Affect: knowledge, communication, creativity and emotion

Concerns about emotional well-being have recently become the focus of social policy, particularly in education settings. This is a sudden and unique development in placing new ideas about emotion and creativity and communication in curriculum content, pedagogy and assessment, but also in redefining fundamentally what it is to ‘know’. Our report charts the creation of what we call an ‘emotional epistemology’ that may undermine all previous ideas about epistemology, draws out implications for educational aspirations and purposes and evaluates potential implications for these aspirations and purposes if trends we identify here continue into the future.This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation

Interventions for resilience in educational settings: challenging policy discourses of risk and vulnerability

‘Resilience’ has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperiness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interventions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being. Drawing on a case study of a popular behavioural programme used widely in British and American primary schools, this paper uses a critical social understanding that combines bio-scientific and social constructionist ideas in order to evaluate key challenges for policy, research and practice framed around resilience. The paper argues that although critical social perspectives illuminate important contemporary manifestations of old problems with behavioural interventions, and challenge narrow, moralising definitions of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’, they coalesce with behavioural perspectives in a search for better state-sponsored responses to the shared question of how to build resilience amongst ‘vulnerable’ groups and individuals. Instead, we argue that critical sociologists need to resist responses that offer more sophisticated behavioural interventions and generate new forms of governance and subjectivity

Unification of SU(2)xU(1) Using a Generalized Covariant Derivative and U(3)

A generalization of the Yang-Mills covariant derivative, that uses both vector and scalar fields and transforms as a 4-vector contracted with Dirac matrices, is used to simplify and unify the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model. Since SU(3) assigns the wrong hypercharge to the Higgs boson, it is necessary to use a special representation of U(3) to obtain all the correct quantum numbers. A surplus gauge scalar boson emerges in the process, but it uncouples from all other particles.Comment: 12 pages, no figures. To be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Reinforcing the ‘diminished’ subject? The implications of the ‘vulnerability zeitgeist’ for well-being in educational settings

Pessimistic discourses about crises in youth and children's well-being, mental health and vulnerability permeate English educational policy and practice. These generate vague and slippery elisions of wellbeing and mental health, and the related rise of an ad hoc, confusing market of psycho-emotional interventions promoted by new types of 'pay-experts'. Revisiting earlier arguments that these developments depict a ‘diminished’ human subject, we propose that the incoherent state of policy, much research and practice in this area warrants robust challenge and critique. In particular, more precision about key concepts of social and emotional learning, mental health and wellbeing, a reining in of universal programmes, and serious interest in the types of curriculum that can offer richer, more meaningful alternatives to developing wellbeing in educational settings

Intrinsic Charm Contribution to Double Quarkonium Hadroproduction

Double $J/\psi$ production has been observed by the NA3 collaboration in $\pi N$ and $p N$ collisions with a cross section of the order of 20-30 pb. The $\psi \psi$ pairs measured in $\pi^-$ nucleus interactions at 150 and 280 GeV$/c$ are observed to carry an anomalously large fraction of the projectile momentum in the laboratory frame, $x_{\psi \psi} \geq 0.6$ at 150 GeV$/c$ and $\geq 0.4$ at 280 GeV$/c$. We postulate that these forward $\psi \psi$ pairs are created by the materialization of Fock states in the projectile containing two pairs of intrinsic $c \overline c$ quarks. We calculate the overlap of the charmonium states with the $|\overline u d c \overline c c \overline c \rangle$ Fock state as described by the intrinsic charm model and find that the $\pi^- N \rightarrow \psi \psi$ longitudinal momentum and invariant mass distributions are both well reproduced. We also discuss double $J/\psi$ production in $pN$ interactions and the implications for other heavy quarkonium production channels in QCD.Comment: Revtex, APS style, 7 pages, 3 figures in uuencoded fil

