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Brent Library Service was the first U.K. public library to purchase URICA. Conventional wisdom suggests that the purchase of an untried computer system is not the smoothest path to computerisation. Why, then, did Brent deliberately adopt such a high‐risk approach? Clearly, any attempt to identify a prime cause for this decision runs the risk of looking further and further into the past. A sensible identification of the starting point for our computerisation project is to be found in 1978.

The growth of interest in local history shows no sign of dying down. Public libraries have clearly been affected by the increasing number of people who use them and by the foundation of new societies and journals. Equally great, but perhaps less obvious, is the impact made by certain specific developments. Local history is now integrated into the educational curriculum at all levels, it is the subject of radio and television programmes and has grown in popularity with publishers of monographs. The ways in which local studies libraries have been affected by these factors are examined. Public libraries are concentrated on, though there is some reference to local collections in academic libraries. In conclusion, it is suggested that staff should be specifically allocated to an education service and to media liaison work, and that one librarian should specialise in acquisitions.

This paper aims to provide a living tribute to the leading autoethnographer, Alec Grant.

Alec provided Jerome with a list of names of people he might approach to write a tribute on his behalf.

The accounts describe the influence that Alec has had both as an educator and as a trusted colleague for the people approached.

While this is a living tribute, it is about one man and could, therefore, be described as a case study. Some people wonder what can be learned from a single case study. Read on and find out.

Alec has carved out a path for himself. In many senses, he chose “The Road Less Travelled”. He has never shied away from challenging “The System” and defending the rights of the marginalized and socially excluded. It is not a road for the faint-hearted.

For systems to change, radical thinkers need to show the way. “Change keeps us safe” (Stuart Bell).

Alec was a well-known and highly respected cognitive behavioural academic practitioner and the author of key textbooks in the field. He then decided to reinvent himself as an autoethnographer. This has brought him into contact with a much more diverse group of people. It has also brought him home to himself.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sharing stories of being a mental health professional and academic, based more broadly on serendipity and searching in life, can serve as means for bridging and developing cross-cultural understandings and collaborative work.

This paper is a relational autoethnography based on face-to-face and written conversational dialogue between five mental health academics from the UK and Norway.

The very practice of writing this paper displays and serves the purpose of bridging people, cultures and understandings, at several levels, in the facilitation of new research and writing projects. Troubling traditional boundaries between “us” and “them, and the “knower” and the “known,” the writing is theoretically underpinned by Friendship as Method, situated in a New Materialist context.

Through its conversational descriptions and explorations the paper shows how doing relational autoethnography can be purposeful in developing cross-cultural understandings and work at both professional and personal levels. It also demonstrates how autoethnography as relational practice can be useful in the sharing of this methodology between people who are more and less familiar with it.

In this paper, the authors engage with embodied critical literacies through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the use of improvisational comedy (improv) in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to extend understandings of critical literacy to consider how embodied critical literacy may be transformative for both individual students and classroom assemblages. The research question asks: how might improv, as an embodied literacy practice, open up spaces for critical literacy as embodied critical encounter in classroom assemblages?

The authors used case study methodology informed by post-qualitative research methods, and in particular, posthuman assemblage theory. Assemblage theory views the world as taking shape through the ever-shifting associations among human and more-than-human members of an assemblage. The case study took place in a sixth-grade classroom with 28 11-year-olds over a four-month period of time. Audio and video recordings provided the empirical materials for analysis. Using Bruno Latour’s three stages for rhizomatic analysis of an assemblage, the authors mapped the movements of participants in an assemblage; noted associations among those participants; and asked questions about the larger meanings of those associations.

In the sixth-grade classroom, the dynamic and emerging relations of the scene work and post-scene discussion animate some of the ways in which the practice of classroom improv can serve as a pedagogy that involves students in embodied critical literacy. In this paper, the authors are working with an understanding of critical literacy as embodied. In embodied critical literacy, the body becomes a resource for that attunes students to matters of critical importance through encounter. With this embodied attunement, transformation through critical literacy becomes a possibility.

