Search results

It has been held not infrequently that of the influences which together mould the individual and determine his or her value as a social unit those of heredity are so prepotent as to leave little room for those of the environment. By others this view has seemed to involve unjustifiable pessimism. You will, I think, admit that in the past when there was little objective knowledge to bear on such questions, current views were largely decided by that ingrained difference in social outlook which has divided and still divides human opinion on so many other fundamental questions. Those who are naturally inclined to justify privilege, and who have felt instinctively that class distinctions are a social necessity founded on nature, have been tempted perhaps to emphasise too exclusively the unmistakable influence of heredity; those to whom a different outlook is natural have wished to believe, not, of course, that all are born equal as the eighteenth century philosophers declaimed, but that in favourable environments individuals tend to display greater equality of capacity.

This research investigated how students are becoming teachers of primary school (ages 5–11) physical education (PE), using a physical literacy (PL) approach (Whitehead, 2010). Primarily methodological, the purpose was to disrupt how to investigate this topic since research highlights that the philosophy underpinning PL makes the concept difficult to operationalize (Shearer et al., 2018).

PE settings are inherently lively, and the author retained this in the analytic insights from what she called a “methodological meshwork” (Law, 2004; Ingold, 2006). Informed by phenomenology, posthumanism and sociomaterialism, data gathering included observations, interviews with artefacts, with humans, and tweets as part of the methodological meshwork. Diagrammatic presentations accompany written text, whilst also doing work in themselves (Decuypere and Simon, 2016). The author followed the actors (Adams and Thompson, 2016), thus entered the middle of data, such as lesson plan or physical education equipment.

Onto-epistemological entanglements (Barad, 2007) are presented in an interweaving format. Thus, theory is discussed alongside the empirical and shows that a PL informed approach to PE is evident in multiple places-spaces.

Broader issues are raised about methodological assumptions that inform investigations of PL and practice generally. It is hoped that these may be relevant to a wider professional audience as well as those in physical and teacher education.

Examines the impact of corporate disposal on the staff of TSB Bank Northern Ireland plc (TSBNI). Specifically, focuses on the major areas of concern for employees of TSBNI together with an assessment of how successful TSBNI management have been in allaying staff fears. Also looks at the effectiveness of various communication media. Suggests that a differential approach should be adopted by management in relation to the dissemination of information in the period immediately following the announcement of disposal. Bases this idea on the findings that disposal generates different concerns for differing groups of employees. Furthermore, presents evidence indicating that different grades of employees benefit from different communication strategies.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) can face barriers implementing the accreditation of informal learning, despite many institutions having developed policies and strategies to embed employability and skills. The purpose of this paper is to present the case of the institutional response of one HEI when dealing with the various drivers and challenges faced when accrediting informal learning at higher levels.

The case study approach was adopted as this method allowed for in‐depth qualitative enquiry into a contemporary phenomenon in a real‐life context.

The paper finds that by designing a shell framework incorporating module outlines and a toolkit of support materials for various stakeholder groups, HEIs may overcome many of the implementation problems often associated with HE accreditation of informal higher level learning.

This framework and toolkit approach could help other HEIs better enable the wider accreditation and embedding of work‐based learning within HE, which is deemed so important in facilitating the achievement of UK Government targets for 40 per cent of UK adults to gain a qualification at Level 4 or above in the next ten years. This is also a particular issue for Wales, dealing with its own skills agenda in response to specific skills gaps needed to ensure the sustainable future of the Welsh economy.

While a limited number of HEIs have adopted a framework approach to the accreditation of work‐based learning, this paper addresses the issues in a regional context, as the framework and toolkit presented is the first of its kind to be articulated for the Welsh skills agenda by a Welsh HEI.

A SPLENDID conference, I thought. True, there were those who complained, those who thought some of the papers were elementary and those who thought that we had come a long way to learn very little. I don't agree at all. Some of the papers did, I admit, deal with basic considerations but it does nothing but good to re‐examine the framework of our services from time to time. In any case other papers were erudite, and for the first time I have seen an audience of librarians and authority members stunned, almost, into silence.

