Search results

‘It’s Quite a Responsibility. If It All Goes Haywire Just Because of Something You Said’: Student Voice in Curriculum Redesign across the University

This handbook brings together scholarship from various subfields, disciplinary traditions, and geographic and geopolitical contexts to understand how student voice is operating in different higher education dimensions and contexts around the world. The handbook helps not only to map the range of student voice practices in college and university settings, but also to identify the common core elements, enabling conditions, constraints, and outcomes associated with student voice work in higher education. It offers a broad understanding of the methodologies, current debates, history, and future of the field, identifying avenues for future research.

Who are you?

Sensor monitoring in the home

This paper describes the approach used to identify elderly people’s needs and attitudes towards applying ambient sensor systems for monitoring daily activities in the home. As elderly are typically unfamiliar with such ambient technology, interactive tools for explicating sensor monitoring –an interactive dollhouse and iPad applications for displaying live monitored sensor activity data– were developed and used for this study. Furthermore, four studies conducted by occupational therapists with more than 60 elderly participants –including questionnaires (n=41), interviews (n=6), user sessions (n=14) and field studies (n=2)– were conducted. The experiences from these studies suggest that this approach helped to democratically engage the elderly as end-user and identify acceptance issues.

To have voice and choice

Social work in the Netherlands is attracting an increasing number of Turkish and Moroccan Dutch professionals, mostly second-generation migrant women from a Muslim background. Inspired by Amartya Sen’s capability approach, this article presents the findings of a qualitative content analysis of 40 interviews with professionals by peers from the same background. The question is, what kind of professionals do these newly started social workers desire to be and what hindrances do they encounter? The professionals challenge the dominance of Western beliefs and values. This becomes tangible in their desires and constraints and especially in the process of choice.

Changemakers: a pedagogical approach for action-oriented, experiential learning to empower voice, agency and leadership

We developed and piloted a course, called Changemakers, that supported interdisciplinary student-led action groups to identify social and environmental sustainability challenges and influence systemic change. By exposing students to dynamic and complex issues from multiple stakeholder perspectives, Changemakers aimed to empower students to find and use their voice and agency to make a difference in society. Students need knowledge and skills to navigate societal challenges, address SDGs and build confidence and creativity to change the status quo (Lozano, 2017; Raelin, 2009). Changemakers provided a playful and safe learning environment to explore societal challenges, form inclusive and sensitive judgments, and enact interventions for change. Students developed self-efficacy (Bandura, 2001) that were encouraged to be autonomous and self-directed in their learning (Morris, 2019). Through learning-by-doing, students gained a set of leadership and change management skills that can be applied to a variety of professional settings in local and global contexts.

The effect of visual-anchors and training in auditory-perceptual judgment of voice quality

The aim of the present investigation was to evaluate the effect of visual feedback on rating voice quality severity level and the reliability of voice quality judgment by inexperienced listeners. For this purpose two training programs were created, each lasting 2 hours. In total 37 undergraduate speech–language therapy students participated in the study and were divided into a visual plus auditory-perceptual feedback group (V + AF), an auditory-perceptual feedback group (AF), and a control group with no feedback (NF). All listeners completed two rating sessions judging overall severity labeled as grade (G), roughness (R), and breathiness (B). The judged voice samples contained the concatenation of continuous speech and sustained phonation. No significant rater reliability changes were found in the pre- and posttest between the three groups in every GRB-parameter (all p > 0.05). There was a training effect seen in the significant improvement of rater reliability for roughness within the NF and AF groups (all p < 0.05), and for breathiness within the V + AF group (p < 0.01). The rating of the severity level of roughness changed significantly after the training in the AF and V + AF groups (p < 0.01), and the breathiness severity level changed significantly after the training in the V + AF group (p < 0.01). The training of V + AF and AF may only minimally influence the reliability in the judgment of voice quality but showed significant influence on rating the severity level of GRB parameters. Therefore, the use of both visual and auditory anchors while rating as well as longer training sessions may be required to draw a firm conclusion.