Books on the topic 'Readiness drivers'

The face of the workforce is rapidly changing. Technological advances mean that jobs previously serving as major drivers of the world’s economy are now fully automated. Furthermore, the automatization of many common work activities means that those currently entering the workforce require a different set of skills than those entering the workforce of the 20th century. As such, there is a need to redefine what it means to be “ready to work.” This has led to a major reboot, with new research, applied, and policy questions: How do we define and measure work readiness? How should we prepare students for the workforce? And how can we bridge gaps between college and workforce readiness? A key to reconsidering workforce readiness is placing greater emphasis on measuring and developing noncognitive or “21st century” skills, such as teamwork, creativity, and persistence, and focusing more attention on fostering activities that engage, prepare, and advance students for the future. This volume brings together some of the world’s cutting-edge workforce readiness researchers from the fields of industrial/organizational, educational, and personality psychology to tackle these disparate issues. It concludes with a summary of what has been learned and a set of recommendations for educators, researchers, and policymakers to move the field forward. These recommendations represent a crucial first step to “building better students,” who will truly be ready to work.

Abstract: This chapter summarizes and discusses the planning phase of the community change process that comprised the three Good Neighborhoods phases (planning, readiness, and transformation). The purpose of the planning phase was to engage neighborhood residents and stakeholders in a community-wide planning process that would result in a community goal and action plan that was community-owned and -driven. In this chapter, the authors describe and discuss the process by which engagement of the community, needs assessment, and planning took place. The authors use the Osborn neighborhood as the case, recognizing that, as much as possible, the same process was followed in each of the six neighborhoods.

The search for “noncognitive” skills essential for workforce readiness has largely overlooked one important individual difference domain: interests. This chapter reviews evidence for the relationship between interests and job performance, career success, and academic achievement. It also discusses two mechanisms through which interests can predict a range of educational and work outcomes. First, interests serve as a source of intrinsic motivation that drives the direction, effort, and persistence of human behaviors. Specifically, interests contribute to learning and the acquisition of job knowledge, which are direct determinants of academic and job performance. Second, interests capture the relationship, or the fit, between a person and an environment. The degree of person–environment fit in terms of interests, or interest congruence, predicts academic and work outcomes above and beyond individual interest scores alone. In closing, the chapter discusses the implications of using interest assessments for educational and career guidance and for personnel selection.

This book engages with how affective encounters are shaped and conditioned by interfacial events. Together, the chapters explore the implications of this on a micro-perceptual and macro-relational level through an experimental middling of approaches and examples. While broadly departing from a Spinozist and Deleuzian theoretical foundation, the book weaves together a compelling number of conceptual and empirical trajectories. Always attuned to the implications, modulations and tonalities arising in the readings through art, journalism, bodies, an/archives, data and design, Affects, Interfaces, Events allows for a truly transdisciplinary resonance driven by theory, technology and practice.

This chapter is devoted to the consequences of Nietzsche’s expressivist conception of agency for his conception of the agent (or self). Commentators sometimes suggest that Nietzsche is a sceptic about the existence of the ‘self’ or that he reduces ‘selves’ (and hence agency) to a mere playing out of sub-personal drives. The argument here is that the self or agent implicit in Nietzsche’s expressivism cuts against such readings, and that his expressivism issues in a conception of the self that allows us to make sense of his twin commitments to fatalism on the one hand, and to the possibility of self-creation on the other. Nietzsche’s expressivism also allows us to understand his commitment to the love of fate. ‘My formula for human greatness’, he tells us, ‘is amor fati’—a claim that acquires precision (and perhaps plausibility) as soon as we read him as an expressivist about the self.