WE tell our students to concentrate on policy rather than practice, and this I propose to do here. But I am sure that librarians are interested in the way in which our policy is implemented, so there will be some account of our selection procedures. Some questions of principle will be examined as they arise from the facts given; others will be left to later sections of this paper.

Twenty‐three years ago the most frequently met among many slogans was “ Food Will Win the War.” To‐day our food problems are fully as important to our defence; but they present many new aspects. Then our prime duty was to save food : now it is to consume food in the way most conducive to fitness. Our knowledge of nutrition has advanced so rapidly that much of it is too new to have been assimilated into our everyday thought and practice. Yet it is precisely as guidance to everyday use of our familiar foods that the newest knowledge of nutrition can be of most benefit: of benefit both to the one‐third of our people who are officially declared “ ill‐nourished,” and to the great majority of the rest of us as well. For while finding that much of our previously baffling disease and frustration is due to shortage of certain nutritional factors in the food supply, research has also shown that a more scientifically guided use of our everyday foods constitutes a sort of superior chemical engineering of our own mechanisms which can increase the vitality and efficiency even of those people who are already healthy and efficient. The relations of nutrition to the functioning of the mind are, of course, more difficult of controlled investigation and not yet as objectively demonstrable as to the effects of food upon bodily functions and length of life. But careful research is now showing that even within the range of fully normal conditions, our daily food choices have much more important effects than science ever previously supposed upon that internal chemistry that directly environs and conditions all our life processes. The blood is the great mediator of this internal environment, and the same blood circulates through the brain as through all the other organs of the body, bringing its help or its hindrance to both mental and muscular activities. True there is much which remains to be clarified by further research; but the already established findings, of recent and current nutritional investigation, need only to be more widely known and used in order to make our people much stronger for the defence of our civilisation, and for its permanent advancement when the emergency has passed. In our “ intellectual climate ” of the moment there is still a good deal of inertia because the newest knowledge is not yet sufficiently understood, while at the same time the new view is perhaps being over‐coloured by some writers. This paper therefore does not seek to add more assertions; but rather to review objectively the evidence on what the Council of National Defence has announced as one of our present‐day needs, “ to make the American people nutrition‐conscious in terms of the nutritional science of to‐day.” Nutrition presents three major aspects : (1) that in which food serves as fuel to supply energy for the activities of the bodily machine; (2) that of the assimilation of certain food constituents into structural material first for the growth and later for the upkeep of the body tissues; and (3) the utilisation of food substances either directly or indirectly to serve the body in those self‐regulatory processes by which it maintains its relatively “ steady states ” or essential internal environment. It is in its energy aspect that nutrition has most fully arrived at the status of an exact science. Expert opinion is well agreed on the fundamental principles of the energy transformations in the body, on the values of the foodstuffs as sources of energy, and on at least the broad lines of theory as to the influence of different bodily conditions in determining the energy need. On the latter points, especially, many laboratories are actively engaged in increasing the precision of present knowledge, and at least three well‐endowed nutrition laboratories—those of the Carnegie Institution, of the Russell Sage Institute, and of the Rochester University Department of Vital Economics—are devoting their resources especially to the perfection of the energy aspects of nutritional knowledge. The protein aspect of nutritional research has also reached a relatively mature status with well‐defined objectives. Among many other laboratories working in this field, that of the United States Department of Agriculture is giving special attention to the purification and description of the proteins themselves; and the laboratory of physiological chemistry of the University of Illinois is very actively investigating the nutritional relationships of the individual amino acids, with the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation. We may look forward with confidence and great gratification to a presumably fairly near future in which this aspect of nutritional need can be stated quantitatively in terms of ten individually indispensable amino acids. The catalysts which make the chemical processes in the body go fast enough to support life overlap and in a measure integrate the subject matter divisions of the chemistry of nutrition. They function in the energy aspect; and in their own chemical constitutions they are derivatives of proteins (or their amino acids), mineral elements, and vitamins. This very active field of research is quite as frequently classified with general biochemistry as with nutrition. Until its current era of “ newer knowledge,” the chemistry of food and nutrition had for several decades faced the dilemma that foods could be analysed as elaborately, and their composition accounted for with as close an approach to one hundred per cent., as other natural materials; and yet nutrition could not be sustained with pure mixtures of the substances that the analyses revealed. Seeking deeper insights, chemists broadened their research methods to include the systematic use of feeding experiments with laboratory animals, carried on with as careful attention to accuracy of controls as in other experimental researches in the exact sciences. This extension of method in chemical research has been rewarded with a rapid series of discoveries of substances which are essential to our nutrition, but whose very existence was, until recent years, either entirely unknown or only vaguely apprehended. Neither in chemical nature nor in nutritional function do these substances have much in common with each other. That they came to be called by the group name vitamins was not the result of their being naturally related, but rather of the two circumstances, (1) that they were all discovered through the use of the same development of research method, and (2) that the discoveries of their existence and importance followed each other too rapidly for physical isolation and chemical identification and nomenclature to keep pace. The latter, however, are steadily catching up, and in several cases new names, which are individually distinctive of either the chemical structures or the historic associations of the substances, have been coined and are coming into general use.

