Literatur verstehen und inszenieren: Foreign language literature through drama, a research project

Based on the experience that today's students find it more difficult than students of previous decades to relate to literature and appreciate its high cultural value, this paper argues that too little is known about the actual teaching and learning processes which take place in literature courses and that, in order to ensure the survival of literary studies in German curricula, future research needs to elucidate for students, the wider public and, most importantly, educational policy makers, why the study of literature should continue to have an important place in modern language curricula. Contending that students' willingness to engage with literature will, in the future, depend to a great extent on the use of imaginative methodology on the part of the teacher, we give a detailed account of an action research project carried out at University College Cork from October to December 2002 which set out to explore the potential of a drama in education approach to the teaching and learning of foreign language literature. We give concrete examples of how this approach works in practice, situate our approach within the subject debate surrounding Drama and the Language Arts and evaluate in detail the learning processes which are typical of performance-based literature learning. Based on converging evidence from different data sources and overall very positive feedback from students, we conclude by recommending that modern language departments introduce courses which offer a hands-on experience of literature that is different from that encountered in lectures and teacher-directed seminars.

Functional educational characterisation of the utility of embalming fluids for anatomical education and research

Human cadavers have long been used to teach human anatomy and are increasingly used in other disciplines. Different embalming techniques have been reported in the literature; however there is no clear consensus on the opinion of anatomists on the utility of embalmed cadavers for the teaching of anatomy. To this end, we aimed to survey British and Irish anatomy teachers to report their opinions on different preservation methods for the teaching of anatomy. In this project eight human cadavers were embalmed using formalin, Genelyn, Thiel and Imperial College London- Soft Preserving (ICL-SP) techniques to compare different characteristics of these four techniques. The results of this thesis show that anatomy teachers consider hard-fixed cadavers not to be the most accurate teaching model in comparison to the human body, although it still serves as a useful teaching method (Chapter 2). In addition, our findings confirm that joints of cadavers embalmed using ICL-SP solution faithfully mimics joints of an unembalmed cadaver compared to the other techniques (Chapter 3). Embalming a human body prevents the deterioration in the quality of images and our findings highlight that the influence of the embalming solutions varied with the radiological modality used (Chapter 4). The method developed as part of this thesis enables anatomists and forensic scientists to quantify the decomposition rate of an embalmed human cadaver (Chapter 5). Formalin embalming solution showed the strongest antimicrobial abilities followed by Thiel, Genelyn and finally by ICL-SP (Chapter 6). The overarching viewpoint of this set of studies show that it is inaccurate to state that one embalming technique is ultimately the best. The value of each technique differs based on the requirement of the particular education or research area. Hence we highlight how different embalming techniques may be better suited to certain fields of study.