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In this collaborative autoethnographic study, four faculty members in a US-based Doctor of Education (EdD) program reflected individually and collectively in the authors’ community of practice through reflective journaling, self-reflection and discussion sessions to analyze the individual stories critically. This study aims to examine the influence of the authors’ involvement with an EdD program on the academic approaches to teaching, research and mentoring EdD students.

Professional practice doctorates have emerged in response to the growing need for practitioners to use evidence for continuous improvement. Although the literature has highlighted faculty members as change agents redefining the EdD as a professional practice doctorate, minimal research has explored how their involvement in such design work may affect their academic practices.

The authors perceived the involvement with the EdD program as transforming the faculty practices in five ways (i.e. shifting the epistemologies, embracing practice-based pedagogies, engaging in practice-based research, mentoring scholarly practitioners and intentional community building) and creating a shared vision of preparing scholarly practitioners.

The authors draw implications for redesigning EdD programs through participation in a faculty community of practice, prompting faculty to shift their practices to better support scholarly practitioners and affecting their identity as teachers, mentors and program developers.

Pilot‐scale surface‐flow, subsurface‐flow and floating aquatic plant constructed wetland system designs were installed and evaluated to determine the effectiveness of constructed wetlands to immobilize and remove metals such as cadmium, zinc, copper, chromium, lead and nickel in tertiary effluent wastewater in a Midwestern US climate (central Illinois). Following wetland treatment, average concentrations of copper decreased from 56.6μg/l in influent to 7.9μg/l (86.0 per cent reduction) in the FAP system, 9.2μg/l (83.7 per cent reduction) in the SSF system and 11.0μg/l (80.6 per cent reduction) in the SF system, respectively. Results of ANOVA indicated that differences in concentration reduction of copper among the three wetlands were not statistically significant. The average concentration of chromium decreased from 1.31μg/l in influent to 0.4μg/l (69.5 per cent reduction) in all system designs. Copper concentrations were reduced consistently with increasing wetland retention time, with most of concentration reduction having occurred in the first wetland cell for all system designs.

There is an increasing requirement for inspection of electronic components, assemblies and interconnections, and to meet this demand there are new developments in inspection techniques. None of the techniques is universally applicable, but many are capable of consistent and reliable results. This paper outlines the major techniques which are available and summarises their capabilities. The limitations on types of component and boards which may be examined are listed, and the difficulties of detecting some flaws with some techniques are highlighted and the reasons considered.

In this chapter, we draw on health lifestyle, human capital, and health commodity theories to examine the effects of educational attainment on a wide range of individual dietary behaviors and dietary lifestyles.

Using data from the 2005-2006 iteration of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 2,135), we employ negative binomial regression and binary logistic regression to model three dietary lifestyle indices and thirteen healthy dietary behaviors.

We find that having a college degree or higher is associated with seven of the thirteen healthy dietary behaviors, including greater attention to nutrition information (general nutrition, serving size, calories, and total fat) and consumption of vegetables, protein, and dairy products. For the most part, education is unrelated to the inspection of cholesterol and sodium information and consumption of fruits/grains/sweets, and daily caloric intake. We observe that having a college degree is associated with healthier dietary lifestyles, the contemporaneous practice of multiple healthy dietary behaviors (label checking and eating behaviors). Remarkably, household income and the poverty-to-income ratio are unrelated to dietary lifestyles and have virtually no impact on the magnitude of the association between education and dietary lifestyles.

Our findings are consistent with predictions derived from health lifestyle and human capital theories. We find no support for health commodity theory, the idea that people who are advantaged in terms of education live healthier lifestyles because they tend to have the financial resources to purchase the elements of a healthy lifestyle.

