Intentionality and Expertise: Learning from Observations of Children at Play in Multilingual, Multicultural Contexts

This article draws from three ethnographic studies of children playing sociodramatically in multilingual, multicultural contexts. Countering a deficit perspective that focuses on what children from nondominant cultures do not know, we use the concept of syncretism to illuminate children's expertise and intentionality as they blend knowledge from multiple worlds to reinvent cultural practices and create new spaces for learning. Findings encourage educators to learn from the syncretic nature of children's teaching and learning through play.     

Exploring continuity equation via a modeling activity: in the context of crowd science

Abstract

Using problems from real life contexts which is related to learners’ environment or their culture plays an important role in their learning that concept. In this regard, science educators especially physics educators search for real-life domain of theoretical concepts for effective science teaching and they consider analogical and physical models as an opportunity in their instruction. In the presented activity, we worked with 66 senior pre-service science teachers from our science teaching methods course. We used crowd movements as a real-life domain of our analogical models to scientifically explain a stampede case, then utilized physical model to explore continuity equation. Real life problem based scenarios could be used while taking advantage of the 3?D modeling in teaching of scientific principle. As a result, we found that pre-service teachers were able to make scientific explanation for causes of stampedes by using modeling activity. High school teachers and upper-level instructors could benefit from including the modeling activity introduced in this study to help their students understand the concepts related to continuity equation by designing a physical model based on an analogical model. Via the physical model, students are able to make predictions, observations, interpretations and explanations of a complex and abstract scientific phenomenon.     

For what purpose the arts? An analysis of the mission statements of urban arts high schools in Canada and the United States

While general arts programs have declined in many schools across the United States and Canada, the number of specialized art programs in public secondary schools has swelled since the 1980s. While this increase is often celebrated by arts educators, questions about the justification of specialized arts programs are rarely raised, and their value is often taken for granted. In this article, we examine the mission statements of eighty-four specialized arts programs across two countries to examine the ideas, values, and commitments that are expressed in these public statements. In addition to a close thematic analysis, we describe how these mission statements reflect different conceptions of the role of the arts in education and consider the ways in which arguments that seek to broaden access to the arts are combined with the goal of serving a narrow subset of the student population. We argue that analyzing mission statements provides a clearer picture of the ideas that shape these programs, and that in order to foster an informed public conversation about the purpose and value of an education in the arts, educators committed to the arts must engage in this serious discussion.     

The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide

The inspiration I take from J. M. Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello (2003) is his advocacy of imagining as an alternative to rational thought. Imagining, as I understand him, is mindwork that engages the body as an experiential and metaphorical site. I apply this notion of imagining to suicides conducted in the service of political protest: The fatal hunger strike of ten prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1981 and Jan Palach's self-immolation in Prague in 1969. Three questions direct the exploration of their trajectories: What feeds the hope for the effectiveness of protest suicides? How do they use the body as a performance site? Do such suicides call for an ethics of attentiveness?     

Introduction: Culture Without Cultures—The Culture Effect

Anthropology has often been handmaiden to administrative and political activity that requires bounded social groups mapped onto territories and possessing defining characteristics such as language, values and behaviours. This introductory essay sets the scene for the papers in this Issue which show that actual sets of social relations in their particular places cannot easily be made to conform with this hermetic construct. Acknowledging this, post‐colonial theory has been driven to theorise borderlands, hybridisation and metissage, liminal and interstitial social spaces. Yet these necessarily reinforce and privilege primary concepts of the pure and the central, the bounded and situated. This paper places the hermetic view of culture in its formative period, which also saw the emergence of nationalism and scientific atomism. The paper proposes that positing pure and bounded cultures, even as an idealised abstraction, is an error of theory which is influenced by an attachment to metaphors of the material world, usually ‘Euclidean’. Finally, the paper explores ways that analyses of cultural interrelation, such as those in this Special Issue, can proceed without imagining a resulting ‘culture’, and what this may do for the political landscape of localised cultural rights.     

