Understanding Restaurant Stories Using an ASP Theory of Intentions

The paper describes an application of logic programming to story understanding. Substantial work in this direction has been done by Erik Mueller, who focused on texts about stereotypical activities (or scripts), in particular restaurant stories. His system performed well, but could not understand texts describing exceptional scenarios. We propose addressing this problem by using a theory of intentions developed by Blount, Gelfond, and Balduccini. We present a methodology in which we model scripts as activities and employ the concept of an intentional agent to reason about both normal and exceptional scenarios

Disciplines, discourse and Orientalism: the implications for postgraduate certificates in learning and teaching in higher education

Despite national requirements for accredited teaching qualifications to promote understanding of ‘how students learn, both generally and in the subject’ (HEA, 2006), there is a lack of literature internationally on disciplinary differences in student learning in higher education. Academics at a UK research intensive university were asked to report on the existence of literature or folkloric knowledge concerned with how students learnt in their subject. No relevant literature or folklore were identified but responses did demonstrate a discourse in which the academics constructed their discipline as ‘better’ than other disciplines: the finding with which the present paper is concerned. The discourse of the distinctiveness and superiority of ones own discipline can be understood as a form of ‘Orientalism’. A postcolonial analysis of the discourse of disciplinary relationships offers a partial explanation for challenges made to the validity of cross-university activities, such as postgraduate certificates in learning and teaching

The New Old Legal Realism

Do the decisions of appellate courts matter in the real world? The American judicial system, legal education, and academic scholarship are premised on the view that they do. The authors want to reexamine this question by taking the approach advocated by the original Legal Realists. The current project seeks to add to our knowledge of the relevance of case law by focusing on an area that has received little examination: how pronouncements about employment discrimination law by appellate courts translate into understandings and behavior at the ground level. As our lens, we use evidence of how people talk about the relevance of changes in the law. This new Old Legal Realist perspective suggests that social and economic factors play a more important role than case law in outcomes on the ground. Cases cannot have an impact, if the local social and economic variables are not aligned in a fashion that allows the impact to occur

To Kill a Stereotype: An Examination of Canonical Literature and Racial Representation in the Classroom

This project examines racial representation in canonical texts frequently taught in the secondary English Language Arts classroom. Every year, the population of students in the American public school system becomes increasingly more racially diverse while the demographics of the teaching population and the literature within classrooms remain the same. As the student population continues to change, what type of literature and curriculum must educators teach in order to represent students’ diverse identities and encourage respect and responsiveness towards other cultures? As an Asian-American pre-service teacher, I first discuss the current state of American public school education in this project and then proceed to include two case studies. This section exists to examine and discuss two canonical and commonly used “racially diverse” texts in the English Language Arts classroom. Through examining Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) for aspects of racial representation, this project discusses how these texts portray people of color and their individual experiences. Moreover, this project considers whether or not the characters of color are complex, humanized, empowered, and are portrayed beyond negative racial stereotypes. I argue that all educators should not only teach diverse literature in the classroom, but should also seek to provide literature which features positive racial representation within its narratives. While Lee’s novel perpetuates negative stereotypes that dehumanize black characters, Walker’s novel instead features black characters with agency and the capacity to succeed. All students, regardless of identity, have the opportunity to learn from racially diverse literature, experience representation, and develop empathy. At its conclusion, this project features curriculum that seeks to emphasize cultural competency in the classroom. Ranging from reading techniques to writing prompts and practices to enhance racial awareness, this project provides readers and educators with techniques for developing a respectful and inclusive class

“They ate macaroni-and-cheese or TV dinners; my mother made curry instead”: A narrative inquiry of South Asian American writers’ identity negotiation

As the demographic and linguistic landscape in the United States is shifting—the Asian population has increased significantly in the last decade, particularly the South Asian population—these changes are reflected in the classrooms all over the country. As such, it becomes imperative to investigate who these multilinguals are, and as several scholars have pointed out, the Asian population has not been studied to the same extent as other minorities. In addition, the notion of a homogenous Asian identity persists and hides the internal differences that exist within the Asian population. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to challenge the notion of a homogenous Asian identity by exploring the identity struggles and identity negotiation of South Asian Americans. To understand their identity struggles and negotiation processes, a post-structural perspective was adopted and narrative inquiry was employed to broaden the range of methodologies that are used to research multilingual identities. A corpus consisting of memoirs and short narratives written by South Asian Americans was created and analyzed. From the analysis of the narratives, four themes emerged: Theme 1: Indexing the “Other,” Theme 2: Labels and self-identification, Theme 3: Positioning of self and others, and Theme 4: Linguistic identities. Theme 1 concerns the ways in which the writers were “othered,” mainly through physical attributes, their names, and cultural practices that they engaged in that were not seen as American. Theme 2 shows that the writers mainly identified and referred to themselves through their ethnic heritage, and Theme 3 reveals that the writers commonly positioned themselves as outsiders and different from the white American. Lastly, Theme 4 highlights the writers’ complicated relationship with English and that a standard language ideology persists. Echoing previous research, the findings of this study suggest that the construction and negotiation of multilingual identities are very much linked to larger societal issues grounded in a limited view of what it means to be American, pervasive language ideologies that promote Standard English varieties, as well as the persisting notion of a singular Asian identity. Additionally, employing narrative inquiry has opened up for additional possibilities to study multilingual identities, which I suggest should be explored further to expand on identity research that is currently conducted in applied linguistics and related fields

Informal STEM Education for Underrepresented Racial Minorities: Students’ Perceptions of the Imhotep’s Legacy Academy After-school Programme

This study explores students' perceptions of the Imhotep's Legacy Academy After-School Project (ILASP), an after-school STEM programme offered to Nova Scotian students of African descent. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was employed to understand students' beliefs about how the Imhotep's Legacy Academy (ILA) has impacted their views of STEM fields, their academic choices, and their career aspirations. First, data were collected in the quantitative phase of the study through online surveys and then a case study approach was used to collect data in the qualitative phase, which involved face-to-face interviews, and students' drawings. The findings indicated that the hands-on activities offered by the ILA reached a wide array of learners and helped them to have positive STEM experiences, nurturing their desires to pursue STEM academics and STEM careers

Exploring dyslexia, literacies and identities on Facebook

This paper examines the role of identities in underpinning and activating literacies learning in a small class of adolescent students labelled with dyslexia. It derives from a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a Facebook group page about the students’ scaffolded research into dyslexia. The study investigated an apparent paradox: that although literacy demands are often cited as barriers to learning and participation for students labelled with dyslexia, social networking technologies seem to motivate at least some such students to willingly undertake significant amounts of reading and writing. Two interrelated potential explanations are investigated to attempt to resolve this paradox. Firstly, that the social and collaborative nature of Facebook literacy events and practices, which promotes a sense of shared identity amongst the participants, is itself motivating. Secondly, that identity strongly influences engagement with texts. Three intertwined strands of identity work emerged from analysis of the data. These three strands underpinned the students’ literacy events and practices. Each strand is elaborated, through reference to interview data and classroom dialogue. The study concludes that Facebook offered an affinity space in which the students inhabited projective identities which reciprocally shaped their literacy practice