Desirable Difficulties: Toward a Critical Postmodern Arts-Based Practice

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four women academics. What follows is an attempt at describing an arts-based project, emerging from concentrated efforts to develop an approach to collaborative scholarship aimed at identifying and inhabiting the divides rather than only navigating around, over or under them

The effects of students\u27 asynchronous online discussions of conceptual errors on intentionally flawed teacher-constructed concept maps

Research shows that online discussions are often unfocused and without providing much benefit to students\u27 learning outcomes. One of the reasons behind this phenomenon is the lack of or inadequate scaffolding or guidance provided to students when participating on asynchronous discussion boards. The collaborative misconception mapping strategy is a tool that was designed to mediate cognitive and metacognitive processes via feedback provided by peers and a teacher-created concept map that contains intentional conceptual errors; This study evaluated the effects of collaborative misconception mapping as compared with those of a traditional online discussion activity, where students post responses to discussion questions. Subjects were 52 undergraduate students in health sciences statistics classes at a large southwestern urban university; 24 in the misconception mapping group and 29 in the traditional discussion group. The level of meaningfulness of students\u27 discussions using a rubric based on an intentional conceptual change model, and their post-test scores were compared. In addition, utilizing mean scores on the Metacognitive Self-regulation subscale of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), the collaborative misconception mapping strategy\u27s effectiveness for students with low self-regulation skills was investigated. Findings indicate that the misconception mapping strategy outperforms the traditional discussion tool, as it provides a self-regulatory scaffold to students, and improves learning outcomes even for those with low levels of self-regulation. The strategy also enhances the meaningfulness of discussions in terms of their reflection of cognitive and metacognitive processes, and promotes more positive learner perceptions regarding the tool itself. It is recommended that instructors reevaluate their online discussion requirements, consider the negative impact unguided online discussions may have on their students\u27 online learning experience, and provide appropriate cognitive and metacognitive scaffolding for optimal learning outcomes

You say security, we say safety : speaking and talking ‘security’ in Kyrgyzstan

The Copenhagen School\u27s notion of securitization is widely recognised as an important theoretical innovation in the conceptualisation of security, not least for its potential for including a range of actors and spatial scales beyond the state. However, its empirical utility remains more open to question due to a lack of reflexivity regarding local socio-cultural contexts, narrow focus on speech and inherently retrospective nature. Drawing on fieldwork conducted by the author in Kyrgyzstan between September 2005 and June 2006, this paper will examine the implications of these limitations for conducting empirical research on &quot;security&quot; logistically and methodologically. Centrally, the question of how &ldquo;security&rdquo; can be researched in the field will be discussed. Consideration will be given to the researcher&rsquo;s role in talking &ldquo;security&rdquo; and how &ldquo;security&rdquo; can effectively be located and explicated through the creation of ethnomethodological &ldquo;thick description&rdquo;. Issues of contingency, multiple voices and power loci, and inter-cultural translation will be addressed. The paper will conclude with a consideration of how local knowledge can be used to inform our research and help find ways to bridge the divide between the field and theory.<br /

From the plane tree to the gardens of Adonis : plant and garden imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus

Since at least the time the Akkadian version of The Epic of Gilgamesh was preserved in clay tablets nearly four thousand years ago, human beings have weaved plants and gardens into their stories. The way they appear in myth and literature is often as diverse as it is fascinating: they might figure as settings, metaphors, analogies, or be imbued with symbolism. This particular treatment of plants and gardens is not limited to myth and literature though. In a number of Plato’s dialogues he utilises them in a similar way. This essay sets out to think about the plant and garden images in one of Plato’s dialogues; more specifically, the Phaedrus. It seeks to address the following question: what might the plant and garden images in the dialogue mean, and how are we to understand them in relation to the text? We will come to see that during the classical period the plants and gardens mentioned in the dialogue were associated with love, madness, chastity, sterility, death, and more; in short, the whole gamut of themes taken up in the Phaedrus. Since many of these vegetal images appear in the text as part of the dialogue’s setting, this means that as Phaedrus and Socrates converse with one another, they do so surrounded by images of the very things they discuss. We will also discover that the setting of the dialogue seems to influence both the flow of conversation and the language that Socrates uses. It would seem that there is more to the plant and garden imagery in the dialogue than first meets the eye

Critical for Pure Judgment: The \u27Socratic Method\u27 on Relativism

The following essay is an attempt to justify philosophically the possibility of a \u27natural law\u27 or prescriptive cross-experiential judgment. To accomplish this task, an examination of contemporary relativism and indication of what is wrong with that position is necessary at first. Why argue against something if its sound? The second stage is a survey of certain key thinkers on law, justice and judgment. Their thoughts will yield clues or suggestions about what is needed for a natural law. The third section lays out this author\u27s thoughts on how to solve the problem. The final section is objections and replies