Alleviating praxis shock: Induction policy and programming for urban music educators

An integral part of a teacher learning continuum ranging from preservice education to professional development for experienced educators, new teacher induction holds particular potential to effect change in urban education. Accordingly, this article offers recommendations for induction-related policy and programming capable of supporting beginning music educators' professional growth in urban settings. Four programmatic components well-suited to addressing urban music teachers' distinctive learning needs are discussed: professional development tailored to urban settings, collaborative communities of practice, mentoring, and school-university partnerships.     

Powerful allies: Arts educators and early childhood educators joining forces on behalf of young children

ABSTRACT

Arts educators and early childhood educators espouse similar philosophies and purposes surrounding young children's educational lives, yet continue to function in largely separate worlds. This article calls for the creation of intentional alliances between the two disciplines, by first recognizing and embracing these alignments. In addition, this article provides recommendations for arts educators and early childhood educators to consider as they join forces to ensure that all young children have access to high-quality arts-based education.     

Levers and mixtures: An integrated science and mathematics activity to solve problems

In recent years, the integration of science and mathematics has become popular among educators because of its potential benefits for student learning. The purpose of this study is to introduce a two-day interdisciplinary lesson that brings science and mathematics concepts together, actively engaging students in working with percentages of the ingredients in mixtures with the concept of torque. Participation in this Grade 7-9 lesson provides opportunities for students to learn from both content areas as they progress through a variety of science process skills.     

Direct reciprocity between individuals that use different strategy spaces

In repeated interactions, players can use strategies that respond to the outcome of previous rounds. Much of the existing literature on direct reciprocity assumes that all competing individuals use the same strategy space. Here, we study both learning and evolutionary dynamics of players that differ in the strategy space they explore. We focus on the infinitely repeated donation game and compare three natural strategy spaces: memory-1 strategies, which consider the last moves of both players, reactive strategies, which respond to the last move of the co-player, and unconditional strategies. These three strategy spaces differ in the memory capacity that is needed. We compute the long term average payoff that is achieved in a pairwise learning process. We find that smaller strategy spaces can dominate larger ones. For weak selection, unconditional players dominate both reactive and memory-1 players. For intermediate selection, reactive players dominate memory-1 players. Only for strong selection and low cost-to-benefit ratio, memory-1 players dominate the others. We observe that the supergame between strategy spaces can be a social dilemma: maximum payoff is achieved if both players explore a larger strategy space, but smaller strategy spaces dominate.     

Isolation and Culture of Dissociated Sensory Neurons From Chick Embryos

Neurons are multifaceted cells that carry information essential for a variety of functions including sensation, motor movement, learning, and memory. Studying neurons in vivo can be challenging due to their complexity, their varied and dynamic environments, and technical limitations. For these reasons, studying neurons in vitro can prove beneficial to unravel the complex mysteries of neurons. The well-defined nature of cell culture models provides detailed control over environmental conditions and variables. Here we describe how to isolate, dissociate, and culture primary neurons from chick embryos. This technique is rapid, inexpensive, and generates robustly growing sensory neurons. The procedure consistently produces cultures that are highly enriched for neurons and has very few non-neuronal cells (less than 5%). Primary neurons do not adhere well to untreated glass or tissue culture plastic, therefore detailed procedures to create two distinct, well-defined laminin-containing substrata for neuronal plating are described. Cultured neurons are highly amenable to multiple cellular and molecular techniques, including co-immunoprecipitation, live cell imagining, RNAi, and immunocytochemistry. Procedures for double immunocytochemistry on these cultured neurons have been optimized and described here.     

The question of animal culture

In this paper I consider whether traditional behaviors of animals, like traditions of humans, are transmitted by imitation learning. Review of the literature on problem solving by captive primates, and detailed consideration of two widely cited instances of purported learning by imitation and of culture in free-living primates (sweet-potato washing by Japanese macaques and termite fishing by chimpanzees), suggests that nonhuman primates do not learn to solve problems by imitation. It may, therefore, be misleading to treat animal traditions and human culture as homologous (rather than analogous) and to refer to animal traditions as cultural.     

