Learning To Live Together

The rise of ethnic tensions has rendered the idea of pluralist societies more problematic than ever before. This article looks at the role played by adult education in helping to build peace in Northern Ireland, a society which is moving towards the stabilisation of its intercommunal conflict. A typology of peace education is put forward, outlining the various strategies adopted by those involved in adult learning or community relations work. Some general observations are added about the role of gender. Questions are then raised about how the impact of peace education progammes can be measured or assessed, and about the methodological problems facing all those attempting to draw conclusions about the role of education in conflict societies.

A randomised control trial of experiential learning to promote physical activity

The paucity of training in physical activity (PA) promotion in UK medical schools is a barrier to health professionals' promotion of PA to their patients. Doctors who are more physically active are more likely to counsel patients in this regard. We used a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to examine the effect of an intervention which engaged students in goal-setting, using pedometer step counts, on their PA behaviour and intentions to promote PA in future practice.

‘The “English Disease” is to Look for a “Solution of the Irish Problem”’: British Constitutional Policy in Northern Ireland after Sunningdale 1974–1976

This article reconstructs British constitutional policy in Northern Ireland after power-sharing collapsed in May 1974. Over the following two years, the British government publicly emphasised that Northern Ireland would decide its own future, but ministers secretly considered a range of options including withdrawal, integration and Dominion status. These discussions have been fundamentally misunderstood by previous authors, and this article shows that Harold Wilson did not seriously advocate withdrawal nor was policy as inconsistent as argued elsewhere. An historical approach, drawing from recently released archival material, shows that consociationalists such as Brendan O'Leary and Michael Kerr have neglected the proper context of government policy because of their commitment to a particular form of government, failing to recognise the constraints under which ministers operated. The British government remained committed to an internal devolved settlement including both communities but was unable to impose one.

Using Cooperative Learning to Engage Students in Science

Cooperative learning can actively engage students in school science, stimulating curiosity and improving attitudes and motivation. Allen Thurston discusses the roles teachers and students can play to maximize its potential.

Learning to be Boys: Reading the Lessons of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Marston’s What You Will

This essay focuses on the lessons of Love’s Labour’s Lost’s pageboy-schoolboy-boy actor, Moth, to examine the production of boyhood in early modern culture. It reads Shakespeare’s boy character alongside John Marston’s schoolboy, Holofernes Pippo, in What You Will to investigate the ways in which school lessons might be deployed to produce aged and gendered identities that complicate traditional understandings of early modern masculinity. Reading the comic staging of lessons in these plays, it will suggest that while the educational system aimed to produce gendered subjects, early modern masculine identities exist as a range of categories on a developmental scale. It will propose that although Moth and Pippo comically expose the limits of many pedagogical methods to produce ‘men’, they demonstrate the ways in which these characters learn to be boys. Finally, it will consider the extent to which this production of early modern age and gender identity in the plays is paralleled by the historical boy actors performing these roles.

"Should I prioritize medical problem solving or attentive listening?": the dilemmas and challenges that medical students experience when learning to conduct consultations

Objective: Communication skills can be trained alongside clinical reasoning, history taking or clinical examination skills. This is advocated as a solution to the low transfer of communication skills. Still, students have to integrate the knowledge/skills acquired during different curriculum parts in patient consultations at some point. How do medical students experience these integrated consultations within a simulated environment and in real practice when dealing with responsibility?

Methods: Six focus groups were conducted with (pre-)/clerkship students.

Results: Students were motivated to practice integrated consultations with simulated patients and felt like 'real physicians'. However, their focus on medical problem solving drew attention away from improving their communication skills. Responsibility for real patients triggered students' identity development. This identity formation guided the development of an own consultation style, a process that was hampered by conflicting demands of role models.

Conclusion: Practicing complete consultations results in the dilemma of prioritizing medical problem solving above attention for patient communication. Integrated consultation training advances this dilemma to the pre-clerkship period. During clerkships this dilemma is heightened because real patients trigger empathy and responsibility, which invites students to define their role as doctor.

Practice Implications: When training integrated consultations, educators should pay attention to students' learning priorities and support the development of students' professional identity.