Do Charter Schools Threaten Public Education? Emerging Evidence from Fifteen Years of a Quasi-Market for Schooling

Supporters of public education have long feared that charter schools will threaten the public system, both by 1) creaming off the most advantaged students and 2) undermining political support for the public system. These fears have not been borne out. Blacks are disproportionately in charters, whites are disproportionately in traditional public schools, and Hispanics are fairly evenly distributed between the two. Looking at class measures, poor students are distributed fairly equally between the two types of schools. And turning to other measures of privilege, the evidence does not point strongly in either direction. My conclusions are not without qualification. The article identifies some domains in which cream-skimming might develop and others where more research is needed. Moreover, the evidence does not support the claims of some charter school advocates that charter schools serve an especially disadvantaged population of students. Regarding the question of public funding, privatization in the education context may have the effect of creating an additional constituency for increased overall education funding. Charter school advocates have moved away from claims that charters will cut costs and instead now focus on securing additional public funding. I argue that the structure of education funding means that charter school efforts to obtain greater public support will likely depend on increasing per pupil spending in all public schools

Recommendation in Dialogue Systems

Dialogue system has been an active research field for decades and is developing fast in recent years, due to the recent breakthrough of the deep learning techniques. How to make recommendations in dialogue systems is attracting increasing attention because such systems could meet various user information needs and have much commercial potential.Current dialogue system researches typically focus on building systems for social conversation, question answering, and performing specific tasks. However, making recommendations to users, as important information need, has not been intensively researched. Meanwhile, traditional recommender systems are usually developed for non-conversation scenarios. In this dissertation, we explore how to integrate these two systems into one framework that specifically aims at making recommendations in dialogues. Such a system helps users find items by chatting with users to understand their preferences and recommending accordingly.First, we build conversational recommendation datasets, because existing dialogue datasets do not have user-item preference information or the dialogue utterances discussing facets of items, and current recommendation datasets do not have dialogue scripts associated with each user-item pair. We build the datasets by requesting crowdsourcing workers to compose dialogue utterances based on schemas and then use the delexicalization approach to simulate dialogues with the collected utterances. The datasets are used to train the natural language understanding component and provide recommendation information for our system.Based on collected datasets, we propose a reinforcement learning based conversational recommendation framework. Such a framework has three components, a belief tracker, a dialogue manager, and a recommender. The dialogue agent learns to first chat with a user to understand her preferences, and when it feels confident enough, it recommends a list of items to the user. We conduct both offline and online experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.We further extend this framework with a personalized probabilistic recommender module. This recommender learns to predict the probability of a user likes an item given the dialogue utterance information and the personalized user preference information. By leveraging this hybrid information, the recommendation and dialogue performances are further improved. We evaluate the dialogue agent's strength in various simulated environments as well as in online user studies and demonstrate the advantages of this approach

Towards Cooperation: An Organizational Rhetorical Analysis of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue

This study analyzes the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogues (S&ED) to uncover the organizational and rhetorical mechanisms by which U.S. and Chinese officials attempt to forge cooperative relations while managing issues of conflict. I argue for a communication centered approach for understanding geopolitical relations and the socialization process by which norms and values take root amongst U.S. and Chinese officials. To do so, I draw upon organizational institutionalism to uncover competing organizational logics guiding and constraining the S&ED through an organizational rhetorical lens while also providing a new theoretical conception of public diplomacy as a means to legitimize the S&ED as a mechanism for managing the complex bilateral relationship. Texts under analysis include the press releases, speeches, memos of understanding, and agreements published following each of the eight annual S&ED meetings from 2009-2016, totaling over 160 documents. Findings suggest that the S&ED defines both the dialogue mechanism and bilateral relationship as founded upon a central logic of “positive, cooperative, and comprehensive” relations between the two countries. Resulting from this logic, both the economic and strategic tracks of the S&ED focus on producing ever increasing, tangible outcomes encompassing wider areas of cooperation each year. These outcomes occur most significantly within the economic track discussions as well cooperation on climate change and exchange programs. Not until the later years of the S&ED, with the incorporation of a “new model of major country relations” are more security related issues addressed, with criticism of diverging view points on sensitive issues naturalized as expected given the S&ED’s value of dialogue and attention redirected from these issues to focus on the positive outcomes reached in other areas. Success of the S&ED relies upon self-reflexive praise by participants of the S&ED regarding its effectiveness in order to justify to domestic constituencies in both nations the continuance and support of the dialogue mechanism. This suggests that even after eight years of meeting, the dialogue mechanism is a fragile one, predicated on producing continuous success. Nonetheless, the breadth and number of agreements, exchanges, and growth of coordination between the bureaucracies of each country demonstrates that cooperation is possible

Caring for the sufferers among us : Job through the lens of classical rhetoric and modern psychological trauma studies

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/2613/thumbnail.jp