Integrating an open-source course management system (Moodle) into the teaching of a first-year medical physiology course: a case study

Educators in medical schools around the world are presently experimenting with innovative ways of using web-based learning to supplement the existing teaching and learning process. We have recently used a popular open-source course management system (CMS) called the modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment (Moodle) to construct an online site (DPhysiol) to facilitate our face-to-face teaching of physiology to a group of first-year students in the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery program. The integration of the Moodle site into our teaching was assessed using online log activity, student examination marks, and feedback from students. The freely available Moodle platform was simple to use, helped to effectively deliver course materials, and has features that allowed cooperative learning. Students who used the CMS throughout their academic year and commented favorably regarding its use as a complement to the face-to-face classroom sessions. The group of students used the CMS obtained significantly higher scores in the final examination compared with the previous class that did not use the CMS. In addition, there was a significant correlation between student participation and performance in online quizzes and their final examination marks. However, students' overall online usage of the CMS did not correlate with their examination marks. We recommend Moodle as a useful tool for physiology educators who are interested in integrating web-based learning into their existing teaching curriculum.     

The evolution of animal 'cultures' and social intelligence

Decades-long field research has flowered into integrative studies that, together with experimental evidence for the requisite social learning capacities, have indicated a reliance on multiple traditions ('cultures') in a small number of species. It is increasingly evident that there is great variation in manifestations of social learning, tradition and culture among species, offering much scope for evolutionary analysis. Social learning has been identified in a range of vertebrate and invertebrate species, yet sustained traditions appear rarer, and the multiple traditions we call cultures are rarer still. Here, we examine relationships between this variation and both social intelligence--sophisticated information processing adapted to the social domain--and encephalization. First, we consider whether culture offers one particular confirmation of the social ('Machiavellian') intelligence hypothesis that certain kinds of social life (here, culture) select for intelligence: 'you need to be smart to sustain culture'. Phylogenetic comparisons, particularly focusing on our own study animals, the great apes, support this, but we also highlight some paradoxes in a broader taxonomic survey. Second, we use intraspecific variation to address the converse hypothesis that 'culture makes you smart', concluding that recent evidence for both chimpanzees and orangutans support this proposition.     

The Film as an Art Form

In this article, the author explores the possibilities of teaching and learning through multiple-literacies in an arts environment. Acknowledging that technologies have a profound effect on our society, and often outpace our ability to properly assess or understand their implications, the author asserts that young people can become critical and active agents in their interactions with new media. Arts education, specifically theater education, is uniquely positioned to substantially contribute to these interactions between teachers and students that acknowledge and explore the new forms of literacy that are essential to navigating our contemporary culture. To this end, the author calls on arts educators to effectively engage with their students' multimodal concerns through interactions that value new multimodal literacies.     

Promoting collaborations between biomedical scholars in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa

The premise of this piece is that a priority of international health should be to increase the number of investigators in the US and other developed countries who engage in research and other kinds of scholarly work in underdeveloped parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa where the overall disease burden is the highest and the gap in biomedical research infrastructure is the widest. The author's aim is to encourage medical students, resident doctors, and medical school faculty to devote a part of their career to teach, acquire clinical skills, or participate in research with health professionals at teaching hospitals in Africa. After briefly describing the thinking that led the author to Nigeria 30 years ago to teach and study biochemical aspects of health problems in rural and urban areas, he discusses some of the factors one needs to consider before entering into an international partnership, including identifying the right foreign collaborators, selecting a suitable research site, setting realistic goals, learning the local culture and indigenous language, and defining a theme for your program. Lastly, the piece points out potential pitfalls and problems that are often overlooked or underestimated in the early phases of planning an international partnership, including lukewarm institutional support at home, inflexible institutional review boards, dominance of the program by the US partner, maintaining continuity, and striking the right balance between scholarly work and humanitarian efforts. My hope is that US students and faculty in the health professions who read this piece will be stimulated and encouraged to consider how they might integrate into their curriculum or academic life visits lasting several months or more each year during which they would teach or train others or engage in research at a teaching hospital in some country in Africa.     