COVID-19 has had remarkable impacts in rural America. Although the onset of the pandemic was in urban areas, it quickly spread to rural areas and ultimately resulted in higher mortality rates for rural populations. Due to this and other associated impacts, the pandemic has resulted in mental health issues across rural America. In this chapter, the authors first describe the state of rural America pre-pandemic, then detail the overall and mental health impacts of the pandemic on rural people. Following this, the authors report results of a case study on COVID-19 in the rural America West and conclude with recommended steps for addressing the unfolding crisis. Many of the steps the authors can take to improve rural mental health following the pandemic have long-been necessary. However, given the impacts of COVID-19, they are now needed more than ever.

Faith-based nonprofit organizations often do not track the transformational outcomes of programs because these outcomes are considered intangible and difficult to quantify. Bible League International’s (BLI) Board of Directors commissioned the development of an instrument to assess the transformative impact of BLI’s programs. This was accomplished in collaboration with the Metadigm Group. From field interviews and from relevant literature, three measurement domains emerged: Program Participant Outcomes, Worker Capacity and Affiliation, and Program Function. In pilot tests, qualitative methods were used to refine the instrument. Due to time and budgetary restraints, the project ended prior to conducting reliability studies. This case study presents factors driving faithbased nonprofits to measure transformational outcomes, exposes some of the methodological challenges in accessing transformational outcomes, and provides an approach to developing an instrument to quantify transformational outcomes

This chapter reviews the ongoing processes of marketisation in secondary school teaching and its further embedment through commodification of teachers’ performance. We track developments through documentary evidence from Government statements and other agency reports and unstructured interviews with teachers’ union representatives in the South West of England. Following Carter and Stevenson (2012) we begin by introducing the labour process debate concerning teachers’ productive labour to provide the backdrop for the argument that teachers’ work is increasingly commodified and judged along neoliberalised requirements. Commodification has taken place through measurement of abstract standards constructed by associating individual teachers with their pupils’ achievements, as well as subjective assessment of teacher behaviour judged against newly introduced ‘Teacher Standards’. We argue that this attempted quantification of teacher output is constructed, in Marxist terms, to accommodate to the ‘socially necessary labour time’ and to indirectly maximise work ‘output’ for individual teachers through a process of standardisation of processes involved in task completion. We attempt to define new ways of measuring teachers’ work through the lens of abstract labour and link such processes to workplace alienation. In such fashion, teachers are subject to work intensification, increased monitoring and surveillance, further standardisation of work and weakening of creative autonomy leading to intensified alienation from the professional nature of the job.

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is one of the most commonly performed general surgical operations and is associated with several potentially serious post‐operative complications. Informed consent is vital to avoid patient misunderstanding of risk and subsequent costly litigation. Consent practice at the authors' hospital was audited with the aim of investigating the quality of consent and assessing the impact of the introduction of a detailed patient information leaflet.

In total, the consent forms of 200 patients were examined; 100 patient consent forms were selected before and 100 after the introduction of a pre‐operative patient information leaflet, and retrospectively analysed.

Consultant staff obtained only 27 per cent of consent; 64 per cent of consent was taken on the morning of surgery. The most common risks mentioned were bleeding, infection, thrombo‐embolic risks and conversion to open. Other complications were mentioned inconsistently, with only 2 per cent of patients having documented evidence of receiving the information leaflet.

The authors demonstrate that consent for laparoscopic cholecystectomy remains inconsistent. The introduction of an information leaflet did not improve the documentation of risk required for informed consent.

The problem of providing a reliable and cost‐effective interconnection system between semiconductor devices and other add‐on components and the film circuit has been central to the development of hybrid microelectronic technology since its inception. Many of the techniques used have been adopted from those developed primarily for the semiconductor industry, and not all of these have been entirely suited to hybrid microcircuit production. Thermocompression bonding using gold wire, for example, while acceptable as a process for lead attachment to discrete transistors or semiconductor integrated circuits, in which the duration of exposure to raised temperature is quite short, may be the cause of early or delayed failure when applied to the assembly of a hybrid of any complexity, when the time at temperature is necessarily much longer.

Bryan Pledger, Chairman of the IMF Printed Circuit Group, chaired this meeting, held in London on 26 September, and introduced the panel of speakers, well‐known nationally and internationally, and specialists in the field of surface mounting.