The Minister today announced that our NHMRC Partnership Project led by Prof Julian Trolller on Developing a model of Preventative Healthcare for People with Intellectual Disability has been funded. It has an incredible team of Investigators and includes an impressive range of industry partners:
Agency for Clinical Innovation
Department of Health
Inclusion Australia
Aruma
Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care
Northcott
Down Syndrome Australia
Cancer Institute of New South Wales
NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission
Achieve Australia
Western Victoria Primary Health Networ
National Disability Services
NSW Ageing and Disability Commission
Central and Eastern Sydney Primary Health Network
Cancer Council
NSW Council for Intellectual Disability.
This project is exciting but I’m also conscious that it’s urgently needed because people with intellectual disabilities experience:
more than twice the rate of avoidable deaths
twice the rate of emergency department and hospital admissions
significantly lower rates of preventive healthcare, especially in primary health care.
I’m sure I’ll be posting more about this project in the coming years, but if you have ideas about relevant projects and activities I’d greatly appreciate hearing about them.
We had a pretty wide-ranging discussion about health equity, how the COVID response could be exacerbating health inequities, vaccination for teachers, and how the return to classrooms might play out – including the role that HEPA filters might play.
We also briefly spoke about the early 20th-century movement for open-air schooling, and how some of these design ideas may make a comeback
Every class, as we waited to start, I would ask my students (blue squares on the video conference screen) if they had any gossip. “I need something,” I said. “Any catfights? Anyone get really drunk and moon their neighbors? Anyone’s roommate cheat on their boyfriend? I am desperate here.”
Online meetings and tutorials where nobody else turns on their screens have been the leitmotif of the past eighteen months. Online discussions that end up becoming discussions only between the teaching assistant and I, while some letters in coloured circles look on.
It’s not dehumanising exactly. It’s… nothing?
Why don’t they turn on their cameras? I don’t know. They might find it emotionally draining to meet via Zoom constantly. They might have a crappy internet connection. They might be doing other things. They might be self-conscious.
It’s not just students. Most meetings with staff are the same. A shared screen and a sea of letters in circles.
Connection seems to be missing. It’s not the medium, and it’s not solely the COVID pandemic. It’s something else.
Elaina Nguyen from Canada and fellow students from Australia, Hong Kong and Malaysia have argued that the values underpinning effective learning partnerships – respect, reciprocity, shared responsibility, authenticity, honesty, responsibility, inclusivity, reciprocity, empowerment, trust, courage, and plurality – all need to renegotiated not just for virtual environments, but also for our COVID world . They’re onto something.
Reading Sarah E. Smith’s post reminded me that some universities in Australia plan to publish subject evaluation metrics. There are proposals that students should be able to see aggregated subject evaluations, which are usually mean agreement scores with statements along the lines of “this subject enabled me to develop an understanding of the subject matter” or “this subject made me feel like part of a community”. Fair enough questions and useful information for teachers.
Student evaluation is unequivocally a good thing. It one of the main ways we can learn about what courses are like for students, and improve the way we teach.
The challenge is that often it’s not solely the teaching, the assessment activities or learning materials that students are evaluating.
Jenna Price captured the challenge at the heart of this in an article yesterday:
When students fill out those forms, they don’t answer the questions before them. La Trobe University lecturer Troy Heffernan has published widely on what students really mean when they rate subjects and the teachers who teach them. It’s about gender, race, accent. It’s also about institutional practices.
Evaluation is only helpful if we’re able to act on the insights it offers. If students are using them to express dissatisfaction with student-to-teacher ratios, institutional policies, or have unacknowledged gender or racial biases , their usefulness evaporates. Similarly, evaluation scales become less useful for ongoing improvement if used as proxy metrics for poorly defined staff performance outcomes.
The way forward is clearly to develop more collaborative pedagogies based on students as partners , including co-creation of subjects and recognising students as consultants in that process.
At this time, what we need to improve as teachers probably isn’t captured through an agreement scale, valuable as that could be in the proper context. It’s solving the letters in coloured circles problem. It’s figuring out what’s really going on for the humans behind the circles.
I’d like to add one question to the student evaluation forms: why don’t they turn on their cameras?
Cassie McCullagh – HEPA filters in schools – 1 September 2021 Download MP3
Interestingly, I noted that a US academic has also written for The Conversation US about HEPA filters in schools, and sums up some of the equity considerations and limitations quite well:
In-room HEPA filtration is a long-term investment that supplements existing ventilation systems. And though COVID-19 was the impetus for the installation of many HEPA filters, they are effective for far more than just reducing exposures to airborne viruses. Well-maintained and properly functioning filtration systems also reduce exposure to wildfire ash that can penetrate buildings, as well as allergens and other unwanted particles like automobile exhaust, tire detritus and construction dust.
But even the best indoor HEPA filtration cannot guarantee protection from airborne respiratory threats in schools. HEPA filters are effective only as part of an integrated approach. Ultimately, masks, distancing and reducing the number of students packed into tight spaces will determine how well students are protected from COVID-19.
There’s a very interesting letter in the MJA, describing a survey undertaken by the Cancer Council Victoria. They asked 2,774 people if they’d favour phasing out cigarette sales. They found support for phasing out sales of cigarettes in retail outlets from:
52.8% of all respondents
31.7% of smokers participating
53.8% of respondents under 30
53.4% of respondents over 50 .
It’s time to limit the sale of cigarettes in Australia – the public is already on board https://t.co/M3Dt1skDaJ
It’s important to note that while more than half the respondents might be receptive to phasing out cigarette sales, this might actually be lower than it was twelve years ago .
In the discussion about the twelve NSW local government “areas of concern” that are under tighter restrictions, I’ve noticed that the number of people affected is never mentioned. So I looked it up and there are more than 2.3 million people living in the twelve LGAs (table below).
About 1 in 10 people in Australia live in a NSW Local Government Areas of Concern, which means they’re under curfew and need permits to leave their LGAs
Penrith suburbs of Caddens, Claremont Meadows, Colyton, Erskine Park, Kemps Creek, Kingswood, Mount Vernon, North St Marys, Orchard Hills, Oxley Park, St Clair, St Marys