Participatory Sense-Making for Integration Practices and Policies

In this presentation, I continue previous work on extracting consequences for the design of integration policies from research on participatory sense-making in cognitive science. Participatory sense-making was introduced in cognitive science in the early 21st century. The idea, roughly, is that social understanding consists in mutually inclusive social face-to-face real-time participation in pursuit of joint activities. I mean to unpack the concept of participatory sense-making to the end, specifically, of proving it relevant for integration policies and practice. I argue that modelling integration policies on participatory sense-making is instrumental to consolidate a sense of community and mutual respect for others and norms for how to live together

Persons and affordances

Interdisciplinary interest in affordances is increasing. This paper is a philosophical contribution. The question is: Do persons offer affordances? Analysis of the concepts ‘person’ and ‘affordance’ supports an affirmative answer. On a widely accepted understanding of what persons are, persons exhibit many of the features typical of socionormative affordances. However, to understand persons as offering affordances requires, on the face of it, stretching traditional understandings of the concept of affordance: persons, in contrast to the organisms that partially constitute persons, do not seem to be available to perception. This and similar worries are responded to

Determinants of hand hygiene compliance among nurses in US hospitals: A formative research study.

Hand hygiene is the simplest and most effective measure for preventing healthcare-associated infections. Despite the simplicity of this procedure and advances made in infection control, hospital health care workers' compliance to hand hygiene recommendations is generally low. Nurses have the most frequent patient care interactions, and thus more opportunities to practice hand hygiene. As such, it is important to identify and understand determinants of nurses' reported compliance. Formative research was undertaken to assess the potential impact of several unexamined factors that could influence HH among nurses: professional role and status, social affiliation, social norms, and physical modifications to the work environment (as well as institutional factors like safety climate). A survey questionnaire was developed primarily to inform the creation of a behaviour change intervention. The survey looked at how these factors influence HH among nurses and sought to identify barriers and levers to reported hand hygiene. It was administered to a survey panel of acute care nurses, working in US hospitals, with a year or more of experience. Multivariate regression modelling suggested that reported hand hygiene compliance was most likely to be a function of a hospital management's communication openness, perceived performance by peers, increased interactions with patients and other staff members, and the reduction in stress, busyness, and cognitive load associated with role performance. A powerful, effective intervention on HH among nurses therefore could be directed at improving communication openness, consider the impact of perceived performance by peers, increase interactions with patients and staff, and determine how to reduce the stress and cognitive load associated with role performance

Seeing Things As We Do: Ecological Psychology And The Normativity Of Visual Perception

In virtue of what is perception successful? In philosophy and psychology, we sometimes assume that visual accuracy amounts to a correspondence between percepts and subject-independent, physical properties. In this dissertation, I argue that we should reject this assumption in favor of norms grounded in the action-guiding nature of perception. Recent theories of perception purport to cast off the intellectualist baggage of twentieth-century thinking, and to address perception in its own distinctive terms. I show that these approaches are unified in aiming to reduce spatial aspects of the percept to subject-independent geometrical facts about the object-perceiver relation. In doing so, these views remain guilty of an unwarranted assimilation of perception to cognition. Perceptual constancy, the capacity to encounter a relatively stable world of object properties despite variation in sensory stimulation, is measured using a metric that has percept-physical property correspondence at one extreme, and retinal match at the other. Advocates of the correspondence norm freely redeploy this metric as gauging accuracy in perception, so that the closer a percept comes to invariantly matching the distal property, the closer it comes to veridically presenting the environment. Yet, correspondence views are committed to widespread misperception that cannot be accounted for in terms of evolutionary complexity. I distinguish between descriptive and normative enterprises in cognitive science, and suggest that we reinterpret the constancy metric as an empirically useful, descriptive quantificational tool—one that does not straightforwardly entail normative facts. With the correspondence norm undercut, I develop a more viable framework for understanding accuracy, one that draws on James Gibson’s ecological theory. Accordingly, accuracy is best understood pragmatically, in ecological terms such as usefulness. Partial constancy is often sufficient for an organism to act effectively in its environment, a result that suggests surprising consequences for what is seen in perception. In color ontology, there is some theoretical attention to descriptive facts about constancy. However, because of a worry about stipulating perceiver and context standards, theorists continue to reject ecological approaches to color. I resolve the worry by appealing to pluralism about scientific objects. The resulting framework is ecologically sensible, empirically useful, and deeply interdisciplinary

"Dá pra fazer" : ética e autogestão na ocupação de uma escola em Canguçu (RS)

Este trabalho parte das narrativas de participantes da ocupação da Escola Técnica Estadual de Canguçu (ETEC), ocorrida em maio de 2016 para discutir reverberações posteriores do movimento. Desse modo, procurou-se mapear experiências que se tornaram possíveis pela extensão dos aprendizados construídos pela ocupação. Foram realizadas entrevistas com estudantes e uma professora e extratos delas foram articulados ao texto, produzindo uma narrativa sobre a ocupação da escola e sobre o cotidiano pós-ocupação. A teoria da enação, especialmente nas formulações a respeito de uma ética não representacional, mas centrada no fazer, oferecem elementos para a discussão das experiências atualizadas nas narrativas. Aliamos o método cartográfico à abordagem enativa. Os processos autogestionários vivenciados nos movimentos de ocupação são um fio condutor da discussão. Aponta-se, ao longo do trabalho, para práticas escolares que são possibilitadas por disposições emocionais e por conhecimentos pré-reflexivos, não apenas declarativos, que têm ênfase na discussão dos processos educativos participativos e horizontalizados ensaiados na ocupação.This work parts of the discussion of the occupation of Escola Técnica Estadual de Canguçu (ETEC), which happened in May 2016. The problem is related to the later reverberations of the occupation practices in the school, so we tried to map experiences that were made possible by the extension of the learning built on the movement. Interviews were conducted with students and a teacher and extracts from them were articulated to the text, producing a narrative about the occupation of the school and about the daily post-occupation. The theory of enaction, especially in the formulations regarding a non-representational ethics, but centered in the know-how, offer elements of analysis. We connect the cartographic method to the enactive approach. The self-managed processes experienced in the occupation movements are a thread leading to the discussion. It is pointed out, throughout the work, to school practices that are made possible by emotional dispositions and by pre-reflective, not just declarative, knowledge, that usually emphasizes the discussion of educational processes

Enação: percursos de pesquisa

Livro formato Ebook produzido pelo NUCOGS/UFRGS.O livro busca articular alguns dos principais desdobramentos da teoria enativa com temas como emoções, linguagem, habilidades e expertises, formação de professores e pesquisadores, ensino e aprendizagem.Apoio CAPES e CNP

An Ecological Approach to Normativity

It is argued that normativity is an embodied and situated skill that resists explanation in terms of rule-following. Norms are dynamic and negotiable, and are understood in practice by engaging with others. Rules are a subclass of norms and have pragmatic functions, e.g. to impose norms and elucidate implicit normativity. The propositional articulation of norms is secondary to normativity. Norms can be explained within the framework of ecological psychology as a particular kind of affordance that enables actions to be directly understood as correct. This view entails that the niche of human beings is inherently normative. Finally, the ecological account of normativity is used to elucidate the notion of rule-following