How Do Veterinary Students Engage When Using Creative Methods to Critically Reflect on Experience? A Qualitative Analysis of Assessed Reflective Work

Critical reflection—the exploration and questioning of one’s experience, beliefs, assumptions, and actions—supports resilience, empathy, the management of uncertainty, and professional identity formation. Yet for many students and educators, the techniques to engage in critical reflection are elusive. Creative methods that foster engagement with emotional and uncertain aspects of experience reportedly help some students to reflect at a more critical level than when they use reflective writing, and this study explores more deeply the experiences of such students, who used creative methods to critically reflect on challenging or troubling past events. A narrative methodology was utilized, in which researchers collaboratively co-constructed an understanding of students’ experiences of reflection to identify the activities and steps they used. Creative methods did not inherently lead to critical reflection, but when this was achieved, the creative approaches seemed to facilitate a staging of reflection, which incorporated five sequential stages: preplanning creative depiction, experimenting with different ideas, deliberately completing the reflective piece, reflecting on creative work, and reflecting again on learning and development. This cyclic, repeated revisit to experience, as students engaged in each stage of their work, appeared to facilitate both a deep connection with the emotional elements of experience and a more distanced analysis. This ultimately led to a deepening of understanding of events, including the construction of students’ own beliefs and empathy with others’ views.

The Management of Uncertainty

Chapter 5 presents an approach to managing uncertainty in medicine. It develops the idea of “uncertainty tolerance” as a normative goal for efforts to manage uncertainty. It offers a working definition of uncertainty tolerance as an optimal, adaptive balance in people’s responses to uncertainty and identifies humility, flexibility, and courage as key moral virtues or capacities that enable uncertainty tolerance. The chapter presents a practical integrative framework of uncertainty management that aims to promote uncertainty tolerance through four key tasks: establishing the diagnosis of uncertainty, assessing its prognosis, clarifying goals, and initiating treatment. The chapter uses a case study to explore the potential practical value of the framework in helping clinicians and patients to manage and tolerate the uncertainties they experience.

The Natural History of Uncertainty

Chapter 4 describes the natural history of medical uncertainty—that is, the way that the phenomenon is manifest in people’s lives. It classifies people’s psychological responses to uncertainty within two main categories: primary (initial cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses) and secondary (compensatory responses aimed at regulating primary responses). It presents a conceptual framework that classifies the variety of primary and secondary responses to uncertainty and discusses how the framework can help clinicians and patients evaluate and manage these responses. The ultimate goal of this framework is practical: to improve the management of uncertainty in medicine. The framework can promote this goal by enabling clinicians and patients to rise above their own regulatory responses to uncertainty and achieve greater tertiary control over them.

Flexibility decision pathways in the management of uncertainty in property development: experience from an emerging market

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the flexible decision pathways adopted by development advisors in the management of uncertainty in property development. Specifically, the study examines the quantitative techniques adopted by development advisors, the level of adoption of real options analysis (ROA) vis-à-vis the level of adoption of heuristics. Finally, the types of options exercised in property development were analysed. This was with a view to providing information that could mitigate the challenges of risk and uncertainty and increasing investment failure associated with property development in Nigeria, an emerging market. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted a survey method and was conducted on development advisors in property development companies/estate surveying and valuation firms in Nigeria. A total of 195 development advisors participated in the survey. The respondents were required to rate, on a five-point Likert scale, the level of adoption of the quantitative models, heuristics and the types of flexibility exercised during development. The data were analysed using mean rating, one-sample t-test and analysis of variance. Findings The results revealed that there was a preference for the use of traditional techniques, while probabilistic appraisal models and other contemporary methods such as ROA are seldom adopted by development advisors. While there was a significantly high level of adoption of heuristics, the stratified analysis examining the profile of the respondents and the level of adoption of ROA and heuristics suggests that years of experience influenced the level of adoption of both the ROA and heuristics by the development advisors. The analysis of the types of flexibility showed that staging/phasing and changing the initial use/design were the most prevalent flexibility pathways adopted during the development. However, the study found that there was no significant difference concerning the choice of flexibility being adopted by development advisors who used ROA and those who did not. Practical implications The study provides an understanding of the decision pathways adopted by development advisors in an emerging market like Nigeria. Originality/value The paper contributes to studies on decision-making pathways in the management of uncertainty under dynamic conditions by development advisors in emerging markets.

Citizens, Madmen and Children: Equality, Uncertainty, Freedom and the Definition of State.

In this paper, I argue that a fundamental tradeoff between freedom and equality in human social organization is, in fact, a learnable schedule for the management of uncertainty for an individual agent operating in a social world pervaded with randomness. This implies that political organization and state structures may be viewed as different ways of handling uncertainty, each trading off freedom and equality in a slightly different manner, but each with an equivalent, and theoretically symmetric, balance between the two. I will argue that uncertainty in an intelligent agent arises from one of three primary sources. First, the agent’s logical, objective, mental model of the environment may be noisy. Second, subjective, affective appraisals, of other individuals, their behaviours, and their intentions may present substantial randomness. Finally, the relationship between the objective, real, external world, to the subjective, internal world of the agent may be blurry. As I will show, in any basic two-level Bayesian model of reasoning, these same three sources of uncertainty naturally arise as three learnable parameters. These three parameters govern the operation of the model, but must be traded-off against each other. Furthermore, I will give these three dimensions of uncertainty some theoretical validity, by showing how they pervasively occur across a wide swatch of literatures as three dimensions of political freedom and equality. The relationship between the parameters and the freedoms is a key step in gaining a better understanding of political movements. For example, I discuss how the transition from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity during the industrial revolution in the 19th century, as described by Durkheim, is in fact a shift in the management of uncertainty to one focused on immediate meanings to one focused on trust. Further, such shifts may be purposefully initiated by politically interested groups, by spreading new narratives or introducing new policy. Viewed as uncertainty management, any shifts so induced should be carefully evaluated in terms of what freedoms it compromises, with smoother transitions assured for shifts that remain in a position of equilibrium with respect to freedom and equality.

