DOC 2014-10 Proposal for MS in Education - Leadership for Educational Systems

Legislative authorit

Culture and Commerce

Illustrates the possibilities and challenges of making partnerships between economic development agencies and traditional arts organizations work. Examines the outcome of eight collaborations that were formed as part of a partnership funding initiative

Seeing the bigger picture: visual imagination and the social brain

I studied multi-modal aspects of visual imagination in relation to visual art and complex images, defining ‘visual imagination’ broadly as a dynamic of complex psychological processes that integrate visual information with prior experiences and knowledge to construct internal models of oneself, others and the outside world. This reflects the ultimate aim of my work to develop engaging cultural and clinical resources that strengthen social brain networks, tailored to personal interests, age and cognitive health. I pursued two interrelated research programmes based primarily at the Wellcome Collection, as part of my interdisciplinary residency with Created Out of Mind. I used complementary neuroscientific and visual research methods to probe relationships between visual imagination and the social brain in neurologically healthy adults and people living with various forms of dementia. The Social Brain Atlas and connectome (Alcalá López et al., Cerebral Cortex 2017) was recently computed from 3972 functional neuroimaging studies in 22712 healthy adults: to contextualise my research in the social brain, I first translated the social brain connectome to functional infographics (relational spatial representations) of the four hierarchical processing levels of the Social Brain Atlas, and generated visual imagination brain profiles in healthy adults and profiles of canonical dementia syndromes. I used these to generate hypotheses and guide analysis of my neuroscientific experiments. I recruited three participant cohorts: 17 neurologically healthy adults aged 20-30 years; 20 neurologically healthy adults aged 50+ years; and 11 senior adults living with various forms of dementia. These research participants took part in five neuroscientific experiments that I had designed, in which I used advanced technologies to capture physiological responses and established as well as novel visual research methods to study neuropsychological responses to visual art, complex imagery and colour experiences. I employed an arts-based facilitated conversation methodology, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS); and I developed novel quantitative methods to analyse recorded eye tracking data, electrodermal activity and speech samples. I used both parametric and non-parametric statistical methods to compare participant cohorts. In parallel with the neuroscientific research, I developed a series of art experiments at UCL Institute of Making, and my studio at the Limehouse Art Foundation, East London. My artistic research complemented my neuroscientific work by emphasising individual experience over generic perceptual mechanisms: by creating space for personal interactions with art, the research becomes contextualised in the social world. The artistic research resulted in a public exhibition of optical instruments, visual artworks and installations that expanded on the two neuroscientific research projects, complementing the written thesis with the embodied language of visual art. Visitors could freely explore the perceptual effects of the optical instruments and were invited to reflect on the visual artworks with the Visual Thinking Strategies method

A Watershed Moment: The First National Conference on Science in Out-of-School Time

Summarizes discussions and recommendations from a September 2008 conference on integrating science and technology education into afterschool, weekend, and summer programs. Includes papers on strategies, funding, collaborations, and evaluation

Eagle Executive Magazine

From the Desk of Dean Amason College News Department News Feature: Research That Matters Big News Graduate Programs Alumni News Development Newshttps://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/eagle-executive/1026/thumbnail.jp

Raising the ‘Beatrice’s Goat’: The Indian Experience in Microcredit

Empowerment of the poor entails three basic inter-linked dimensions – generation of employment (and income), reduction of poverty, and erasing inequality. The perspective has now undergone a basic change from the collective care mechanism of a paternalistic state intervention meted out from the top to bottom to a people-centered and participation-oriented bottom up approach. With this new perspective, new practices have emerged through integrated community participation of the poor. Thus the basis of the concept of micro finance is self-mobilization and self-organization of the poor at the community level driven by an ardent desire backed by an unfaltering trust in their own inherent capacity to improve their living conditions by themselves, given an enabling environment. An active realization of such self-mobilization is found in self help groups (SHGs), formed for distributing the microcredit benefits, inspired by the success of the Bangladesh Grameen experiment. This approach has already taken strong roots across the lengths and breadths of India as an effective and viable channel to take the poor to a new domain of economic empowerment and social upliftment. Microcredit, which synergies the thrift and credit habits of the poor in a participatory and informal setting, is now widely acknowledged as a strategic tool in all poverty alleviation programmes. This paper discusses the Indian experience in microcredit.Microcredit; Indian experience; empowerment; financial inclusion