Suicide is a global health concern, though little is known about the social practices that might support those who are contemplating suicide. Online forums provide a unique insight into the anonymous discussion of suicide, including sociocultural norms about suicide and the delicate management of online interaction. In this article, we examine the provision and acknowledgment of support in an online discussion forum about suicide, using discursive psychology to analyze the textual interaction. The analysis illustrates how forum threads function as case studies and enable members to gain support on numerous occasions. In this way, members can gain help at crisis points as and when these occur, while still maintaining authenticity as a valid forum member. The analysis also provides additional evidence for models of suicide which highlight the fluid nature of suicidality and contributes to the preventative work on suicide by demonstrating how support can be provided at crisis points.
Vocational disciplines such as engineering provide an ideal opportunity for contextualising the curriculum. The provision of co-curricular activities can stimulate students to assimilate their prior knowledge and skills whilst enhancing employability attributes. Team-based cocurricular activities linked to problem-based learning (PBL) can offer students a quasiauthentic experience of engineering practice. In this paper, we provide a case study of a successful co-curricular initiative supported by local civil engineering employers. Civil Engineering 4 Real (CE4R) are evening workshops facilitated by practicing engineers, where student attendance is voluntary. Students use authentic documentation and collaborate in peer learning to solve industrial problems. CE4R has assisted student's anticipatory socialisation into their disciplinary profession. However, further research is required to establish the cognitive legacy that students gain from attending CE4R. There is also a need to explore the industrial experience within the UK higher education landscape (Tennant et al, 2015; Foster et al, 2017;Pilcher et al, 2017) and anecdotal evidence suggests that this can compromise the authenticity of the learning and assessment regime within an engineering curriculum.Academic role models tend to display research identities rather than the industrial disciplinary identities that would assist students to learn through mirroring "real-life situations and require the practising of the ways of thinking and problem solving employed by actual experts in relevant fields" (Kreber, 2013, p.19).In light of these issues, the current paper is organised as follows. In the next section, we examine the call for HE to recognise the value of co-curricular/extra-curricular learning and the concept of hybrid problem-based learning (PBL). This is followed by an introduction to the Civil Engineering 4 Real (CE4R) initiative; a co-curricular series of evening workshops designed to combine prior curricular knowledge with real-life engineering problems and scenarios. The next section provides a justification for our research methodology whereupon we draw insights from selected student feedback. The following section provides a discussion of four key findings from our analysis (relevant learning; links (and gaps) identified between CE4R sessions and curriculum; importance/appreciation of problems being 'real'; value of team work) before we offer our overall conclusions to the research. Co-curricular learning: a hybrid problem/project-based approachThere has been a growth in the number of references made to what students do outside the formal curriculum. Whilst some researchers (Wankel & Wankel, 2016) view co-curricular and extra-curricular as having interchangeable meaning, when we refer to 'co-curricular' we mean extensions of the disciplinary learning experience whereby students are able to assimilate knowledge and skills related to their professional practice within an academic programme.'Extra-curricular' refers to activities that may be coordi...
This project is funded by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Award (EPSRC Reference 1827113). The authors would like to thank the manuscript reviewers for their attention to detail and for such supportive comments throughout the publication process.
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