QCD Mechanisms for Double Quarkonium and Open Heavy Meson Hadroproduction

Double $J/\psi$ production on the order of 20-30 pb has been observed by the NA3 collaboration. These $\psi \psi$ pairs, measured in $\pi^- N$ interactions at 150 and 280 GeV$/c$ and in $pN$ interactions at 400 GeV$/c$, carry a large fraction of the projectile momentum, $x_{\psi \psi} \geq 0.6$ for the 150 GeV$/c$ beam and $\geq 0.4$ at 280 GeV$/c$. We examine several sources of $\psi \psi$ pair production within QCD, including ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^4)$ $\psi \psi$ production, leading-twist $b \overline b$ production and decay, and the materialization of heavy-quark Fock states in the projectile. We estimate the production cross section and the single and double $J/\psi$ momentum and mass distributions for each, comparing the results with the NA3 data, and predict $\psi \psi$ production in $pN$ interactions at 800 GeV$/c$, accessible to current fixed-target experiments. We also discuss the observable implications of open heavy meson pair production from the intrinsic heavy quark Fock states.Comment: Revtex, APS style, 16 pages, 15 figures available as uuencoded postscript files (or ps files) from the Autho

The impact of Advanced level GNVQ assessment policy on further education students' autonomy and motivation

PhD ThesisPolicy goals for lifelong learning prioritise a need to motivate people to participate in purposeful learning and to become autonomous lifelong learners. As the latest of a series of initiatives in the vocational curriculum, Advanced GNVQs adopted a controversial assessment model to achieve these aims. The implementation of the model in the further education (FE) sector has taken place at a time of protracted restructuring in colleges. This study evaluates the effects of Advanced level GNVQ policy on students' autonomy and motivation. It focuses on the 'policy trajectory' created by the interplay between macro, meso and micro-level factors. The research developed and tested a theoretical typology to connect types of motivation and autonomy to formative assessment practices through three layers of analysis: (a) the structural and ideological context of policy for lifelong learning; (b) the particular policy debates and processes that surrounded the GNVQ assessment model and (c) the social processes of assessment within two GNVQ courses in two FE colleges. By combining these three layers, the thesis set out to relate to a tradition of policy scholarship and to contribute to the sociological study of the political, cultural, social and pedagogic roles that assessment systems play in the UK. The study draws upon a wide range of data collection techniques, including interviews with policy-makers, teachers and students, participant observation in colleges, documentary analysis and questionnaires. It adopts multiple perspectives for analysing data to raise issuesa bout assessmenpt olicy and practice in four broad areas.F irst, policy development for GNVQs shows that extreme ad hocery, chaos and controversy continue to beset assessment policy in the UK, particularly over what 'standards' of assessment mean. This, together with the speed of development, lack of funding and turf wars between different constituencies has created an 'assessment regime' where new forms of regulation, pedagogy and organisational practices shape meanings associated with 'autonomy' and 'motivation'. Second, this regime affects teachers' and students' values and beliefs about vocational education and their formative assessmenpt ractices. The study argues that a combination of mechanisms for regulating teachers' assessmenpt ractices, resource pressuresa nd student expectations about acceptable engagement with learning create and shape students' 'assessment careers'. In this respect, the study contributes evidence to a growing body of work on the social and cultural processes and effects of assessment and to research which explores learners' identities and 'learning careers'. Third, the study highlights barriers to improving formative assessmentin postcompulsory education but offers recommendations to various interested constituencies that might contribute to this goal. Last, the study offers tentative suggestionsa bout how current assessmenpt olicy and pedagogy' might relate to specific ideological trends associated with 'risk consciousness'

Signals for Double Parton Scattering at the Fermilab Tevatron

Four double-parton scattering processes are examined at the Fermilab Tevatron energy. With optimized kinematical cuts and realistic parton level simulation for both signals and backgrounds, we find large samples of four-jet and three-jet+one-photon events with signal to background ratio being 20\%-30\%, and much cleaner signals from two-jet+two-photon and two-jet+$e^+e^-$ final states. The last channel may provide the first unambiguous observation of multiple parton interactions, even with the existing data sample accumulated by the Tevatron collider experiments.Comment: 7 pages, plain LaTeX, 2 tables, no figures. A compressed PS file is available by anonymous ftp at ftp://phenom.physics.wisc.edu/pub/preprints/1996/madph-96-945.ps.