Developing and evaluating the integration of Life and Social Sciences teaching to first-year Nursing and Midwifery students

Title: Evaluating the integrating of life and social sciences teaching to first-year nursing and midwifery students

Objectives: To evaluate an integrated teaching and learning approach to first-year nursing students, combining the life, social sciences and public health with a more integrated and clinical focused approach to teaching delivery

Background: Historically within the School of Nursing and Midwifery the life sciences and social sciences had been taught as separate modules with separate teaching teams. This had reflected in a somewhat dis-integrated approach to student learning and understanding without clear clinical focus on application. With focus upon student learning the teaching teams engaged with a stepped, incremental and progressive movement towards developing and delivering a more integrated structure of learning, combining the life sciences, social sciences and public health teaching and learning within the one extended first-year module. The focus was particularly on integrated understanding and clinical relevance. This paper discusses both the approach to developing the integrated model of teaching and the evaluation of that teaching.

Results: The module, combining life, social science and Public health teaching was positively evaluated by the students. Evaluations are compared and contrasted from to nursing student intakes.

The life and death of Irish social partnership: lessons for social pacts

From 1987 to 2009, Irish social partnership operated as a national framework for industrial relations. The contribution of the article is twofold. We seek to link the institutional dynamics of social partnership with the Régulation School's notions of modes of accumulation and regimes of régulation. This framework is used to explain the rise and fall of social partnership in Ireland. We argue that the regime of social partnership in Ireland can be divided into two distinct periods. In the first, social partnership contributed positively to a benign productivity-led mode of accumulation. In the second, it lost its economic functionality due mostly to financialisation taking a grip in the Irish economy. The conclusion is that social partnership had both positive and negative features, but it is unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future, at least not in Ireland.

Impacts of culling and exclusion of browsers on vegetation recovery across New Zealand forests

Introduced browsing animals negatively impact New Zealand's indigenous ecosystems. Eradicating introduced browsers is currently unfeasible at large scales, but culling since the 1960s has successfully reduced populations to a fraction of their earlier sizes. Here we ask whether culling of ungulates has allowed populations of woody plant species to recover across New Zealand forests. Using 73 pairs of permanent fenced exclosure and unfenced control plots, we found rapid increases in sapling densities within exclosures located in disturbed forests, particularly if a seedling bank was already present. Recovery was slower in thinning stands and hampered by dense fern cover. We inferred ungulate diet preference from species recovery rates inside exclosures to test whether culling increased abundance of preferred species across a national network of 574 unfenced permanent forest plots. Across this network, saplings were observed irrespective of their preference to ungulates in the 1970s, but preferred species were rarer within disturbed sites in the 1990s after long-term culling and despite nationwide increases in sapling densities. This indicates that preferred species are relatively heavily affected by browsing after culling, presumably because remaining animals will increase consumption of preferred species as competition is reduced. Our results clearly suggest that culling will not return preferred plants to the landscape immediately, even given suitable conditions for regeneration. Complete removal of ungulates rather than simply reducing their densities may be required for recovery in heavily browsed temperate forests, but since this is only feasible at small spatial scales, management efforts must target sites of high conservation value. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.

Impacts of invasive browsers on demographic rates and forest structure in New Zealand

Background/Question/Methods

Assessing the large scale impact of deer populations on forest structure and composition is important because of their increasing abundance in many temperate forests. Deer are invasive animals and sometimes thought to be responsible for immense damage to New Zealand’s forests. We report demographic changes taking place among 40 widespread indigenous tree species over 20 years, following a period of record deer numbers in the 1950s and a period of extensive hunting and depletion of deer populations during the 1960s and 1970s.

Results/Conclusions

Across a network of 578 plots there was an overall 13% reduction in sapling density of our study species with most remaining constant and a few declining dramatically. The effect of suppressed recruitment when deer populations were high was evident in the small tree size class (30 – 80 mm dbh). Stem density decreased by 15% and species with the greatest annual decreases in small tree density were those which have the highest rates of sapling recovery in exclosures indicating that deer were responsible. Densities of large canopy trees have remained relatively stable. There were imbalances between mortality and recruitment rates for 23 of the 40 species, 7 increasing and 16 in decline. These changes were again linked with sapling recovery in exclosures; species which recovered most rapidly following deer exclusion had the greatest net recruitment deficit across the wider landscape, indicating recruitment suppression by deer as opposed to mortality induced by disturbance and other herbivores. Species are not declining uniformly across all populations and no species are in decline across their entire range. Therefore we predict that with continued deer presence some forests will undergo compositional changes but that none of the species tested will become nationally extinct.

Impacts of invasive browsers on demographic rates and forest structure in New Zealand. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/267285500_Impacts_of_invasive_browsers_on_demographic_rates_and_forest_structure_in_New_Zealand [accessed Oct 9, 2015].

‘At First I Saw It as a Toy’: Life Stories, Social Consciousness and Music Ethnography

This article examines the role of life narratives as discursive spaces for the performance of individual resistance. Through the inspection of three interviews with professional musicians in Athens, the essay will illustrate how the recounting of nodal events in their lives and careers facilitates an assertion of their current social ideology and their disillusionment with the popular music industry in which they operate. Ultimately, what follows will suggest a mode of listening to individual utterances and narratives as discursive forms of resistance that need to be appreciated as social acts as opposed to mere ethnographic data.