Helen Fogg - Director of Higher Education

Welcome to the Scholarship Review 2021

Helen Fogg

Director of Higher Education

Welcome to the 2021 edition of the Scholarship Review. This publication is one of the mechanisms through which staff at Blackpool and The Fylde College (B&FC) are able to disseminate their research and scholarship outcomes and to share these with the cohesive, self-critical academic community.

The review opens with Françoise Peill’s paper entitled “The pursuit of happiness: an early year’s explorative study into the challenges of recognising and supporting child health and wellbeing”. It addresses rising concerns surrounding child mental health and wellbeing and examines the appropriateness and timeliness of interventions in early year’s environments within socio-economically deprived communities.

Richard Dunston’s paper ‘Questioning the efficacy of online Continuous Professional Development (CPD); practitioner reflections through experiential and theoretical lenses’ explores the need for CPD while questioning its nature. The work draws upon studies which consider distance learning and the human psychological reasoning as to its success or failings, alongside considering transactional distance theory and its application in face-to-face, online and distance learning methodologies.

Colette Mazzola-Randles’ paper highlights the views of participants from a variety of university settings in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The findings were gathered from semi structure interviews exploring the emotional connections and sense of belonging to teaching and learning online. The key findings evidence that not all staff used visible interactions (via web cameras) to develop emotional connections online and the asynchronous environment appeared to support students becoming more confident and express themselves.

Graham Mason and Mark Belfield’s paper offers an interesting view on the impact of diet and nutrition on mental wellbeing of students at Blackpool and the Fylde College. The paper documents their project which aimed to evaluate the current level of wellbeing of students and their current dietary intake, to determine if there is a direct correlation between nutrition and mental wellbeing.

David Hayes piece ‘Reflections on the need to develop a multi-heritage critical citizenship education’ offers insight and perspective on the historical context of policies surrounding British Values. Looking at the impact of both New Labour and Conservative discourses around British citizenship, and questioning the pedagogic rationale of embedding this version of British Values into curriculum delivery. The writing offers the potential for a multi-heritage education model that engages with more complex and ‘lived experience’ of local and regional communities.

The review continues with Ashley Lister’s piece ‘Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?’ A brief investigation into the application of genre. The aim of his paper is to demonstrate that such genre labels are descriptive rather than prescriptive and to illustrate that the purpose of genre classification is often more important than the limits imposed by an arbitrary label.

Alex Barlow’s paper, ‘Safety Culture and Cadets: assessing cadet values relating to safety and the impact of teaching and learning strategies on those attitudes’ examines the potential shift in the attitudes of merchant navy cadets towards safety culture as of result of engaging in taught health and safety sessions. Drawing on industry standard guidelines and current literature the research implements a mixed method research design combining both quantitative evaluation and qualitative social research. The findings offer some thoughtprovoking insight into the impact teaching health and safety within a maritime setting.

Fraser Hatfield introduces a novel open-source software package, called ‘Open Broadcast Software’, OBS, in his paper titled, ‘The application of innovative technology in online teaching’. The software is a video recording and live streaming suite that allows him to combine his webcam video with all of his interactive resources into one output display, and then shares his screen with the students in Teams. Using this technology, Fraser has been able to demonstrate the relevance of physics and maths to Marine Engineering, generate interest and enthusiasm, engage students in their learning, improve understanding and knowledge retention, improve assessment grades and improve students’ satisfaction.

Alan Harding’s paper ‘What the…! System Failures’ discusses concepts around system failures relevant to systems engineering. An accident that occurred in aerospace is briefly broken down in this short paper. This is then used as a template for student analysis of maritime accidents such as the Costa Concordia.

Lucky Ishaku’s paper is on the Development of a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System Hotplate-based, Photoacoustic Carbon Dioxide Sensor. In this collaborative study with colleagues, it is outlined how the system developed offers the advantages of low-cost, small-size and low power consumption devices, which can be easily mass produced, and which are capable of sensing and monitoring Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere and in industrial settings.

Our final piece “The Most Important Cog in the Machine: Business Analysis and 5S Implementation in an Engineering Company” written by Margarita Georgieva, Andrew Heaton, Abdelrahman Abdelazim and Matthew Worthington, focusses on the 5S process, incorporating a real working example of how this method can positively affect a business in terms of managing change and continuous improvement. The paper outlines the benefits that 5S implementation can bring to a manufacturing business on every-day work with a holistic approach that intends to bring order both in the material environment and in the ethical values that support it.

We hope you engage with and enjoy this 2021 edition and that it motivates you to consider writing for the Scholarship Review in the future.