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Although special education was built upon the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the discrimination that many racialized students receiving special education services experience cannot be denied. Many culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students receiving special education services encounter labels that perpetuate racism and ableism and lead to inequitable access to services and resources necessary for more positive postsecondary outcomes. By honoring intersectionality and dismantling the singular identity, educators can become change agents and shift the historic oppressive narrative to create a system of empowerment as these individuals transition from transitional kindergarten to age 21 special education programs (TK-21) schools into adulthood.

Many pregnant and post-natal women do not meet physical activity (PA) guidelines. One barrier to PA for these women is finding suitable sports bras because of the numerous changes the breasts undergo. This study aims to assess current maternity/nursing sports bras in terms of purchasing activity, likes and limitations of products and determine the essential characteristics and features required for future product developments.

A mixed-methods deductive sequential approach was taken using an online questionnaire and in-person focus group interviews. A total of 308 participants who were pregnant, had given birth within the last 12 months or were nursing at the time of data collection completed the questionnaire, and 13 participants also took part in focus group interviews.

Only 15% of maternity/nursing sports bra purchasers found exactly what they wanted with most problems relating to support, design and fit. Support and comfort were the most important characteristics with 94% and 98% of participants rating them as very important or absolutely essential. Easy nursing access, adjustability, product longevity and value and availability, in terms of where products can be purchased and sizing range, must also be considered for future products to meet user groups’ needs and reduce barriers to PA.

This study investigates the requirements and preferences of maternity/nursing sports bras for both pregnant and post-natal women, including an assessment of a range of commercially available products. These findings provide important implications for future product developments.

At the centre of Chapter 2 is higher education that places greater emphasis on lifelong learning journeys and equitable access to quality education at all stages of an individual's life and career. This chapter articulates the relevance of learning outcomes for both the world of work and for citizenship in a global and interconnected world. One way to operationalize this dual emphasis is through micro-credentials, which offer a flexible and modular way to learn new skills and knowledge. The chapter notes current challenges with implementing micro-credentials in a robust and quality assured manner, and suggests ways to overcome these.

Mentoring is a valuable support system for academics wishing to implement micro-credentials and contribute to the achievement of all sustainable development goals. Mentors can help nurture initial ideas, guide the design and delivery of micro-credentials and ensure that they are aligned with the needs of students and university external stakeholders. The dialogue included in this chapter illustrates a specific scenario at undergraduate level. There is, however, recognition that a broader range of contexts for micro-credentials exists, where mentoring can provide equally valuable support towards achieving desired goals.

With specific reference to mentoring, the chapter discusses ways in which mentoring relationships can develop and be maintained over time. It considers the impact that the setting in which mentoring meetings take place can have on the quality of the learning experience. Equally importantly, discussion touches on digital dimensions of mentoring – the metaverse as a setting and artificial intelligence complementing a real mentor or coach.

Sherwood Forest is a mosaic of heritage, habitats and stakeholder relations. Scheme Manager, Steve Little, and Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies, Charlie Gregson, share their story of developing a working methodology in this complex landscape. By evaluating their relationship through the lenses of knowledge brokering and collaborative mentoring, they identify six themes relating to how their working environment evolved and functioned. Discussion finds significant overlap between collaborative mentoring, KE and the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals in their ability to enable more nuanced and holistic changemaking that is contextualized in a deep understanding of need.

Knowledge brokering, a process by which an individual (or an organization) supports the transfer of research evidence into policy and practice, can improve evidence-based decision-making through knowledge exchange (KE) but is, on the whole, poorly defined in academia (Cvitanovic et al., 2017). This chapter seeks to contribute to the ‘necessary and urgent’ need for evaluation of KE in practice (Rycroft-Smith, 2022) by providing edited snippets of dialogue, analysis and key learning points. It is intended as inspiration and encouragement for academics, professionals, students and volunteers developing human-centric projects or design-thinking methodologies between universities and external partners.

The purpose of this paper is to present an automatic approach for mesh sizing field generation of complicated  computer-aided design (CAD) models.

In this paper, the authors present an automatic approach for mesh sizing field generation. First, a source point extraction algorithm is applied to capture curvature and proximity features of CAD models. Second, according to the distribution of feature source points, an octree background mesh is constructed for storing element size value. Third, mesh size value on each node of background mesh is calculated by interpolating the local feature size of the nearby source points, and then, an initial mesh sizing field is obtained. Finally, a theoretically guaranteed smoothing algorithm is developed to restrict the gradient of the mesh sizing field.

To achieve high performance, the proposed approach has been implemented in multithreaded parallel using OpenMP. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach is remarkably efficient to construct reasonable mesh sizing field for complicated CAD models and applicable for generating geometrically adaptive triangle/tetrahedral meshes. Moreover, since the mesh sizing field is defined on an octree background mesh, high-efficiency query of local size value could be achieved in the following mesh generation procedure.

How to determine a reasonable mesh size for complicated CAD models is often a bottleneck of mesh generation. For the complicated models with thousands or even ten thousands of geometric entities, it is time-consuming to construct an appropriate mesh sizing field for generating high-quality mesh. A parallel algorithm of mesh sizing field generation with low computational complexity is presented in this paper, and its usability and efficiency have been verified.