Beleaguered countries struggling against aggression or powerful nations defending others from brutal regimes mobilize medicine to wage just war. As states funnel medical resources to maintain unit readiness and conserve military capabilities, numerous ethical challenges foreign to peacetime medicine ensue. Force conservation drives combat hospitals to prioritize warfighter care over all others. Civilians find themselves bereft of medical attention; prison officials force feed hunger-striking detainees; policymakers manage health care to win the hearts and minds of local nationals; and scientists develop neuro-technologies or nanosurgery to create super soldiers. When the fighting ends, intractable moral dilemmas rebound. Postwar justice demands enormous investments of time, resources, and personnel. But losing interest and no longer zealous, war-weary nations forget their duties to rebuild ravaged countries abroad and rehabilitate their war-torn veterans at home. Addressing these incendiary issues, Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict integrates the ethics of medicine and the ethics of war. Medical ethics in times of war is not identical to medical ethics in times of peace but a unique discipline. Without war, there is no military medicine, and without just war, there is no military medical ethics. Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict revises, defends, and rebuts wartime medical practices, just as it lays the moral foundation for casualty care in future conflicts.

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

This introduction begins by tracing the history of adaptation studies as a series of evolutionary phases defined more by their critique of the previous paradigms of fidelity, medium specificity, and intertextuality than by their uncritical embrace of new paradigms. From its beginnings, adaptation studies has been organized around a series of foundational debates: What is an adaptation? What responsibility do adaptations owe the texts they adapt? What role should evaluation play in adaptation studies? Should the field be driven by close readings or general theories? The present volume, born out of the conviction that adaptation studies has thrived because of its anti-canonical approach to the classics of literature, cinema, and critical theory, attempts to foster these debates and provoke new ones, especially those that have the power to cross disciplinary boundaries, rather than attempting any definitive resolutions.

Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith suggests that the life and works of Christina Rossetti offer a commentary on the relationship between Christianity and ecology. It counters readings of her as a withdrawn or apolitical poet by reading her Anglo-Catholic faith in the context of her commitment to the nonhuman. Rossetti considered the doctrines and ideas associated with the Catholic Revival to be revelatory of an ecology of creation in which all things, material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, divine and embodied, are interconnected. The book focuses on her close attention to the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Francis of Assisi to show how her poetry, prose, and letters refused the nineteenth-century commodification of creation and declared it as a new and shared reality kept in eternal flux by the nondual love of the Trinity. In chapters on her early involvement in the Oxford Movement, her relationship to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Franciscan commitment to the diversity of plant and animal life through her anti-vivisection activism, and green reading of the apocalypse as transformative rather than destructive, the book traces an ecological love command in her writing, one she considered it a Christian duty to fulfil. It illuminates Rossetti’s at once sensitive and keenly ethical readings of the place of flora and fauna, stars and planets, humans and angels in creation, and is also the first study of its kind to argue for the centrality of spiritual materialism in her work, one driven by a prevenient and green grace.

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld that is driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

Evidence-based, prevention-oriented, and community-driven approaches are advocated to improve public health and reduce youth behavior problems, but there are few effective models for doing so. This book advances knowledge about this topic by describing the conditions and actions necessary for effective community-based prevention. The chapters review the ways in which communities can promote readiness to engage in prevention among local stakeholders; build and maintain diverse, well-functioning prevention coalitions; conduct local needs and resource assessments; collectively decide on prevention priorities; select evidence-based interventions that are a good fit with prioritized community needs, resources, and context; and implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs) with fidelity and sustain them over time. The Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system is described in detail to illustrate effective community-based prevention. CTC is a coalition-based prevention system shown to promote healthy youth development and reduce youth behavior problems community wide. It does so by assisting communities to: (1) increase awareness of and support for EBIs; (2) encourage positive interactions between community residents and youth; (3) conduct local needs assessments and collectively decide on priorities to target with EBIs; (4) implement EBIs that are matched to prioritized needs; and (5) ensure that EBIs are coordinated across community organizations, implemented with fidelity, widely disseminated, and evaluated. The book describes the development and evaluation of the CTC system, including how its developers used community-based participatory research to ensure that CTC could be feasibly implemented and employed rigorous research methods to assess the degree to which use of the system reduced adolescent behavior problems.

