Reflective Piece Research Articles

Rethinking “again” girls at-promise: A vicennial response

ABSTRACT This article presents a brief commentary on Abrams’ Rethinking Girls “At-Risk” (2002) and uses a vicennial perspective to retrospectively explore the conceptual structure respecting adolescent female development. Acknowledging the change in collective ideological values and social normative influences, the piece comments on how certain theories and approaches argued by Abrams in the 2000s have either evolved or been phased out, and accordingly repositioned adolescent girls’ developmental experiences in the present-day dialogue. An up-to-date examination of contextual and sociocultural factors is put forward in this commentary, along with the three components summarized in empowering women’s agency today: participation, authority, and deliverance. What follows is a discussion of topical issues concerning recent global activities and milestones, with a particular attention to cyberactivism and the impact of COVID-19, for the understanding of the risks concerned with girls’ development and the enquiry into young women’s lives at the present time. This reflective piece is a useful conceptual basis in juxtaposition with Abrams’ article, providing those involved in adolescent female development with conceptualizations and a thematic frame of reference in tackling adolescent girls’ development, against the backdrop of cultural, political, and social trends.

Lessons from history – How can this inform our future?

This reflective piece narrates the history of the DCP L&M Faculty on its 20thanniversary, and considers what lessons can be learned from the past 20 years to inform leadership of and by the profession in the future.

Coping with Academic and Family Expectations during COVID-19: Perspectives of Female Students of Durban University of Technology

Coping with COVID-19 has been difficult for humankind globally. While there has been an assessment of the challenges people face concerning COVID-19, there is sparse research on the coping mechanisms used in different spheres. This paper lurched into this gap and looked specifically at selected female students of the Durban University of Technology, exploring their coping processes as they balance the reality of COVID-19 and the challenges of university life. Folkman and Lazarus’ (1988) coping theory and the associated ways of coping (WCQ) factors (confrontive coping, distancing, self-controlling, seeking social support, accepting responsibility, escape-avoidance, planful problem-solving and positive reappraisal) are the foundations of this study’s conceptual framework. This study used the WCQ factors within a qualitative interpretive analysis to interpret reflective pieces of 14 female students enrolled in a university-wide module – Cornerstone. The module aims to induct students into the higher education community with the values and practices that promote self-awareness, social justice and environmental knowledge. Findings revealed the difficulty experienced by the students in balancing life and academic contexts. The study also showed that COVID-19 had worsened their social realities because of the regulations on social distancing and public gatherings, thus inhibiting educational or physical social contact. These made female students vulnerable to mental health issues. Therefore, they used multiple coping mechanisms to deal with challenges during the COVID-19 period.

FAMILY Medicine.

This is a reflective piece about a family who I cared for during my first year of residency.

Reconnecting with Nature through Haiku

This reflection piece is a short summary of how haiku can help us to reconnect with nature and be used as a creative form of writing and a literary tool to raise environmental awareness and promote change. It is based on the experience developed in the chapter “Raising Environmental Awareness and Rewriting Education through Haikus” co-written by Lorraine Kerslake and Mª Encarnación Carillo and published in Literature as a Lens for Climate Change: Using Narratives to Prepare the Next Generation. 2022: pp. 171-193.

Growing love for the world: COP26 and finding your superpower

ABSTRACT This short reflective piece charts my own experiences of working with young people (aged 5–11 years) during COP26 and offers some tentative reflections on the role of hope in emplaced geographical education. Through detailing the experiences of a community garden workshop in Drumchapel, Glasgow, this paper highlights the ways in which hope for the future in the face of climate adversity was both felt and seen by young people during COP26. In doing so, it briefly reflects upon why their hopes and imaginations matter in our discussions of the legacy of climate events such as COP26.