Natural Fats.—It is important to bear in mind that there is an acute shortage of fats throughout the world. Most of the great sources of tropical fats, palm oil, copra and ground nut oil, are still producing much smaller quantities than before the war, partly because a lack of consumer goods makes the natives disinclined to collect raw material, partly because it takes a long time to rebuild a complicated industry and trade that was wrecked in many areas to a large extent by the upheaval of the war. Other sources of raw fats that were available to us before the war have dried up entirely, so far as we are concerned. India no longer exports edible oils. But, even if these sources of fat were as productive now as they were before the war there would still be a big world shortage, so great has become the demand for fats. As I see the problem, the only real solution, although it necessitates taking a very long‐range view, is rapidly to push ahead with the development of ambitious undertakings in the tropical belt of the world, similar in character to the ground‐nut scheme that our Government has had the courage and initiative to launch. The potential productivity of the vast tropical belt is prodigious, if the enormous tasks of dealing with disease, infestation, sanitation, fertilisation and land conservation can be successfully tackled, as I am confident the pioneer experimental attack in East Africa will demonstrate. Such developments will provide not only the fat so greatly needed for human use but enormous quantities of animal feeding stuffs with which to increase the production of bacon, meat, poultry, milk, butter and cheese. But, as I have remarked, this is a long‐range view. It will be asked whether there is any alternative likely to bring about an increase in. the supply of fats during the next two or three years. There is a possibility that there may be a steady, if slow, improvement. The supply of tropical fats will, I think, tend to get a little better as conditions in the producing areas gradually return to what they were before the war, and there is also the hope, perhaps a rather slender one, that food for livestock will not be as restricted in the next year or two as it has been. Production of whale oil is also on the up‐grade. So much, then, for the supply of ordinary natural fats, but, as we should consider every possible approach to the problem, passing reference should be made to other potential sources of supplies. There are two directions in which much exploration has been undertaken. In both the Germans were the pioneers.

I HAVE sometimes been asked whether I am conscious, as the present editor of THE LIBRARY WORLD, of the spirit and influence of its founder, James Duff Brown, and of his editorial successors, who included J. D. Stewart and W. C. Berwick Sayers. The answer is that of course I am—how could it be otherwise?

AS Canadians themselves will quickly inform you, this is a big, young country—Great Britain would fit into a small part of Alberta, large stretches of which are still not accurately recorded on large scale maps. Indeed, I listened to radio reports of a search for two aircraft on the first morning we were there. One aircraft (a helicopter) had been missing in the North Western Territories with a Calgary man aboard for two weeks and was eventually found crashed; the other, missing for two days, was a Cessna seaplane which had run out of fuel and punctured a float as it landed close to the shore of the Great Slave Lake. The occupants were rescued by air from this largely uncharted waste.