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

Recognized as one of the most influential studies of memory in the late twentieth century for its elaboration of a ground-breaking paradigm for rethinking the relationship between the nation, territory, history and memory, Pierre Nora’s monumental project Les Lieux de mémoire has also been criticized for implying a narrow perception of national memory from which the legacy of colonialism was excluded. Driven by an increasingly critical postcolonial discourse on French historiography and fuelled by the will to acknowledge the relevance of the colonial in the making of modern and contemporary France, the present volume intends to address in a collective and sustained manner this critical gap by postcolonializing the French Republic’s lieux de mémoire. The various essays discern and explore an initial repertoire of realms and sites in France and the so-called Outremer that crystalize traces of colonial memory, while highlighting its inherent dialectical relationship with the firmly instituted national memory. By making visible the invisible thread that links the colonial to various manifestations of French heritage, the objective is to bring to the fore the need to anchor the colonial in a collective memory that has often silenced it, and foster new readings of the past as it is represented, remembered and inscribed in the nation’s collective imaginary.

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers. As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends. Beyond this, it is a theoretical work that follows the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author’s life and an œuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot’s is a life that has become the œuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly, even if they are what drives it. Blanchot’s œuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.

The teaching of international organization (IO) poses unique challenges. One is deciding whether to take a broad global governance-IO approach dealing with the creation, revision, and enforcement of rules that mark different governance arrangements, the roles of formal, informal, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental IOs, and the politics, dynamics, and processes of problem-solving and governance in various issue areas, a theory-driven approach, or an IOs approach focusing primarily on select formal intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and possibly nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), emphasizing structures, charters, mandates, and functions. Either choice could lead one to utilize recent literature on IGOs (and to a lesser extent NGOs) as organizations and bureaucracies, examining their design, functions, and performance or behavior. Another is the extent to which various international relations as well as IO-related theories such as theories of cooperation, regime and institution formation and evolution, functionalism, constructivism, and others are integrated into an IO course. To what extent are students introduced to currents of critical theory such as postmodernism, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism in relationship to IOs? There is also the question of which IGOs—global and/or regional—to include given the range of possibilities. How all the abovementioned issues are addressed will strongly influence choices with regard to textbooks, other readings, and various types of electronically available materials.

The late Justice Scalia relished pointing to departures from text as departures from the Constitution, but in fact his jurisprudence relied on unwritten ideas. As textualism has become more prominent with the elevation of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett to the Supreme Court—jurists in the mold of Scalia—it is crucial to reveal the unwritten ideas that drive textualist readings of the Constitution. Our deepest debates about America’s written Constitution are not about constitutional text but about the unwritten ideas and understandings that guide our reading of text. This fact is obscured by the public understanding of textualism and originalism as put forward by its most prominent judicial advocates. The (Un)Written Constitution makes these ideas visible by turning to the practices of Supreme Court justices and political actors in interpreting the Constitution over more than two centuries. From founding debates about freedom of speech and religion to contemporary arguments about judicial review, the separation of powers, same-sex marriage, and partisan gerrymandering, this work highlights the too-often unacknowledged ideas that animate our debates about the written Constitution. Contrary to textual jurists, these recurrent debates are not about whether to follow the text; they are disputes about what fidelity to the text requires. How do we weigh and balance different textual provisions and see them as part of a constitutional whole? The text does not answer such questions. This book illustrates that moving beyond the text is an inescapable feature of interpreting America’s written Constitution.

