Engaging the Senses: Object-based learning in higher education

The use of museum collections as a path to learning for university students is fast becoming a new pedagogy for higher education. Despite a strong tradition of using lectures as a way of delivering the curriculum, the positive benefits of ‘active’ and ‘experiential learning’ are being recognised in universities at both a strategic level and in daily teaching practice. As museum artefacts, specimens and art works are used to evoke, provoke, and challenge students’ engagement with their subject, so transformational learning can take place. This unique book presents the first comprehensive exploration of ‘object-based learning’ as a pedagogy for higher education in a broad context. An international group of authors offer a spectrum of approaches at work in higher education today. They explore contemporary principles and practice of object-based learning in higher education, demonstrating the value of using collections in this context and considering the relationship between academic discipline and object-based learning as a teaching strategy.

Designing Bare Essentials: Aldi, Lidle and the architectures of cheapness

They’re cheap. They’re in every settlement of significance in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. We all use them but perhaps do not always admit to it. Especially, if we are architects.
Over the past decades Aldi/Lidl low cost supermarkets have escaped from middle Europe to take over large tracts of the English speaking world remaking them according to a formula of mass-produced sheds, buff-coloured cobble-lock car parks, logos in primary colours, bare-shelves and eclectic special offers. Response within architectural discourse to this phenomenon has been largely one of indifference and such places remain, perhaps reiterating Pevsner’s controversial insights into the bicycle shed, on the peripheries of what we might term architecture. This paper seeks to explore the spatial complexities of the discount supermarket and in doing so open up a discussion on the architecture of cheapness. As a road-map, it takes former managing director Dieter Brandes’ treatise on the Aldi formula, Bare Essentials: the Aldi Way to Retailing, and investigates the strategies through which economic exigencies manifest themselves in a series of spatial tactics which involve building. Central to this is the idea of architecture as system rather than form and, in Aldi/Lidl’s case, the result of a spatial network of flows. To understand the architecture of the supermarket, then, it is necessary to measure the times and spaces of supply across the scales of intersection between global and local.
Evaluating the energy, economy and precision of such systems challenges the liminal position of the commercial, the placeless and especially the cheap within architectural discourse. As is well known, architectures of mass-production and prefabrication and their origins exercised modernist thinkers such as Sigfried Giedion and Walter Gropius in the early twentieth century and has undergone a resurgence in recent times. Meanwhile, the mapping of the hitherto overlooked forms and iconography of commerce in Learning from Las Vegas (1971) was extended by Rem Koolhaas et al into an investigation of the technologies, systems and precedents of retail in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, thirty years later in 2001. While obviously always a criteria for building, to find writings on architecture which explicitly celebrate cheapness as a design virtue or, indeed, even iterate the word cheap is more difficult. Walter Gropius’ essay ‘How can we build cheaper, better, more attractive houses?’ (1927), however, situates the cheap within the discussions – articulated, amongst others, by Karl Teige and Bruno Taut – surrounding the minimal dwelling and the moral benefits of absence of the 1920s and 30s.
In our contemporary age of heightened consumption, it is perhaps fitting that an architecture of bare essentials is defined in retail rather than in housing, a commercial existenzminimum where the Miesian paradox of ‘less is more’ is resold as a paradigm of ‘more for less’ in the ubiquitous yet overlooked architectures of the discount supermarket.

Street Space—North Street, Belfast

The Belfast city center is fractured, divided by motorways, parking lots, empty buildings, and big box stores. Its 19th-century heyday put it on the international map of textile production, which transformed and enriched its built structure. This tight architectural fabric was slowly destroyed in the 1940s by the Blitz, in the 1970s by road plans and “the troubles” and in the 1990s by large retail buildings. Few pedestrian streets traverse Belfast, and among them, most are recently-developed conduits for the passage of shoppers from one chain store to the next.Within this seemingly bleak urban landscape, there remain a few areas that offer a richer, more architecturally and socially diverse, more memory-laden conception of public space. Current redevelopment plans, however, threaten the mere existence of these few remaining historic streets in Belfast.This reality inspired the current project of one of the Masters in Architecture design units at Queen’s University Belfast. Our team (led by urban designer Michael Corr and myself) has been exploring North Street, one of the main arteries in Belfast City Center. Although North Street has a reputation for being run-down, derelict, and in need of redevelopment, it is one of the few intact 19th-century streets left in the area, and as such is worthy of study as an example of public space that is not strictly synonymous with commercial space.

Cyber-Chaucer

This chapter assesses the impact of the 'digital humanities" on the study of Geoffrey Chaucer

Christian Gottlob Neefe and the Early Reception of Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni

A brief account of Christian Gottlob Neefe's engagement with Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni as exemplified in his correspondence.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been considered a conflict-resolution success story. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement provided a framework for managing a long-standing ethnonational conflict, and has ushered in relative political stability. The consociational features of the Northern Ireland Assembly can be seen either as necessary for managing conflict or as institutionalizing sectarianism so that politics along left–right lines cannot emerge. Although there is evidence for the development of a “Northern Irish” identity to counter competing British and Irish identities, Northern Ireland is a long way from transcending the sectarian structures that shape almost all aspects of social and political life. Northern Ireland remains segregated along religious lines and is also prone to tensions around the anniversaries of atrocities and the public use of symbols and rituals. The failure to systematically “deal with the past” through public information recovery and truth-telling mechanisms also seems to have hindered progress toward reconciliation.