Developing an evidence-Informed decolonising curriculum wheel – A reflective piece

Decolonising the curriculum is not a fad (Moosavi, 2020) nor a metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012). It is the deep interrogation of curriculum with Black and minoritised students, to expose how the colonialist patriarchal epistemological worldview has shaped the curriculum, the results of which are seen in the different educational outcomes for these groups compared to their white peers. Thus, this approach to curriculum transformation decentres the hegemony disadvantaging and harming Black and minoritised students. Decolonising the curriculum reinserts knowledges and authors that are pushed to the margins/devalued, so that Black and minoritised students can be represented in the curriculum, representation leads to belonging, a contributor for student success (Pedler et al., 2022). This paper reflects on the development of an evidence informed ‘decolonising the curriculum wheel – a reflection framework’, as a method to support and guide engagement and continuous evaluation of decolonising curricula activity/ies across a higher education institution, to potentially improve belonging for Black and minoritised students. The article shares how through a scoping literature review and thematic analysis of reports from student focus groups, components for a decolonising method were identified. The article also lays bare the challenges that occurred in this journey towards developing the wheel.

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

Some thoughts on the undergraduate Ayurveda curriculum.

In his reflective piece in this issue, Kishor Patwardhan has exposed the hollowness of the Ayurvedic curriculum in some approaches to anatomy and physiology [1]. Being a teacher of Ayurvedic physiology at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and a widely published researcher, his views should be heeded by those responsible for designing the curricula of the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS). His paper is not a one-off lament. Patwardhan and several others have been writing for over 10 years on the contradictions between recognised medical science and what is professed in the Ayurvedic curriculum [2, 3]. Having himself subscribed to such subterfuges in the past, he now warns that to "superimpose modern science over classical references (is) unscientific," adding that "such misinterpretations could lead to clinical misapplication, misjudgement" and "smother innovation" [1].

The only way is not to be Essex: A reflective piece from a serving head teacher in England regarding stereotypes relating to Essex accents and the impact this has on motivation to become a head teacher

The only way is not to be Essex: A reflective piece from a serving head teacher in England regarding stereotypes relating to Essex accents and the impact this has on motivation to become a head teacher

Mātauranga Māori and secondary science teaching: 2022

This reflection piece is written for secondary science teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand who are , for the first time, being obliged to consider the inclusion of Māori words and concepts in the NCEA achievement standards they use to assess their students. My aim is to unpack the issues implicit in the current trends to incorporate Māori knowledge in the secondary science curriculum, and help science teachers see the new standards in a more balanced and optimistic way.

Grounded in Place: Dialogues between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan, and Aotearoa

This paper introduces “Grounded in Place: Dialogues between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan and, Aotearoa,” a special issue of Pacific Arts. It provides background information about the October 2021 online symposium of the same name, which brought together nineteen First Nations artists, filmmakers, and curators, along with non-Indigenous scholars and museum professionals, from Australia, Taiwan, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Philippines. The symposium explored the relationships that First Nations creative practitioners in the Indo-Pacific region have to the land and sea. Each symposium speaker discussed their creative practice in relation to their panel’s theme: history and sovereignty, land and community, site and materials, or place and space. The journal issue comprises written and visual essays, an interview, poetry, and reflective pieces from symposium participants. The contributions are based on the participants’ presentations and have been expanded. While acknowledging the different political, social, and environmental contexts of each contributor, as well as their highly distinctive perspectives and creative approaches, some common themes have emerged in this volume, which the guest editors outline in this introduction. These centre on First Nations Peoples’ complex relationships with land and water as sites of appropriation and struggles for sovereignty, as sources of learning and creative production, and as places of ancestral being and continuous belonging, community, and culture. The introduction provides a brief overview of each contributor’s essay, as well as background on the collaboration between the institutions that convened the symposium: Queensland University of Technology, Taiwan’s National Museum of Prehistory, and Aotearoa’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre. It also fleshes out some of the similarities between the countries’ histories, particularly the ongoing effects of colonisation upon their respective First Nations Peoples.