These Guidelines are one of the results of the four-year research project “Open Online Learning for Digital and Networked Society” (2017-2021). The project objective was to enable university teachers to design open and online learning through open and online learning curriculum and environment applying learning analytics as a metacognitive tool and creating open and online learning assessment and recognition practices, responding to the needs of digital and networked society. The research of the project resulted in 10 scientific publications and 2 studies prepared by Vytautas Magnus university Institute of Innovative Studies research team in collaboration with their international research partners from Germany, Spain and Portugal. The final stage of the research attempted creating open and online learning assessment and recognition practices, responding to the learner needs in contemporary digital and networked society. The need for open learning recognition has been increasing during the recent decade while the developments of open learning related to the Covid 19 pandemics have dramatically increased the need for systematic and high-quality assessment and recognition of learning acquired online. The given time also relates to the increased need to offer micro-credentials to learners, as well as a rising need for universities to prepare for micro-credentialization and issue new digital credentials to learners who are regular students, as well as adult learners joining for single courses. The increased need of all labour - market participants for frequent and fast renewal of competences requires a well working and easy to use system of open learning assessment and recognition. For learners, it is critical that the micro-credentials are well linked to national and European qualification frameworks, as well as European digital credential infrastructures (e.g., Europass and similar). For employers, it is important to receive requested quality information that is encrypted in the metadata of the credential. While for universities, there is the need to properly prepare institutional digital infrastructure, organizational procedures, descriptions of open learning opportunities and virtual learning environments to share, import and export the meta-data easily and seamlessly through European Digital Hub service infrastructures, as well as ensure that academic and administrative staff has digital competencies to design, issue and recognise open learning through digital and micro-credentials. The first chapter of the Guidelines provides a background view of the European Qualification Framework and National Qualification frameworks for the further system of gaining, stacking and modelling further qualifications through open online learning. The second chapter suggests the review of current European policy papers and consultations on the establishment of micro-credentials in European higher education. The findings of the report of micro-credentials higher education consultation group “European Approach to Micro-credentials” is shortly introduced, as well as important policy discussions taking place. Responding to the Rome Bologna Comunique 2020, where the ministers responsible for higher education agreed to support lifelong learning through issuing micro-credentials, a joint endeavour of DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and DG Research and Innovation resulted in one of the most important political documents highlighting the potential of micro-credentials towards economic, social and education innovations. The consultation group of experts from the Member States defined the approach to micro-credentials to facilitate their validation, recognition and portability, as well as to foster a larger uptake to support individual learning in any subject area and at any stage of life or career. The Consultation Group also suggested further urgent topics to be discussed, including the storage, data exchange, portability, and data standards of micro-credentials and proposed EU Standard of constitutive elements of micro-credentials. The third chapter is devoted to the institutional readiness to issue and to recognize digital and micro-credentials. Universities need strategic decisions and procedures ready to be enacted for assessment of open learning and issuing micro-credentials. The administrative and academic staff needs to be aware and confident to follow these procedures while keeping the quality assurance procedures in place, as well. The process needs to include increasing teacher awareness in the processes of open learning assessment and the role of micro-credentials for the competitiveness of lifelong learners in general. When the strategic documents and procedures to assess open learning are in place and the staff is ready and well aware of the processes, the description of the courses and the virtual learning environment needs to be prepared to provide the necessary metadata for the assessment of open learning and issuing of micro-credentials. Different innovation-driven projects offer solutions: OEPass developed a pilot Learning Passport, based on European Diploma Supplement, MicroHE developed a portal Credentify for displaying, verifying and sharing micro-credential data. Credentify platform is using Blockchain technology and is developed to comply with European Qualifications Framework. Institutions, willing to join Credentify platform, should make strategic discussions to apply micro-credential metadata standards. The ECCOE project building on outcomes of OEPass and MicroHE offers an all-encompassing set of quality descriptors for credentials and the descriptions of learning opportunities in higher education. The third chapter also describes the requirements for university structures to interact with the Europass digital credentials infrastructure. In 2020, European Commission launched a new Europass platform with Digital Credential Infrastructure in place. Higher education institutions issuing micro-credentials linked to Europass digital credentials infrastructure may offer added value for the learners and can increase reliability and fraud-resistant information for the employers. However, before using Europass Digital Credentials, universities should fulfil the necessary preconditions that include obtaining a qualified electronic seal, installing additional software and preparing the necessary data templates. Moreover, the virtual learning environment needs to be prepared to export learning outcomes to a digital credential, maintaining and securing learner authentication. Open learning opportunity descriptions also need to be adjusted to transfer and match information for the credential meta-data. The Fourth chapter illustrates how digital badges as a type of micro-credentials in open online learning assessment may be used in higher education to create added value for the learners and employers. An adequately provided metadata allows using digital badges as a valuable tool for recognition in all learning settings, including formal, non-formal and informal.