Art Education and the Social Use of Metaphor

Human beings are greatly dependent upon social knowledge as a basis for directing their actions in the world and interpreting the actions of others. The dominant quality of social knowledge, or culture, is that it is symbolic. Consider the concept of culture offered by anthropologist Clifford Geertz: (Cultura) denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life

Socially Relevant Practice in Art, Culture, and Environment

What is socially relevant practice? From my perspective, socially relevant practice has to do with making knowledge available to students that enables them to know about social institutions and contexts associated with the visual arts. In other words, the students are provided with experiences that lead them to an understanding of the phenomenon of art in culture and society so that they can assess and decide what their own relationship will be to concepts and objects comprising the visual arts

Culture Change: The Work of C.A. Bowers in Educational Policy

C.A. Bowers has proposed a perspective on educational theory and practice involving cultural literacy and communicative competence. Bowers\u27 proposal addresses culture change through a critical examination of activities in the school curriculum. An overview of this perspective and its possible use in art education is presented

Enculturation and the Visual Arts Curriculum

An overview of some theoretical viewpoints on enculturation is presented. These viewpoints are relevant to the development of the visual arts curriculum. The perspective presented is a critical one that calls for an examination of the cultural constructs in which art educations embedded

Design: A Critique of a Metaphor

Teaching art is basically a process of sharing socially derived knowledge about art with other persons. In order to communicate the cognitive configuration of art as it appears in our culture, it is necessary to use language. In art education, the visual arts are often thought of as a non-verbal symbol system for encoding experience. For this symbol system to be socially known about, however, it must be codified in language. As Hertzler has pointed out, The key and basic symbolism of man is language. All the other symbol systems can be interpreted only be means of language? . Language is thus important in the conceptualization and teaching of art and warrants consideration as an area of inquiry by art educators

Contemporary Sociological Theory and the Study of Art Education

These contemporary theories in sociology could be useful in the study of art education. All of them focus upon meanings, interpretations, social context, beliefs, and interaction. What is significant is how people describe life in the world. They also describe human beings as persons who have personalities that are unique and which are not entirely manifestations of physiological processes. Human beings are seen as initiators of action and as creative agents. These premises about human beings seem to me to be ones that validate art

Children’s Views on Art in the Primary Grades, K-3

This study examined some of the kinds of know ledge that primary students have regarding art. Approximately one hundred students participated in the study. The researcher visited their classrooms, sat among them, and interviewed them as they did their art work. Although the students appeared to have an accurate grasp of the methods for working with art media, they were not very knowledgeable about ways to judge art. At all grade levels, the students\u27 knowledge was somewhat inconsistent and not articulated very well. The students exhibited both unique meanings and socially shared meanings in their discourse and confirmed the importance of art teachers as agents of socialization in the process of learning about art. What students cane to know about art requires the teaching of organized and comprehensive concepts

Association between 5-Year clinical outcome in patients with nonmedically evacuated mild blast traumatic brain injury and clinical measures collected within 7 days postinjury in combat

Importance: Although previous work has examined clinical outcomes in combat-deployed veterans, questions remain regarding how symptoms evolve or resolve following mild blast traumatic brain injury (TBI) treated in theater and their association with long-term outcomes. Objective: To characterize 5-year outcome in patients with nonmedically evacuated blast concussion compared with combat-deployed controls and understand what clinical measures collected acutely in theater are associated with 5-year outcome. Design, Setting, and Participants: A prospective, longitudinal cohort study including 45 service members with mild blast TBI within 7 days of injury (mean 4 days) and 45 combat deployed nonconcussed controls was carried out. Enrollment occurred in Afghanistan at the point of injury with evaluation of 5-year outcome in the United States. The enrollment occurred from March to September 2012 with 5-year follow up completed from April 2017 to May 2018. Data analysis was completed from June to July 2018. Exposures: Concussive blast TBI. All patients were treated in theater, and none required medical evacuation. Main Outcomes and Measures: Clinical measures collected in theater included measures for concussion symptoms, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, depression symptoms, balance performance, combat exposure intensity, cognitive performance, and demographics. Five-year outcome evaluation included measures for global disability, neurobehavioral impairment, PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms, and 10 domains of cognitive function. Forward selection multivariate regression was used to determine predictors of 5-year outcome for global disability, neurobehavior impairment, PTSD, and cognitive function. Results: Nonmedically evacuated patients with concussive blast injury (n = 45; 44 men, mean [SD] age, 31 [5] years) fared poorly at 5-year follow-up compared with combat-deployed controls (n = 45; 35 men; mean [SD] age, 34 [7] years) on global disability, neurobehavioral impairment, and psychiatric symptoms, whereas cognitive changes were unremarkable. Acute predictors of 5-year outcome consistently identified TBI diagnosis with contribution from acute concussion and mental health symptoms and select measures of cognitive performance depending on the model for 5-year global disability (area under the curve following bootstrap validation [AUCBV] = 0.79), neurobehavioral impairment (correlation following bootstrap validation [RBV] = 0.60), PTSD severity (RBV = 0.36), or cognitive performance (RBV = 0.34). Conclusions and Relevance: Service members with concussive blast injuries fared poorly at 5-year outcome. The results support a more focused acute screening of mental health following TBI diagnosis as strong indicators of poor long-term outcome. This extends prior work examining outcome in patients with concussive blast injury to the larger nonmedically evacuated population

hnRNP A1 and secondary structure coordinate alternative splicing of Mag

Myelin-associated glycoprotein (MAG) is a major component of myelin in the vertebrate central nervous system. MAG is present in the periaxonal region of the myelin structure, where it interacts with neuronal proteins to inhibit axon outgrowth and protect neurons from degeneration. Two alternatively spliced isoforms of Mag mRNA have been identified. The mRNA encoding the shorter isoform, known as S-MAG, contains a termination codon in exon 12, while the mRNA encoding the longer isoform, known as L-MAG, skips exon 12 and produces a protein with a longer C-terminal region. L-MAG is required in the central nervous system. How inclusion of Mag exon 12 is regulated is not clear. In a previous study, we showed that heteronuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 (hnRNP A1) contributes to Mag exon 12 skipping. Here, we show that hnRNP A1 interacts with an element that overlaps the 5\u27 splice site of Mag exon 12. The element has a reduced ability to interact with the U1 snRNP compared with a mutant that improves the splice site consensus. An evolutionarily conserved secondary structure is present surrounding the element. The structure modulates interaction with both hnRNP A1 and U1. Analysis of splice isoforms produced from a series of reporter constructs demonstrates that the hnRNP A1-binding site and the secondary structure both contribute to exclusion of Mag exon 12