The case study methodology used for this study allowed for a fine-grained analysis of a particular moment in one classroom. Because of this particularity, the findings of this study are not considered to be universally generalizable. However, educators may take the findings of this study and consider their application in their own contexts, whether that be the pedagogical context of a classroom or the context of the empirical study of language and literacy education. The concept of embodied literacies, while advocated in current literacy research, may not be easy to imagine, in terms of classroom practice. This paper provides an example of how embodied critical literacies might look, sound and unfold in a classroom setting. It also provides ideas for classroom teachers considering working with improv in their language arts classrooms.

The concept of embodied literacies, while advocated in current literacy research, may not be easy to imagine, in terms of classroom practice. This paper provides an example of how embodied critical literacies might look, sound and unfold in a classroom setting. It also provides ideas for classroom teachers considering working with improv in their language arts classrooms.

The authors argue that providing students with critical encounters is an important enterprise for 21st-century classrooms and improv is one means for doing so. As an embodied literacy practice, improv in the classroom teaches students to listen to/with other players in the improv scene, become attuned to their movements and move responsively with those players and the audience. It opens up spaces for critically reflecting on ways of being and doing, which, in turn, may inform students’ movements in further associations with each other both in class and outside the walls of their school.

In this paper, building on work conducted by Author 1, the authors extend traditional notions of critical literacy. The authors advocate for developing critical learning opportunities, such as classroom improv, which can actively engages students in critical encounter. In this vein, rather than viewing critical literacy as critical framing that requires distancing between the learner and the topic, the posthuman critical literacy the authors put forward engages the learner in connecting with others, reflecting on those relations, and in doing so, being transformed. That is, through critical encounter, rather than only enacting transformation on texts and/or material contexts, learners themselves are transformed.

For adequate bibliographical information about Baudelaire's works one must go to collected editions by no means readily available in Great Britain. Information concerning the extensive literature about Baudelaire is still farther to seek. For the English reader the bibliography in Arthur Symons's study mentioned below has not been superseded, although important editions of Baudelaire's works have been issued and much written about him since 1920.

The purpose of this paper is to juxtapose different sources concerning educational experiments embarked on by an English primary school teacher, Muriel Pyrah. Pyrah taught at Airedale School, Castleford, Yorkshire, UK, from the 1950s until 1972. Her approach was celebrated in the fields of oracy and arts education in the final years of her working life. Airedale was a Local Education Authority (LEA) school within the West Riding of Yorkshire, an LEA led by Alec Clegg, from 1945 to 1974.

Using film footage, sound recordings, artwork and topic books produced by her pupils, the paper entangles these archival sources with recent interviews from Pyrah’s former pupils and a former school inspector (HMI). Pyrah’s actual name has been used, as has that of the HMI. The names of pupils who contributed insights are anonymised.

The former pupils provide accounts that encourage a move away from a revisiting of progressivism that is predominantly anchored in studying the intentions and hopes of high profile educationalists postwar.

The number of former pupils willing to discuss their memories was small, so no claims are made that their perspectives represent the dominant views of former pupils. However, these interviews reveal details that are absent in the other surviving archival sources.

The paper lays the foundation for further research on the voices of former pupils, inviting a focus on the way those participants reflect on the long-term impact of being involved in an educational experiment. Thus far, the representation of Pyrah’s pedagogy has been choreographed in print to build the legacy of the LEA. The pupils’ stories resonate differently.

The Association of Language Excellence Centre (ALEC) is a professional body, forum and information source dedicated to raising the profile and quality of business and vocational language training ALEC′s Guidelines on Good Practice in the Management and Delivery of Foreign Language Training for Business have been written for the benefit of private organizations and educational institutions who intend to provide language services which assist the business community in responding to the opportunities of the Single European Market and beyond. The Guidelines, discussed here, are a statement of the collective views of some 50 Language Excellence (LX) Centres on what constitutes good practice in language training for business, including the step‐by‐step summary of a systematic approach to its management.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Not many weeks back, according to newspaper reports, three members of the library staff of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London were dismissed. All had refused to carry out issue desk duty. All, according to the newspaper account, were members of ASTMS. None, according to the Library Association yearbook, was a member of the appropriate professional organisation for librarians in Great Britain.