Christianity as a Vocation: The Rostrevor Benedictines and the Renewal of Faith in Ireland

This chapter explores how the Benedictine monks at Holy Cross Monastery in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, have re-introduced the idea of vocation into the minds of a range of Christians on the island of Ireland. A picture of this new vision of the church in Ireland is painted through sections devoted to 'living ecumenism' and 'creating safe spaces'. The work of the Rostrevor Benedictines may seem limited because of the small scale of the changes among individuals. But Holy Cross is just one of multiple 'extra-institutional' spaces in Ireland's changing religious landscape. From their strategic positions on the margins, extra-institutional expressions of religion may prompt more significant changes in religious practice than initially seem possible.

French Autopathography

Reacting against the assumption that ill people ‘surrender’ their bodies to medicine, first-person illness narratives attempt to restore the patient’s voice to an often dehumanizing and bewildering medical experience. This special issue complements recent medical humanities scholarship on English-language illness narratives by investigating a distinctly rich tradition of French autopathography. Diverse approaches and methodologies will be used to consider first-person perspectives on a range of illnesses, disabilities and disorders, including AIDS, cancer, physical pain, mental health issues, anorexia, and locked-in syndrome. The issue aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue across genres (literature, film, philosophy) and examine the creative potential that lies at the interface of medicine and the arts.

Seasons, Family and Nation in American Horror Story

Arguably, the title of American Horror Story sets out an agenda for the program: this is not just a horror story, but it is a particularly American one. This chapter examines the way that the program uses seasonal celebrations as a way of expressing that national identity, with special emphasis on the importance of family to those celebrations. The particular seasonal celebrations focused on are those of Halloween and Christmas, each of which has associations with the supernatural. However, the use of the supernatural at those seasons is one which is particularly associated with the US, presenting Halloween as a time of supernatural incursion and horror, and of disruption to society and the normal order of things, while Christmas is presented more as a time of unity for the family. Where the supernatural emerges in American Christmas television, it is typically as a force to encourage togetherness and reconciliation, rather than as a dark reminder of the past. While these interpretations of these festivals have been broadcast abroad by American cultural products, not least American television, they have different associations and implications elsewhere, as will be shown. So the particular uses of these festivals is part of what marks American Horror Story out as American, as is the way that the program's narratives have been structured to fit in with US television scheduling. This chapter, then, argues that the structures of the narratives combines with their use of the festivals of Halloween and Christmas in order to enhance the sense of this series as a particularly American horror story.

Ghosts and Television

This chapter explores the ghost story on television, and particularly the tensions between the medium and the genre. Television has long been seen as a nearly-supernatural medium, an association that the very term 'medium' enhances. In particular, the very intimacy of television, and its domestic presence, have led to it being considered to be a suitable and effective venue for the ghost story, while at the same time concerns have risen over it being too effective at conveying horror into the home. The ghost story is thus one of the genres where the tensions between the medium's aesthetic possibilities and desire for censorship can be most clearly seen. As such, there is a recurring use of the ghost story in relation to different techniques of special effects and narrative on television, some more effective than others, and the presence of the ghost story on television waxes and wanes as different styles become more or less popular, and different narrative forms, such as single play or serial or series, become more or less dominant. Drawing on examples primarily from a British and US context, this chapter outlines the history of the ghost story on television and demonstrates how the tensions in presentation, narrative and considerations of the viewer have influenced the many changes that have taken place within the genre.

Can Future Managers and Business Executives be Influenced to Behave more Ethically in the Workplace? The Impact of Approaches to Learning on Business Students’ Cheating Behavior

This study considers the potential for influencing business students to become ethical managers by directing their undergraduate learning environment. In particular, the relationship between business students’ academic cheating, as a predictor of workplace ethical behavior, and their approaches to learning is explored. The three approaches to learning identified from the students’ approaches to learning literature are deep approach, represented by an intrinsic interest in and a desire to understand the subject, surface approach, characterized by rote learning and memorization without understanding, and strategic approach, associated with competitive students whose motivation is the achievement of good grades by adopting either a surface or deep approach. Consistent with the hypothesized theoretical model, structural equation modeling revealed that the surface approach is associated with higher levels of cheating, while the deep approach is related to lower levels. The strategic approach was also associated with less cheating and had a statistically stronger influence than the deep approach. Further, a significantly positive relationship reported between deep and strategic approaches suggests that cheating is reduced when deep and strategic approaches are paired. These findings suggest that future managers and business executives can be influenced to behave more ethically in the workplace by directing their learning approaches. It is hoped that the evidence presented may encourage those involved in the design of business programs to implement educational strategies which optimize students’ approaches to learning towards deep and strategic characteristics, thereby equipping tomorrow’s managers and business executives with skills to recognize and respond appropriately to workplace ethical dilemmas.

Exploring the Roles of Technology and Social Play in Art Museums

This co-written chapter was included in an edited book featuring invited authors from different countries and different areas of museum research and practice. The chapter uses a theory of play by Johan Huizinga (1938) to frame case studies of play-based interactive experiences in museums in various countries. The aim was to use theory to ground museum practice, in order to evaluate existing practical implementations as well as to inform the design of new ones. The book was nominated as one of the 10 best museum education books of 2011 by Museum Education Monitor, and the chapter led to a subsequent technology residency the author undertook in the Spike Island gallery, Bristol in 2012, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England. It also informed his subsequent postgraduate teaching, an example of which is a recent MA project, which deconstructs play from a computational perspective. Collaborations have continued with the co-author, which have resulted in a number of invited lectures. In this chapter the authors explore play as a structure for supporting visitor learning, drawing from international research in museums and interaction design. Four aspects of play first proposed by Huizinga are explored – the free-choice aspect of play, play as distinct from real life, play as an ordering structure, and the role of play in bridging communities. The chapter argues that play provides museums with ready-made structures and concepts, which can help planning for visitor learning. The research was equally divided between the co-authors, who developed the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the article by drawing on their own research alongside key examples of museum design and digital media.