Equity in the Classroom

When discussing how teachers should pursue equity among, in, and through education in their current educational system, many go straight to discussing the lessons. These are very important, and the planning of these lessons can very much influence students to think more openly about equity, but there is something that must be established first before even thinking about executing a lesson plan, and that is the classroom itself. After all, “a large part of the work of teaching is constructing the laboratory for learning.” (Campbell & Demorest, 2008, p. 87). Postman & Weingartner also say that “the most important impressions made on a human nervous system come from… the environment itself [which] conveys the critical and dominant messages by controlling the perceptions and attitudes of those who participate in it” (1969, p. 17). This paper focuses on the creation of a classroom that creates an opportunity for every student to contribute to the environment in which they learn

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself

Photovoice and House Meetings Within Participatory Action Research

Participatory action research (PAR) is an epistemology where community members and researchers collaborate to (a) determine the problem to be researched, (b) collect data, (c) analyze data, (d) come to a conclusion, (e) determine an intervention, (f) implement the intervention, and (g) evaluate the intervention (Fals Borda, 1987). We refer to PAR as an epistemology rather than as a method because most PAR theorists view it as a way for those typically situated outside of science to insert their lived experiences and perspectives into the process of knowledge construction (Fals Borda, 1987). Specifically, PAR allows for the democratization of knowledge production by engaging multiple constituents. Through this PAR process, problem definitions shift, thus posing meaningful implications for community-based interventions and social action that focuses on addressing community members’ needs. Indeed, some argue that PAR is an epistemology that is intimately connected to empowerment and social change (Fals Borda, 1987). We begin our chapter by discussing the two methods within the PAR process, specifically, how photovoice and house meetings work as tools toward social action and empowerment. We highlight some of the relevant literature where these tools have been used. For each method we discuss the steps involved in the process, as well as the benefits and challenges of each. Next, we provide reflections from two of our participant-researchers, who are also coauthors. We end the chapter with implications for community-based PAR and consider how photovoice and house meetings work as tools toward critical consciousness, empowerment, and social action

Akin House Curriculum Development and Living History Programming

This unit plan is comprised of a variety of inquiry-based lessons that explore the culture and way of life of the Native Americans who occupied New England. After studying the Akin house documents, materials, and narratives, I chose to focus my unit on the land and the people who came before the Akin family so that students will learn the long-view of our rich New England history

Crowd-sourcing NLG Data: Pictures Elicit Better Data

Recent advances in corpus-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) hold the promise of being easily portable across domains, but require costly training data, consisting of meaning representations (MRs) paired with Natural Language (NL) utterances. In this work, we propose a novel framework for crowdsourcing high quality NLG training data, using automatic quality control measures and evaluating different MRs with which to elicit data. We show that pictorial MRs result in better NL data being collected than logic-based MRs: utterances elicited by pictorial MRs are judged as significantly more natural, more informative, and better phrased, with a significant increase in average quality ratings (around 0.5 points on a 6-point scale), compared to using the logical MRs. As the MR becomes more complex, the benefits of pictorial stimuli increase. The collected data will be released as part of this submission.Comment: The 9th International Natural Language Generation conference INLG, 2016. 10 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

幼稚園児向けストーリーテリングタスクの分析

日本で保育園が不足している問題に応じて代替教育のオプションが増えています。一つは幼児園というの早期教育の学校という可能性です。いくつかの幼児園で運動技能から英語に至るまで，さまざまなカリキュラムに焦点があてられています。本研究では，東京にある英語幼児園におけるストーリーテリングタスクの説明や分析を行います。この学校では，探究教学法「Inquiry Learning」を用いて児童に教えています。英語イマージョンの環境ですべての科目を英語を用いて教えています。アメリカの小中学校の学科「Language Arts」言語技術に基づく科目もカリキュラムに入っています。一学期で三才児から四才児のクラスで毎日ストーリーテリングタスクを行い，それを録音したものを書き起こし，そのデータを収集・分析しました

Fearless: Eric Lee

Snapping pictures of his fellow Gettysburgians around campus as the visual communications intern, and fearlessly working with other students to create, organize, and lead the new Asian Student Alliance (ASA) group on campus, Eric Lee ’15 finds himself at the crossroads of art and activism. New to campus this year after two years in the making, the ASA is a student-led, -run, and -organized group focused on celebrating different Asian cultures and heritages, closing the gap between international and domestic students, and creating a social, cultural, and political forum for students to dialogue, specifically about issues facing Asian communities. [excerpt

Behind Valencia: A Contemporary Play

SYNOPSIS The purpose of this play is to highlight the length that modern females go to in order to maintain a desired appearance, especially across social media. These desired appearances are influenced by the glamorous and unrealistic looks and physiques that are prevalent in the media. Essentially, the primary goal of these characters is to attract the attention of their male counterparts because of the gender roles society promotes. This shallow lifestyle can be completely consuming for impressionable, young females