Month: January 2025

Abstract

Allocating students into separate classes within a school depending on their “ability” is common in many countries. This paper presents a theoretical discussion of the practice, considering why it persists despite a long history of research emphasizing consequential problems. Our discussion identifies and critiques four possible reasons that between-class ability grouping is being used in schools again today, despite research advising against the practice. These reasons are: 1) educators’ perspectives that it facilitates differentiation and assists in managing the intensification of teaching; 2) advantages for students in “high ability” and “low ability” classes; 3) cultural acceptability; and 4) historical entrenchment, with little explicit policy direction guiding its use. Our critical discussion uses the Australian educational context as a case study. The example of Australia, where we live and work, is comparatively useful for other countries with similar practices, including New Zealand, Canada, the United States, England, and more. We argue that the reasons between-class ability grouping persists are based on misconceptions or agendas that are prioritized over equity and student educational outcomes.

Abstract

Purpose

Argan oil is sourced from the argan tree’s fruit, predominantly found in rural communities in southwestern Morocco. Women utilize indigenous knowledge to produce argan oil in their homes through a laborious, manual process. Although to meet the growing market demand, cooperatives often use machines for certain production steps. This study explores the social and environmental impacts of different argan oil production processes to evaluate the tradeoffs and opportunities that emerge in this time-honored craft.

Methods

Cradle-to-gate social and environmental life cycle assessments were performed on six scenarios, comparing traditional (manual), semi-mechanized, and fully mechanized scenarios for cosmetic and edible argan oil production. The stakeholders considered included Workers and the Local Community. Social impact categories of salary, working hours, health and safety, human energy expenditure, and local employment were assessed. Twenty-six households near Sidi Ifni and four cooperatives near Agadir were surveyed in Morocco. Environmental impact categories included global warming potential, ecotoxicity potential, human toxicity, water consumption, and fossil fuel potential. Reference point thresholds were used for the social impact assessment, and ReCiPe 2016 was used for the environmental impact assessment. A sensitivity analysis was conducted on each scenario, evaluating how productive capacity affects the categories of social and environmental impact.

Results and discussion

The manual production process had the lowest environmental impact. In each scenario, edible argan oil production had a higher environmental impact than its cosmetic equivalent. The scenario analysis revealed that semi-mechanized production typically had greater environmental impacts than fully mechanized production. However, if the semi-mechanized productive capacity is sufficiently higher, then fully mechanized production has the greatest environmental impact. The semi-mechanized productive capacity can be increased by adding more employees. Collection of argan fruit and kneading were reported to be the most challenging steps for manual production by argan oil producers. Collection, depulping, and crushing had the highest human energy expenditures. Women producing argan oil at home earned more daily income than cooperative workers although both earn less than the legal daily minimum wage in Morocco.

Conclusion

The LCA and S-LCA results show the effectiveness of applying both approaches to analyze production processes. The semi-mechanized production process can increase productive capacity while maintaining employment. However, oversight and transparency are needed to ensure that argan oil producers are compensated fairly. Including health and safety questions as well as human energy calculations demonstrated that while kneading did not have a high amount of human energy expenditure, it was one of the most difficult steps.

Abstract

This article explores the role of constructive anger in motivating and sustaining climate action. It considers relevant research in climate psychology with special attention to the dynamic between climate-related anger, action, and hope. The psychological research is then applied to a reconstruction of the concept of anger and hope in philosophical and theological approaches. Developing the concept of constructive anger, this article suggests that such constructive anger can be a factor in moving through apathy, fear, and depression and mobilizing toward collective climate action. Climate-related anger can be relieved through collective forms of climate action and the sense of collective efficacy that can emerge in becoming active. These can become a means to generating resistant, active, constructive forms of hope that can be distinguished from deceptive forms of hope.

Abstract

Increasing use of co-design concepts and buzzwords create risk of generating ‘co-design branded’ healthcare research and healthcare system design involving insincere, contrived, coercive engagement with First Nations Peoples. There are concerns that inauthenticity in co-design will further perpetuate and ingrain harms inbuilt to colonial systems.

Co-design is a tool that inherently must truly reposition power to First Nations Peoples, engendering both respect and ownership. Co-design is a tool for facilitating cultural responsiveness, and therefore a tool for creating healthcare systems that First Nations People may judge as safe to approach and use. True co-design centres First Nations cultures, perspectives of health, and lived experiences, and uses decolonising methodologies in addressing health determinants of dispossession, assimilation, intergenerational trauma, racism, and genocide.

