Fostering intercultural understanding through secondary school experiences of cultural immersion

In parallel with many nations’ education policies, national education policies in Australia seek to foster students’ intercultural understanding. Due to Australia’s location in the Asia-Pacific region, the Australian government has focused on students becoming “Asia literate” to support Australia’s economic and cultural engagement with Asian countries. Drawing on Allport’s optimal contact principles and key factors supporting intercultural understanding, this study examines two “sister school” cultural immersion trips in Indonesia and East Timor to explore ways in which their different approaches supported positive intergroup contact and helped foster intercultural understanding among students. Focus groups and interviews with school project teams and analysis of both researcher and teacher project field notes and documents suggested that these schools’ programmes could be mapped onto Allport’s contact principles in different ways. The paper concludes with promising approaches that can help to inform sister school programmes.

‘You are not born being racist, are you?’ Discussing racism with primary aged-children

Ethnic-racial socialisation is broadly described as processes by which both minority and majority children and young people learn about and negotiate racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. This paper extends the existing ethnic-racial socialisation literature in three significant ways: it (1) explores ways children make sense of racial and ethnic diversity in relation to their experiences of racial and ethnic diversity and racism; (2) considers ways children identify racism and make distinctions between racism and racialisation; and (3) examines teacher and parent ethnic-racial socialisation messages about race, ethnicity and racism with children. This research is based on classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teachers, parents and students aged 8-12 years attending four Australian metropolitan primary schools. The findings reveal that both teachers and parents tended to discuss racism reactively rather than proactively. The extent to which racism was discussed in classroom settings depended on: teachers’ personal and professional capability; awareness of racism and its perceived relevance based on student and community experiences; and whether they felt supported in the broader school and community context. For parents, key drivers for talking about racism were their children’s experiences and racial issues reported in the media. For both parents and teachers, a key issue in these discussions was determining whether something constituted either racism or racialisation. Strategies on how ethnic-racial socialisation within the school system can be improved are discussed.

Conceit

Response to photograph in Land Before Line: A photographic Portrait Series of Contemporary Victorian Poets

Using patients' experiences of adverse events to improve health service delivery and practice: protocol of a data linkage study of Australian adults age 45 and above

Evidence of patients' experiences is fundamental to creating effective health policy and service responses, yet is missing from our knowledge of adverse events. This protocol describes explorative research redressing this significant deficit; investigating the experiences of a large cohort of recently hospitalised patients aged 45 years and above in hospitals in New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

Superiority of lithium over verapamil in mania: a randomized, controlled, single-blind trial.

Both case reports and small controlled studies suggest the efficacy of verapamil in the treatment of mania.

Encountering the ‘other’: interpreting student experiences of a multi-sensory museum exhibition

The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47 Year 11–12 students from three secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, and discusses each method's contribution to an overall empirical understanding of the installation's impact on students' experiences. Emerging findings suggest the ways in which the exhibition space supports students to encounter and engage with individual stories and experiences, thus moving beyond an abstract tolerance of cultural diversity by unsettling the self and destabilising stereotyped and prejudiced interpretations of the ‘other’. The paper concludes by discussing the potential for triangulated qualitative approaches to provide rich emic perspectives on multi-sensory exhibitions.

Radio frequency energy harvesting from a feeding source in a passive deep brain stimulation device for murine preclinical research

This paper presents the development of an energy harvesting circuit for use with a head-mountable deep brain stimulation (DBS) device. It consists of a circular planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) and a Schottky diode-based Cockcroft-Walton 4-voltage rectifier. The PIFA has the volume of π × 10(2) × 1.5 mm(3), resonance frequency of 915 MHz, and bandwidth of 16 MHz (909-925 MHz) at a return loss of -10 dB. The rectifier offers maximum efficiency of 78% for the input power of -5 dBm at a 5 kΩ load resistance. The developed rectenna operates efficiently at 915 MHz for the input power within -15 dBm to +5 dBm. For operating a DBS device, the DC voltage of 2 V is recorded from the rectenna terminal at a distance of 55 cm away from a 26.77 dBm transmitter in free space. An in-vitro test of the DBS device is presented.

The missing evidence: a systematic review of patients' experiences of adverse events in health care

PURPOSE: Preventable patient harm due to adverse events (AEs) is a significant health problem today facing contemporary health care. Knowledge of patients' experiences of AEs is critical to improving health care safety and quality. A systematic review of studies of patients' experiences of AEs was conducted to report their experiences, knowledge gaps and any challenges encountered when capturing patient experience data. DATA SOURCES: Key words, synonyms and subject headings were used to search eight electronic databases from January 2000 to February 2015, in addition to hand-searching of reference lists and relevant journals. STUDY SELECTION: Titles and abstracts of publications were screened by two reviewers and checked by a third. Full-text articles were screened against the eligibility criteria. DATA EXTRACTION: Data on design, methods and key findings were extracted and collated. RESULTS: Thirty-three publications demonstrated patients identifying a range of problems in their care; most commonly identified were medication errors, communication and coordination of care problems. Patients' income, education, health burden and marital status influence likelihood of reporting. Patients report distress after an AE, often exacerbated by receiving inadequate information about the cause. Investigating patients' experiences is hampered by the lack of large representative patient samples, data over sufficient time periods and varying definitions of an AE. CONCLUSION: Despite the emergence of policy initiatives to enhance patient engagement, few studies report patients' experiences of AEs. This information must be routinely captured and utilized to develop effective, patient-centred and system-wide policies to minimize and manage AEs.

Cleaning, resistant bacteria, and antibiotic prescribing in residential aged care facilities

Residents of residential aged care facilities (RACFs) are at risk of colonization and infection with multidrug-resistant bacteria, and antibiotic prescribing is often inappropriate and not based on culture-proven infection. We describe low levels of resident colonization and environmental contamination with resistant gram-negative bacteria in RACFs, but high levels of empirical antibiotic use not guided by microbiologic culture. This research highlights the importance of antimicrobial stewardship and environmental cleaning in aged care facilities.

Feeling it: understanding Korean adoptees' experiences of embodied identity

This paper examines the ways in which transnational Korean adoptees experience identity as an embodied subjective process that is simultaneously contested and objectified by social perceptions of their bodies in their adoptive countries and South Korea. To analyse these lived experiences, I draw primarily on embodiment theories such as Budgeon’s (2003) sociological concept of ‘body as event’ and Csordas’ (2002) cultural phenomenological view of the body not as an object but as a ‘subject of culture’. To analyse processes of (re)embodiment, I draw on Ahmed’s (2007) concepts of ‘space’ and ‘whiteness’. Based on ethnographic data in South Korea and semi-structured interviews with 22 adult Korean adoptees, this paper demonstrates how Korean adoptees’ embodied identities are lived in relation to racialised experiences of belonging and Otherness.