Architectural History and Sustainable Architectural Heritage Education: Digitalisation of Heritage in New Zealand

Over the last few decades, a significant amount of literature on the preservation and adaptive reuse of historical buildings has been published. More recently, the use of digital technologies in heritage projects and academic research has become increasingly topical worldwide. However, the topic of architectural education and the teaching of architectural history in relation to heritage is less discussed. This paper contributes to this relevant and necessary topic that has not received much attention in academia so far, and presents a case study—a real-life heritage project to teach architectural history in higher education. The methodology applied in this case study is based on the digital methods of heritage surveying. The paper explains the methodology process and illustrates the key tasks across three project phases of a Scan to BIM/Capture to CAD methodology: methods and activities developed with the students, from building survey, data processing, development of BIM models, etc. The aim of the paper is to analyse the positive contribution for the teaching curriculum and the benefits for community and industry. The paper is a reflective narrative piece and seeks to share useful tools and strategies to make educational use of a heritage building and its resources as one way of teaching architectural history and heritage today.

How Students’ Inspirations and Aspirations Impact Motivation and Engagement in the First Year of Study

Within this study, we aim to better understand the inspirations and aspirations of first year Biosciences and Chemistry undergraduates, how these change over the first year of study and their impact on motivation and engagement. Participants were asked to write a short reflective piece at the start of Welcome Week in their first year of undergraduate study. Thematic analysis identified four themes surrounding inspirations and aspirations. The most common theme was students naming a specific career as their aspiration (58%), followed by being inspired by work experience, aspiring to undertake further study and finally personal experience of a specific illness. Our findings showed that students’ career aspirations differed depending on ethnicity, with ambitions for medicine and laboratory work showing a marked increase in some ethnically marginalised groups. Focus groups undertaken at the end of the first year of study highlight increased motivation and engagement when students feel their course content aligns with their career aims. Conversely, students are disengaged by course material they feel is irrelevant to their chosen career. Here, we will discuss the impact of these findings on creating an inclusive curriculum and the career readiness of the student body. Conclusions apply to career development modules and how the applied nature of a course can lead to engagement and higher motivation for students as well as curriculum design.

Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media ed. by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová

Reviewed by: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media ed. by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová Anita Tarr (bio) Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. Edited by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. "Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel," opines Bart Simpson. Similarly, discussing climate change is bound to bring on despair, and so we might expect a book focused on the relationship of fiction and the environmental crisis to be full of doom and gloom. The popularity of young adult novels and futuristic films posed as warnings for a Hell on Earth becomes problematic, says Nisi Shawl, in "that they're sometimes used as blueprints" (26). Our pervasive Westernized stories prevent us from seeing beyond our beliefs of "human exceptionalism … human entitlement … and human identity"; we refuse to accept culpability or we become inured to the warnings, paralyzed by our helplessness to enact meaningful change. Fortunately, Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media takes a different path. Instead of casting readers into the swamp of despair, the contributors emphasize the importance of emphasizing hope for the future. The best way of transmitting this hope, they claim, is through counterstories, especially fantasy. Brian Attebery states in his essay, "From the Third Age to the Fifth Season: Confronting Anthropocene Through Fantasy," that "we need stories to tell us how we got here, where we are going, and how to live in the human-created world" (18). At this point I want to cheer out loud, not just because of the radical view that we can envision a future that is hopeful, but that stories—not just government policies, political grandstanding, and (sometimes-contested) statistics—are a vital factor in envisioning not the conquest of nature but a future "focused on cultivating livable collaboration" (214). "Stories can turn very complex matters into something intelligible, into something we recognize and can relate to. Stories and characters convey importance to things, persons, and places," bringing much-needed attention to climate change (227). [End Page 424] Another radical departure for Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene is that the contributors are scholars as well as creative writers, so that we read analysis in addition to poetry or reflective pieces. The editors, Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová, have divided the sixteen analytical essays and the fifteen creative, inspirational pieces into four broad sections—"Trouble in the Air," "Dreaming the Earth," "Visions in the Water," and "Playing with Fire"—the traditional four elements of nature, each of which is introduced by Attebery's simplistic myth of human presence as "Child" wreaking havoc upon the world. Every essay is complemented by an inspirational piece that sometimes dramatizes the same basic topic or intensifies it or makes it more personal. For example, John Rieder's essay "Kim Stanley Robinson's Case for Hope in New York 2140" explains that Robinson "rewrites the myth of the Flood as a fantasy of successful anti-capitalist collective action" (146); the following reflective piece, Adam Gidwitz's "Myth Makes Us See," proposes that we should choose connection over comfort: "We do not need parables about an Earth destroyed. We need stories that wake ourselves to ourselves" (149). All this testifies to the editors' vision of producing a text that appeals to different aspects of readers' interests in their efforts to persuade us all to envision the future with hope, not despair. Although a couple of essays are unnecessarily challenging, all of the essays are edifying and enlightening. The texts being analyzed include Game of Thrones and its conflicted messages of climate change; the "magical connection" between humans and Nature (89), as conveyed in both Terry Pratchett's novels about witches and Margaret Mahy's focus on trees; N. K. Jemison's questionable return to the city as redemption; J. K. Rowlings's Wizarding World, a mind-scape that demonstrates "the process of a restoration ecology" (107); and fantasy television shows such as Steven Universe that thematize queer ecology. The reflective pieces are uneven...