城市居住区多功能绿地景观的景感生态学效应

作为居住区绿地景观重要的组成要素,公共活动空间是居民最为频繁使用的空间,对提高绿地生态系统文化服务,改善人居环境与提高居民健康具有重要意义。基于居民休闲娱乐文化感知,探讨居住区绿地公共活动空间的景感生态学效应,揭示多功能绿地景观对生态系统文化服务和景感营造的影响,可为居住区绿地的景观规划与设计提供重要的参考依据。以郑州市26个居住小区80个公共活动空间为研究对象,结合景感生态学理念,基于小区绿地公共活动空间的景感特征（植被覆盖、基础设施、遮荫率、管理水平、公共活动空间面积与类型）以及内部居民休闲娱乐文化活动特征的调查分析,探讨了城市居住区绿地公共活动空间的景感效应对绿地生态系统文化服务的影响。结果表明：（1）小区绿地不同类型公共活动空间提供的景感效应存在显著差异,水体的自然属性使其景感效应更丰富,文化服务价值最高。（2）小区绿地公共活动空间面积越大,居民的心理感知越强,景感体验越丰富,文化服务价值越高,增加公共活动空间面积是构建多功能绿地景观的直接通道。（3）公共活动空间的植被覆盖营造的视感与遮荫率营造的风感生态学效应较为显著,而基础设施的触感与清洁度的视感并未存在显著影响。（4）结合小区社会经济数据的多元回归分析结果表明,由公共活动空间面积营造的多样化景感对居民活动量的贡献最大,其次为公共活动空间的类型与小区户数。运用景感生态学理论和景感营造原则,在有限的空间内通过景观设计实现了景感载体化,改善和增加了绿地生态系统服务,能够缓解城市绿地的不公平性。未来城市居住区特别是高密度居住区应尽可能设置大面积的具有多功能特征的公共活动空间,而低密度居住区在绿地面积充足的前提下,可设置大面积自然水体和增设多类型的公共活动空间,以提高景感效应。     

Genetically modified plants: the stakes.

Generically modified plants (GMP) are massively used on the American continent in Australia and in China, since they represent an unquestionable potential for progress. New attributes are therefore devoted to the human and animal diet, to the facilitating of culture management, to the reducing of the chemical fertilizer and pesticide usage, and to the conquest of new cultural spaces. Considering itself to be flawed by a too hasty plunge into the market, concomitant with sagging evaluations of other innovations, Europe is confronted by a strong societal debate which blocks GMP cultures and orientates the research towards an evaluation of the environmental and public health risks and an evaluation of their economical and sociological impacts. The authors encourage this societal debate in order to arbitrate the presence of transgenes in conventional productions and products, to define the accepted rules of responsibility, to decide what is not acceptable, and to involve the more upstream actors and operators of the innovation process, all that keeping in mind the agronomical, ecological and economical repercussions of their decisions.     

Running a Question-and-Answer Website for Science Education: First-Hand Experiences

The online learning and outreach resource Ask A Biologist (AAB; ) has been operating for three years, and this paper reports our initial experience of running the site. To date, AAB has answered and archived online over 3,500 questions from the general public with contributions from more than 50 researchers, and attracted an estimated audience of half a million, all with relatively minimal investment. Simply, questions are posted by visitors to the site, and one or more of our registered academic experts then provide their answers which are available for all to see and browse. The system is simple and provides direct contact between the public and scientists on subjects that are guaranteed to be of interest. In this paper, we review the benefits and drawbacks of such a system based on our first-hand experiences, detailing how the site was originally conceived and built and how it operates. We offer this as a model for future projects and to highlight both the benefits and pitfalls of such a system.     

“Where do I even start?” Recommendations for faculty diversifying syllabi in ecology,evolution, and the life sciences

Diversifying curricula is of increasing interest in higher education, including in ecology and evolution and allied fields. Yet, many educators may not know where to start. Here we provide a framework for meeting standard curriculum goals while enacting anti-racist and anti-colonial syllabi that is grounded in the development of a sustainable network of educators. In addition to highlighting this professional learning process and sharing the list of resources our group has developed, we provide suggestions to help educators highlight contributions of minoritized groups, explore multiple ways of knowing, and perform critical assessments of foundational views of life and environmental science fields. We further discuss the key classroom dynamics that affect the success of such anti-racist and anti-colonial initiatives. The retention and success of minoritized students in ecology and evolution depends on whether we address injustices in our fields. Our hope is that our fellow educators will use this paper to catalyze their own efforts to diversify their courses.