Professional competences have been widely studied in workplace and professional learning. However, intercultural competence has received less attention generally and as a part professional competence, including in terms of its definition, manifestations, and practical applicability. This study examines how police students describe intercultural competence and how it is manifested in practical policing actions through their stories. Data comprising 84 stories were collected from police students in Finland using the method of empathy-based stories (MEBS), with participants composing short imaginary stories based on frame stories designed by the researcher. Students were asked to visualize a situation in which they responded to a domestic disturbance call involving an immigrant family and then asked why the police response succeeded or failed. The stories were analysed using thematic analysis, and vignettes were produced to demonstrate variations between successful and failed domestic disturbance tasks from the perspective of the actualization of intercultural competence. The findings illustrate how intercultural competence in action is shaped by the interplay between professional, methodical, social, and personal competences.
Designing good reflection questions is pedagogically important but time-consuming and unevenly supported across teachers. This paper introduces a reflection-in-reflection framework for automated generation of reflection questions with large language models (LLMs). Our approach coordinates two role-specialized agents, a Student-Teacher and a Teacher-Educator, that engage in a Socratic multi-turn dialogue to iteratively refine a single question given a teacher-specified topic, key concepts, student level, and optional instructional materials. The Student-Teacher proposes candidate questions with brief rationales, while the Teacher-Educator evaluates them along clarity, depth, relevance, engagement, and conceptual interconnections, responding only with targeted coaching questions or a fixed signal to stop the dialogue. We evaluate the framework in an authentic lower-secondary ICT setting on the topic, using GPT-4o-mini as the backbone model and a stronger GPT- 4-class LLM as an external evaluator in pairwise comparisons of clarity, relevance, depth, and overall quality. First, we study how interaction design and context (dynamic vs.fixed iteration counts; presence or absence of student level and materials) affect question quality. Dynamic stopping combined with contextual information consistently outperforms fixed 5- or 10-step refinement, with very long dialogues prone to drift or over-complication. Second, we show that our two-agent protocol produces questions that are judged substantially more relevant and deeper, and better overall, than a one-shot baseline using the same backbone model.
Literature emphasizes the importance of cultivating an agile mindset to foster agility. This study advances this understanding by demonstrating the value of organizational leaders’ agile mindsets in driving organizational agility and by revealing a paradox of agile-mindset leadership. A mixed-methods approach was used to formulate and validate the proposed theory. Qualitative data were collected from 85 interviews (41 in Poland and 44 in Finland), and the quantitative stage employed structural equation modeling to analyze 400 questionnaire responses from Polish (200) and Finnish (200) knowledge workers. The findings indicate that organizations cannot achieve true agility without agile-mindset leaders. However, collaboration between employees with agile and non-agile mindsets may be challenging, as these groups often struggle to work together without friction. Agile-mindset leaders may also unintentionally create stress for non-agile employees. This fact clearly reveals a dilemma faced by many organizations: balancing continuous change for smooth adaptability and organizational development driven by the minority with agile mindsets and the stability preferred by the non-agile majority. Both must occur simultaneously, creating a structural paradox. To strengthen agility, organizations should reassess their structures and leadership practices; select leaders who possess an agile, ambidextrous mindset; and empower employees who are ready to adopt agile thinking (being agile) and agile working practices (doing agile). Ensuring psychological safety is essential for the majority to perform effectively. Fostering collaboration between agile and non-agile team members is a key challenge. This study also presents the agile organization as an efficient, comprehensive, and adaptive system that integrates people, processes, technology, culture, and resources, offering a new perspective for building agile organizations.
Successful valorization of brewing by-products for food applications depends on the utilization of innovative technologies, integration of consumer insights during formulation development, and the implementation of effective market strategies.
ABSTRACT Emerging evidence suggests that reduced exposure to biodiversity, including rich environmental microbiota, is associated with negative outcomes in the health and well-being of children. Biodiversity loss not only impacts individual health but also poses significant threats to planetary health. It destabilizes systems that regulate climate, purify air and water, maintain soil fertility, and support plant and microbial life essential for environmental health. Here, we review the scientific evidence on microbiome-supportive strategies in eco-centric, child-friendly playground environments. Investigating how environmental features influence soil microbiomes and exposure pathways could provide insights into how playgrounds function as living interfaces. These are places where environmental microbes shape children’s microbial colonization patterns, immune and endocrine regulatory systems, while also contributing to ecosystem services such as biodiversity support and pollutant mitigation—particularly relevant given that many pollutants are known to disrupt immune and endocrine functions in children. These dynamics have far-reaching implications for child well-being, preventive health strategies, physical activity, environmental literacy, and broader sustainability. A multi-omic systems approach offers a critical pathway to uncover the ecological and health-related impacts of nature-associated microbial exposure and characterize host–microbiome interactions underlying immune and endocrine regulation, brain development, cognition, and stress-related disorders. Our review highlights a lack of such integrative studies, underscoring the need to advance this line of research to inform evidence-based, sustainable, and health-promoting urban design.
