On Continuity and Readiness for Education: Methodology Principles of Quality-Based System Management After Helen N. Solovova

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the most crucial problems related to innovative trends in modern education, i.e. increasing competitiveness. The aim of this paper is twofold: a) to consider the phenomenon of current methodology of professional education in terms of international principles ISO depicted in the research works of the outstanding methodologist and educator, Professor Helen N. Solovova; b) to reveal the versatility of the scientist’s activities in the frameworks of current academic scholarship. The main methodological concept considers the global strategic processes, and the value orientations of educational activity which become especially significant for those who have to work with a personality; the latter has to understand the realia of continuing transformations of the society, qualitative and quantitative changes in the educational environment of the country and the regions, and rather ambiguous social, informational, and educational aspects of the information spaces. As a result of this study, we state that current challenges are of prior importance for the personality development as individuality. As a priority this concerns a constantly changing status of education as a whole, and the image of the university and college trainers, school educators and tutors at In-Service institutions; as is the case, these phenomena reflected in both Russian and International Scientific Scholarship help to understand the progressive methodology principles which cover Knowledge Content, Technology, and Pedagogy/Language Didactics. In conclusion, a special role, for sure, belongs to the methodology of teaching foreign languages (H.Solovova’s concept of prior significance), which performs a humanizing and cultural mission; language pedagogy and didactics are in search of novel principles and approaches to the philosophy of training and learning foreign languages as a valuable intellectual component of Russian culture and education as a whole.

Points of convergence: Deploying the geographies of critical nexus-thinking

In recent years, the concept of ‘nexus’ has become a metaphor for resource interactions (particularly between food, water and energy), a policy apparatus to address resource sustainability and an object of academic analysis. Contending that the ways that nexus has been conceptualised and applied so far are invariably incomplete, this paper marks a concerted attempt to draw geographical scholarship into the conceptualisation of nexus-thinking to offer a more complete reading of resource geographies and their underlying interactions. We present critical nexus-thinking as a conceptual framework for tracing the geographies fashioned by resource nexuses, including the enrolment of human and non-human populations into such nexuses, and how the governance of both routine resource interactions and of ‘shocks’ can impact on such populations. To mobilise critical nexus-thinking as a conceptual framework, we draw out three points of convergence between nexus policy logics and critical geographic/scientific scholarship: socio-material-ecological interactions, politics of scale, and flows, blockages and dis/connectivity. We deploy critical nexus-thinking through analysis that extends the 2014/2015 ‘water crisis’ in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area to other sites, spaces and materials in order to critically evaluate the politics, materiality and spatiality of resource governance, and we use this example to point to how scholars might apply critical nexus-thinking analyses in other contexts.

The Complex Chemistry of Diversity and Inclusion: A 30-Year Synthesis

Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour’s career as a research chemist, educator, and advocate spanned more than forty years. Much of her work took place within a disciplinary culture ignorant of the scholarship supporting organizational change towards inclusive excellence. Her contributions are extensively covered in other articles in this special issue, and her achievements are all the more remarkable given that her colleague, Dr. Gordon Freeman, held gender-biased attitudes which he shared in a peer reviewed article in a national science journal. Three decades later another Canadian chemist, Dr. Tomáš Hudlický, published a peer reviewed essay in an international chemistry journal which included his views on the negative impacts of diversity initiatives on organic synthesis research. Both articles were retracted, but clearly a faulty and pervasively biased peer review system enabled the distribution of prejudiced opinions which were not informed by demonstrated expertise, nor supported by data. These two events are reflective of challenges that Dr. Armour faced in her efforts to diversify chemical sciences. We need to build on her critical work to increasing awareness about inclusive excellence in chemistry, as well as educating scientists on what constitutes an informed opinion. Here, we use Freeman and Hudlický incidents as case studies to indicate how pervasive bias can be superficially perceived as scientific scholarship. Furthermore, we use analogies of analytical processes to illustrate how talent gets systemically excluded. Finally, we provide recommendations to chemistry community members for improving outcomes in terms of synthesis of new knowledge, ideas and solutions, toward leveraging all the available human talent and creating an environment that is both excellent and inclusive.

A systematic metadata harvesting workflow for analysing scientific networks

One of the disciplines behind the science of science is the study of scientific networks. This work focuses on scientific networks as a social network having different nodes and connections. Nodes can be represented by authors, articles or journals while connections by citation, co-citation or co-authorship. One of the challenges in creating scientific networks is the lack of publicly available comprehensive data set. It limits the variety of analyses on the same set of nodes of different scientific networks. To supplement such analyses we have worked on publicly available citation metadata from Crossref and OpenCitatons. Using this data a workflow is developed to create scientific networks. Analysis of these networks gives insights into academic research and scholarship. Different techniques of social network analysis have been applied in the literature to study these networks. It includes centrality analysis, community detection, and clustering coefficient. We have used metadata of Scientometrics journal, as a case study, to present our workflow. We did a sample run of the proposed workflow to identify prominent authors using centrality analysis. This work is not a bibliometric study of any field rather it presents replicable Python scripts to perform network analysis. With an increase in the popularity of open access and open metadata, we hypothesise that this workflow shall provide an avenue for understanding scientific scholarship in multiple dimensions.

