Indeed, the importance of systems design has been well recognized by human factors experts in industry for decades2 and promulgated by a few recent converts in health care for 5-10 years.3 Nonetheless, the speed and intensity with which this report from the National Academy of Sciences captured media, public, political and professional attention surprised everyone. And, it is no passing fad-attention to patient safety has not subsequently flagged, it has increased. In this Medical Error Symposium, the American Journal of Law and Medicine has brought together authors from diverse backgrounds, medical and legal, to advance the debate further, raising important questions about the implications of that report and the changes already underway in health care. It is interesting to speculate on the reasons patient safety has become a cause celebre. Beyond the lurid statistics, surely a major factor in the traction enjoyed by this issue is the unique nature of medical injury. While many other human enterprises, such as aviation, building, and military operations are associated with substantial hazard, in no other situation is the harm and suffering caused by the actions of individuals whose sole purpose is to relieve suffering and in whom the victim places a profound and personal trust-doctors and nurses. It is perhaps this very personal sense of affront and betrayal that accounts for the intense emotion surrounding medical injury, particularly when caused by an error. And, the feeling is universal: victims, doctors, lawyers, and the public are all affected. After all, we're all patients at one time or another. Ironically, that unique nature of medical injury, or more precisely, our reaction to it, has been the major barrier to reducing medical errors and injury. Shame, guilt and fear prevent many physicians from discussing their mistakes, being honest with patients, and being able to look beyond their individual errors to correct underlying systems failures. They can only try harder. For many lawyers, a sense of just cause, in some cases moral outrage, similarly blinds them to alternatives to tort litigation. Both are misplaced. And both have been manifestly unsuccessful in preventing medical injuries. We have created a monster. The toll of medical injury is truly appalling. While the oft-quoted figures of 44,000-98,000 deaths per year are horrendous in themselves, little attention has been given to the accompanying estimates that over a million people are injured by medical treatments annually in the U.S. Even this number, shocking as it is, is clearly an underestimate. Without exception, every study that has examined specific types of injuries (such as adverse drug events, injuries related to use of medications) with more sophisticated methods finds rates of injury that are much higher than those indicated by the rather crude record-review and population-based studies that are so widely quoted.4 And autopsy studies suggest that preventable deaths may also be many more than 98,000.5 The second reason the IOM report captured both public and professional imagination was, I believe, that it packaged shocking news with a compelling remedy; that errors can be prevented by systems re-design. Le., we can do something about it. This idea that errors are primarily caused by systems failures and not human failures is a truly transforming concept. It turns on its head our long-held beliefs and assumptions about why people screw up and what to do about it. It is truly a paradigm shift. Early evidence also suggests it works. For several years before the IOM report in 1999, leaders in a number of health care institutions across the country had begun to implement non-punitive reporting and use of human factors principles in the redesign of systems with fair, if modest, success-particularly in medications systems. …

Movies and Morals: Energizing Ethical Thinking among Professionals

This article examines the use of film in the administrative ethics classroom, with special attention to energizing the moral imagination of professionals. Challenged by a shift in student demographics reflecting the emergence of the new public service, instructors must consider alternatives to pedagogies based on normative and applied ethics. Approaches designed to stimulate the moral imagination of students (based on contemporary metaethical perspectives) need to be considered. Using his experience with movies in the ethics classroom, the author argues that films are particularly effective in energizing the moral imagination.

The professional imagination: narrative and the symbolic boundaries between medicine and nursing.

The sociology of nursing, despite decisive interventions by recent commentators, continues to take as its main focus the subordination of nursing to biomedicine. This view reflects analytic stability, as well as institutional inertia. Far less attention has been paid by sociologists to the ways in which nursing is constructing its difference from medicine, and the exercise of the professional imagination that this involves. This paper suggests a strategy by which this might be remedied, which would focus on professional narratives.

Is the Professionalisation of Adult Basic Skills Practice Possible, Desirable or Inevitable?

This paper explores the meaning and implications of a policy-driven professionalisation of adult basic skills practice. Written amidst competing theoretical conceptualisations of professionalism, the paper focuses on a particular policy moment in Adult Language, Literacy and Numeracy (ALLN) practice in England: Skills for Life. The paper argues that the possibility of implementation of this policy is limited. The policy is filtered through the fragmented nature of the field, the embeddedness of literacy and what this paper calls an 'anti-professional' stance of ALLN practice. For policy makers, professionalisation is desirable, and its impact is far-reaching. It enables control of a key aspect of the service sector implicated in the supply of flexi-workers required by a globalised economy. In discussing the inevitability of professionalisation the paper draws on a small-scale research project to locate a space for the professional imagination, a space in which ALLN practitioners express motivations at odds with policy imperatives and enact professionalisation in ways that arguably hijack the momentum and resource that the policy provides.

An Experiment in Stimulating the Student's Professional Imagination

An Experiment in Stimulating the Student's Professional Imagination