The Final Chapter of my Thesis: How I Made the Most out of Finishing my PhD in Children’s Eating Behaviour During a Pandemic

In early 2020, national lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic meant that face-to-face research could no longer go ahead in the UK. This article describes my experiences as a final year PhD student who was in the middle of data collection for a feasibility trial of a children’s healthy eating intervention when the lockdown began. This reflective piece tracks my thought processes throughout the last year of my PhD, exploring the difficulties and decisions encountered along the way, as well as the serendipity of unexpected research opportunities.

Opening Questions in Visual Working Memory.

In this reflective piece on visual working memory, I depart from the laboriously honed skills of writing a review. Instead of integrating approaches, synthesizing evidence, and building a cohesive perspective, I scratch my head and share niggles and puzzlements. I expose where my scholarship and understanding are stumped by findings and standard views in the literature.

Can (or should) white women do Black feminist theory?: exploring tensions, contradictions, and intersectionalities while performing justice-focused research

ABSTRACT Black feminist thought is produced by and for Black women, but could it be applied by – be the conceptual lens for – others? How do/should I position myself as a white woman doing Black feminist work? How do I de-centre myself, centre Black voices, and also use the power that my whiteness provides to do the type of social justice work Black feminist thought approaches demands? Here, I wrestle with the answers to these questions mainly through my ‘conversations’ with Black feminist intellectuals such as Collins (2000), Lorde (2007), Cooper (2018), and Kendall (2020). In this reflective piece, I explore six ‘lessons learned’ which emerged from the tensions/conflicts I encountered while doing this project in the confines of academia with the goal of considering how academics and practitioners can create knowledge in anti-racist ways.

The Future of Education as a Creative Ecosystem: A Sociocultural Framework for the Development of Creativity.

This article explores the social and educational impact post COVID-19 on education through the perspective of creativity. This is a reflective and forward-thinking piece of how creativity can transform the future of education. The article is structured into five parts. First, the opportunities and barriers that COVID-19 offers in preparing students for an uncertain future. Second, the recognition of the vital role of creativity in the future. Third, the article discusses the value of creativity in education. Fourth, the teachers' role in stimulating creativity and how its practices can be encountered in 21st-century education is commented on. Fifth, the last section presents perspectives for the future of education in an uncertain and complex world, introduces the concept of creative ecosystems for education, and summarizes the key points related to the aspects to which education should devote its efforts in the coming years. The article questions if more creativity-focused education is possible in the future and promotes a deep reflection in this particular context for teachers and educational institutions about the topics that need more attention during this time of change.

Teaching gender in and through uncertainty

Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipline of sociology. I elaborate a theoretical framework for embracing epistemic uncertainty that is informed by feminist pedagogies and begins with a feminist provocation, and present my practical strategies for organizing knowledge within this framework, as well as the strategies of the students themselves. An analysis of the students’ project work (collaborative virtual exhibitions) reveals their capacity to navigate uncertainty through an interpersonal and contextualized approach to knowledge, and produce new learning spaces which unsettle harmful truths and make material new realities.