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Abstract
“Quality” and “excellence” are omnipresent terms permeating all areas of higher education, particularly in the context of teaching and learning. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified debates about conceptions of quality and excellence, particularly regarding universities’ ability to adapt from face-to-face teaching to virtual provision and to respond to the growing mental health needs of its students. In this chapter, we draw on evidence from three distinct projects undertaken in one university in England, each involving academic staff and students co-researching and collaborating on areas of curriculum, pedagogy and mental health. What links these projects is our participatory approach to rethinking notions of quality and excellence in practitioner education, which empowers students and staff to work collaboratively to improve the quality of teaching and learning experiences.
Abstract
Tanimbar corellas, an important model in comparative cognition research, are endemic to the Tanimbar Islands, Indonesia, but were also introduced to several other locations with a tropical climate. Introduced psittacines offer valuable opportunities to test hypotheses at large temporal and spatial scales, such as geographic distribution of behaviours. Here, we report two opportunistic observations of Tanimbar corellas combining small wooden fragments with two types of tropical fruit (Ketapang and Pong-pong) in Singapore. The observations were recorded and uploaded to YouTube by a local bird-watcher. We analyse the behavioural similarities and differences between object combinations with the Pong-pong fruit in Singapore and extractive tool use on the Wawai fruit in Indonesia. Repeated insertions of the wooden fragment into the fruit and visible ingestion suggest that the combinatory behaviours were most likely related to foraging. This report provides first insights into the presence of advanced technical abilities in geographically separated Tanimbar corellas.