Communicative strategy of university education: current discourse

This paper links the relevance of the research on communicative strategy in the frameworks of current university education and national public school system as a whole to fill the gap within both scientific Scholarship and pragma studies that reflect on novelty and changes of conditions and tasks for the development language education in the polyphony of the cultural information and educational spaces as a dominant value of social life of man and the society. This manuscript presents for consideration and discussion some of the authors’ findings of personification of training and learning as a priority of recurrent education and of axiology that involve and constitute the comprehensive model of a) transformations of the requirements for language proficiency of an individual, b) changes of structural, functional and communicative approaches to teaching/training and learning goals, c) selection of knowledge content and methodology of programming and planning in terms of integration processes. In conclusion, the statement of development of functional literacy of a personality in the chaotic space of the multicultural world of global communication and pluralistic essence of the era of postmodernism is suggested as of prior significance.

ESPO and Butler-Williams Symposium: Race, Ethnicity, and Overcoming Barriers to Understand Why Aging Matters

The NIA’s Butler-Williams Scholars Program and GSA’s Emerging Scholars and Professional Organization are united in providing career development opportunities for early career scholars in a manner that promotes leadership, diversity, and inclusivity. This provides a foundation to develop a network of next generation of scientists, clinicians, and policy makers capable of shaping health in aging. Among the chief concerns of our aging population are disparities in health associated with race/ethnicity, experience, sociocultural and socioeconomic factors, as well as access to and communications regarding health care. GSA’s early career professionals and alumni of the prestigious NIA Butler-Williams Scholars Program have tackled these issues directly and the scientific scholarship that results is astounding in its breadth and depth. Dr. Glenna Brewster (Butler-Williams class of 2018) will discuss new findings from a study of African American caregivers of persons living with dementia. Dr. Candace Brown, Ph.D. (Butler-Williams class of 2017), will present on overcoming social and environmental barriers to exercise among older adults. Dr. Joseph Saenz (Butler-Williams class of 2017), will present current work disparities in cognition function in the older Mexican population. The final speaker, Dr. Sarah Forrester (Butler-Williams class of 2019) will explore new perspectives on health equity in physiological dysregulation and aging. In sum, the featured talks by rising stars in aging research deepen our understanding of the influence of race, ethnicity, and overcoming barriers to understand ‘why aging matters’ across our diverse aging populations.

Language ideology and policy in a colonial and postcolonial context

This chapter discusses the animosity against Arabic elements in Persian in present-day Iran. I argue that this phenomenon can be seen as a continuation of the modern anti-Arabism that appeared in Iran in the nineteenth century as a direct result of the domination of European culture, rooted in European racial thought and linguistic beliefs and ideologies. The chapter first outlines the historical background of anti-Arabism in Iran. This is followed by a discussion on the controversy around the rise of the Persian language, while also highlighting the significance of this language as an aspect of Iranian national identity. The chapter finally addresses language-related anti-Arabism and focuses on the hostility that can be observed in scientific scholarship.

Medium and Small Cities, Culture and the Economy of Culture. A Review of the Approach to the Case of Spain in Light of International Scientific Scholarship

While most published studies on the economy of culture present a clear bias in favor of large cities, a significant international bibliography has emerged in recent years that privileges the perspective of medium and small cities. Unfortunately, the case of Spain has been largely overlooked by these analyses; this text is intended to remedy that oversight. To that end, a bibliographic compilation has been undertaken of studies on the cultural economy and cultural development in small and medium Spanish cities, providing a review of the specific literature as contrasted with the international literature. The main conclusions indicate that the Spanish case is similar to that of other western countries. Thus, clear confirmation is found that the effects of agglomeration economies and the so-called metropolitan bias also prevail in Spain, together with dispersion patterns that, to a certain extent, favor particular small and medium cities. Furthermore, even though the literature on the use of culture for urban renewal is abundant, the same cannot be said for the economics of culture, where considerable research gaps persist, both in the geographical coverage of case studies and in the social or labor impacts of this economic model.

Conclusion

This chapter provides a conclusion by extracting main theoretical lessons and developing a typology of creative social knowledge that emerges from the intersection of different ways of combining theory, methods, and data in social scientific scholarship and beyond. After further expanding on the concept of the theory–method–data triad, it presents a broader framework that can better grasp variation in the micro- and meso-level processes of knowledge production in the human sciences. The chapter argues that scholarly networks emerge at the intersection of theory, data, and methods. It also talks about a typology of networks and concrete examples that specify how and when theory, data, or methods take the lead that changes the network's understanding of what constitutes creative work. Different combinations of theory, methods, and data lead to different kinds of conflicts and different kinds of alliances. For instance, fields that grow by incorporating and standardizing data tend to fight with outsiders; questioning the data from within is destructive to the field as a whole.

Markers of Quality in Design Precedent

The generation and description of design precedent is at the core of design case scholarship. However, traditional standards of quality and rigor that are relevant for other types of design and scientific scholarship do not always apply equally to the generation of design cases. In this paper, I describe the nature of design precedent and the standards for evaluating precedent artifacts in a way that foregrounds access of the reader to aspects of design complexity in the design work being described. Standards of quality point towards theappropriateness and potential contribution of the precedent material to design knowledge, across the following dimensions: interest to other designers; rich representation of the design; articulation of transparency and failure; accessibility of style; and acknowledgement of complexity and scope.