Authentic co-design of health services can reduce racism and improve access through its decolonising methods and approaches which are strategically anti-racist. Non-Indigenous people involved in co-design need to be committed to continuously developing cultural responsiveness. Education and reflection must then lead to actions, developing skill sets, and challenging ‘norms’ of systemic inequity. Non-Indigenous people working and supporting within co-design need to acknowledge their white or non-Indigenous privileges, need ongoing cultural self-awareness and self-reflection, need to minimise implicit bias and stereotypes, and need to know Australian history and recognise the ongoing impacts thereof.

This review provides narrative on colonial load, informed consent, language and knowledge sharing, partnering in co-design, and monitoring and evaluation in co-design so readers can better understand where power imbalance, racism, and historical exclusion undermine co-design, and can easily identify skills and ways of working in co-design to rebut systemic racism. If the process of co-design in healthcare across the First Nations of the land now known as Australia is to meaningfully contribute to change from decades of historical and ongoing systemic racism perpetuating power imbalance and resultant health inequities and inequality, co-designed outcomes cannot be a pre-determined result of tokenistic, managed, or coercive consultation. Outcomes must be a true, correct, and beneficial result of a participatory process of First Nations empowered and led co-design and must be judged as such by First Nations Peoples.

Abstract

Background

The impact of the pandemic on Indigenous and disabled people's access to healthcare has resulted in significant disruptions and has exacerbated longstanding inequitable healthcare service delivery. Research within Aotearoa New Zealand has demonstrated that there has been success in the provision of healthcare by Māori for their community; however, the experiences of tāngata whaikaha Māori, disabled Māori, have yet to be considered by researchers.

Methods

Underpinned by an empowerment theory and Kaupapa Māori methodology, this research explores the lived realities of tāngata whaikaha Māori or their primary caregivers. Twenty in-depth interviews gathered participants’ lived experiences, and a discursive lens was brought to the narratives of tāngata whaikaha Māori who have accessed, and received, culturally responsive healthcare services during the pandemic.

Results

Positive experiences accessing primary and secondary services were associated with Māori-centred healthcare and seamless engagement with support services that were founded upon the active dismantling of structural inequities and the prioritisation of Māori cultural values in their care delivery, inclusive of tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty), and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge).

Conclusions

This study provides a novel and solid foundation for comprehending how healthcare can be realigned to cater to the requirements of disabled Indigenous populations.

Abstract

This paper introduces the “NEBULA101 - Neuro-behavioural Understanding of Language Aptitude” dataset, which comprises behavioural and brain imaging data from 101 healthy adults to examine individual differences in language and cognition. Human language, a multifaceted behaviour, varies significantly among individuals, at different processing levels. Recent advances in cognitive science have embraced an integrated approach, combining behavioural and brain studies to explore these differences comprehensively. The NEBULA101 dataset offers brain structural, diffusion-weighted, task-based and resting-state MRI data, alongside extensive linguistic and non-linguistic behavioural measures to explore the complex interaction of language and cognition in a highly multilingual sample. By sharing this multimodal dataset, we hope to promote research on the neuroscience of language, cognition and multilingualism, enabling the field to deepen its understanding of the multivariate panorama of individual differences and ultimately contributing to open science.

Abstract

This article advances the palimpsest as a tool for analyzing the multiplicitous, layered, and relational becomings of Latinidades. Contributing to scholarship about unruly Latinidades that pushes back against marginalization, oppression, and erasure, the palimpsest offers a spatial lens to this work. Drawing on research vignettes, media documents, and cultural texts about Latinx-driven demographic change in the US South, we show how critical spatial thinking adds insights to discussions about the construction, contingency, and complexity of Latinidades. As educational scholars, we use an interdisciplinary approach to contend that the palimpsest provides a heuristic to intertwine Black, Latinx, and Indigenous geographic thought with the often invisibilized layers of spatial narratives that entangle with and unravel bounded notions of Latinx identities and places. This critical spatial lens pushes back against linear, assimilationist, and fragmented logics that tend to dominate much education scholarship.

Abstract

Examining the quality of life outcomes and supports of autistic people, particularly without proxies, is important to inform research and service delivery – not only for it to be more evidenced-based, but also to ensure services and supports are successfully supporting autistic people in ways that are important to them. The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the quality of life personal outcomes of autistic people; our secondary aim was to examine the presence of person-centered organizational supports to facilitate autistic people’s outcomes. We analyzed secondary Personal Outcome Measures interview data from 860 autistic adults (January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2023), many of which also had additional intellectual/developmental disabilities. Autistic people had 50.4% of outcomes present; they were most likely to be safe and have the best possible health, and least likely to choose where and with whom to live, and choose their services. Autistic people had 52.1% of individualized supports in place. While there were differences in autistic people’s outcomes and supports based on their sociodemographics, the presence of supports played a larger role in quality of life. While much work remains, our findings indicate that with thoughtful, person-centered services and supports, autistic people’s outcomes improve tremendously.