Estado y políticas públicas en la crisis de la COVID-19. Desafíos prácticos

Laburpena: Lan honek 2020an larrialdia kudeatzeko eta COVID-19aren pandemia kudeatzeko Estatuaren eta politika publikoen arazo teoriko eta praktiko nagusiak egituratu nahi ditu. Hauek dira: 1) estatuaren gaitasuna; 2) larrialdiaren kudeaketa; 3) baliabideen mobilizazioa; 4) barne-artikulazioak eragindako arazoak; 5) maila anitzeko koordinazioa; 6) komunikazioaren erronkak; 7) ebidentziaren erabilera eta ziurgabetasunaren kudeaketa; 8) protokoloen eraikuntza; 9) prozesuaren gobernantza eta lidergoa; eta 10) larrialdian zehar compliance publikoa. Ildo horretan, "normaltasun berriaren" erronkek eskatzen dute, alde batetik, larrialdiaren kudeaketatik ikasitako irakaspenak txertatzea, eta, bestetik, ezartzen den unetik bertatik eredua krisian jarriko duen ariketa prospektibo bat egitea, eredua egokitzeko alderdiak indartzeko, errealitate kontingente eta desafiatzaile baten esparruan. Resumen: El presente trabajo intenta estructurar los principales problemas teóricos y prácticos del Estado y las políticas públicas para el manejo de la emergencia y la gestión de la pandemia del COVID-19 durante el 2020. Estos son: 1) la capacidad estatal; 2) la gestión de la emergencia; 3) la movilización de recursos; 4) los problemas de articulación interna; 5) la coordinación multinivel; 6) los desafíos de la comunicación; 7) el uso de evidencia y la gestión de la incertidumbre; 8) la construcción de protocolos; 9) la gobernanza y liderazgo del proceso; y 10) el cumplimiento normativo (compliance) público durante la emergencia. En ese sentido, los desafíos de la “nueva normalidad” implican, por un lado, incorporar las lecciones aprendidas de la gestión de la emergencia, y por el otro, hacer un ejercicio prospectivo que ponga en crisis al modelo desde el momento de su implantación y que potencie los aspectos adaptativos del mismo en el marco de una realidad contingente y desafiante. Abstract: This paper attempts to structure the main theoretical and practical problems of the State and public policies for emergency management and the administration of the Covid19 pandemic during 2020. These are: 1) State capacity; 2) Emergency management; 3) Mobilization of resources; 4) Internal articulation problems; 5) Multilevel coordination; 6) Communication challenges; 7) The use of evidence and the management of uncertainty; 8) Construction of protocols; 9) Governance and leadership of the process; and 10) Public compliance during the emergency. In this sense, the challenges of the “new normal” imply, on the one hand, incorporating the lessons learned from emergency management, and on the other, carrying out a prospective exercise that puts the model in crisis from the moment of its implementation., empowering the adaptive aspects of it in the framework of a contingent and challenging reality.

Internacionalização como política educacional: a Universidade de Alcalá no Espaço Europeu de Educação Superior

The new functions of the university in the integral development of the student suppose a strategy of continuous innovation to adjust, and even anticipate, to the prospective needs, both professionally and personally, of the citizens who will coexist in a global, interdependent and changing reality. The University of Alcalá integrates the historical tradition, the European geostrategic situation and its policy of flexibility, evaluation and constant adaptation to the company and society where it is located. Educational policy needs to have a clear purpose that allows the development of teachers' teaching competences to be combined with a perspective based on dialogical learning, formative and shared evaluation, collaborative work, inclusion and the management of uncertainty.

Structure is Management of Uncertainty in Groups

I argue that the management of uncertainty by agents in a social world is foundational to the formation of social structures and to the definition of culture. I present a deep Bayesian model for this management of uncertainty in intelligent systems, and I argue for its applicability to cultural sociology. As social systems grow more heterogeneous, management of uncertainty in any participating agent becomes computationally difficult, and I propose that combinations of a small number of layers of reasoning in a deep Bayesian model are sufficient to account for some of the salient ways by which humans manage this uncertainty. Three forces come into play when considering such a model, and each is connected to a particular form of uncertainty. A denotative layer in the model represents uncertainty in the world or environment (ambiguity and risk about outcomes), a connotative layer manages the uncertainty about relationships with other social agents, and the connection between denotative and connotative handles uncertainty about identities of the self and others. Behaviours taken by agent and by others are handled in both layers simultaneously. I show how the tradeoff between these three factors maps to different social structures, and I use use the model to make predictions across a range of domains, and show its relationship to cultural sociological, social psychological, economic and sociological theorizing. I further link this model to Bayesian views of the mind, primarily the active inference model of human intelligence, and compare and contrast to more traditional artificial intelligence.