Using learning journals to identify critical incidents of understanding

Learning journals have been used extensively in Art and Design at University College Worcester (UCW) as a means of evidencing the kind of approach, deep/surface, students have taken to their learning. They are increasingly being recognised as a more reliable means of establishing whether students understand what they are doing than the finished artefacts such as paintings, ceramics and even essays. This paper will outline the role of the journals in relation to the assessment scheme, which is structured around Biggs’ SOLO taxonomy (Biggs J, Collis K, 1982), and explore several of the problematics that arise in both their use and their non-use. The paper will also examine the nature and use of learning outcomes since they play a significant role in the journals themselves

Negotiating sexuality and masculinity in school sport: An autoethnography

This autoethnography explores challenging and ethically sensitive issues around sexual orientation, sexual identity and masculinity in the context of school sport. Through storytelling, I aim to show how sometimes ambiguous encounters with heterosexism, homophobia and hegemonic masculinity through sport problematise identity development for young same-sex attracted males. By foregrounding personal embodied experience, I respond to an absence of stories of gay and bisexual experiences among males in physical education and school sport, in an effort to reduce a continuing sense of Otherness and difference regarding same-sex attracted males. I rely on the story itself to express the embodied forms of knowing that inhabit the experiences I describe, and resist a finalising interpretation of the story. Instead, I offer personal reflections on particular theoretical and methodological issues which relate to both the form and content of the story

Music, Myth and Motherland: Culturally Centered Music & Imagery

This study assessed ethnic identity in adults of Indian origin through Culturally Centered Music & Imagery (CCMI), a music-centered, psychotherapeutic technique that emphasizes socio-cultural context, identity and meaning. The purpose was to examine how participants’ native music, in the context of CCMI, could evoke identity-based imagery and assess ethnic identity in a globalized context. Five cisgender Indian men and women from Hindu backgrounds participated in one CCMI session each, including an interview and follow up discussions. The qualitative methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1997) was used in this study. The results reveal how CCMI can access the cultural and ethnic unconscious, a relatively new area of consciousness in Jungian and GIM paradigms. The study also shows how CCMI can highlight the fluid and multiple nature of ethnic identity, revealing its intersection with other identities such as gender, sexual orientation, caste and religion. In addition, the data support the use of contextual and identity-based music selections in assisting participants to explore, recreate or gain a deeper understanding of their ethnic identity through image and metaphor. Major findings include new categories of ethnic identity such as Aesthetic, Ancestral, Philosophical, Mythological, Spiritual and Core Indian identities. Subthemes include experiences of Rebirth, Disconnection, Unconscious Divide, as well as other socio-cultural identities such as Kaleidoscopic, World Citizen and Global Nomad. These and other themes relate to American, global, spiritual, queer, socio-economic, caste, gendered, and individual contexts. The research also suggests that this technique may be effective in emotionally and psychologically supporting adults who are going through the process of immigration or acculturation

Sitting in the Bush, or Deliberate Idleness

In this essay, Sylvia Bowerbank describes wandering with her two dogs on her land on the edge of Beverly Swamp in Southern Ontario in an effort to cultivate Green habits and attitudes in her daily life

Sharing our stories : celebrating critically reflective psychological textual practice : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

This study involves my engaging with ideas through three interweaving, storied strands: some personal experiences of my own, the historical development of the academic discipline of psychology, and the pivotal autobiographical vignettes in five psychological articles. Ethical considerations permeate the overlapping theoretical, metaphorical and analytical processes of this work. I consider how writers and readers can engage together through the reflexive sharing of personal narratives, working toward interpretations of experiences in terms of subject positionings within powerful cultural discourses. A metaphorical perspective is integrated into my research process to help me in my attempts to articulate and evoke some fleeting traces of meaning through the elusive symbolic system of language. My analyses of the five focus pieces of writing attend to their skilfully metaphorical, critically reflective use of language within a supportive, nurturing discursive space. This thesis celebrates the transformational possibilities inherent in these pieces of psychological counter-practice. I believe these writers usefully address social sciences' 'crisis' concerns around the relationship of psychology with 'real' people, enabling re-interpretations of experiences in terms of gender and social power relationships and the fashioning of different, more useful meanings for our storied, culturally directed experiences

Spartan Daily, November 19, 1997

Volume 109, Issue 58https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9205/thumbnail.jp

AI Researchers, Video Games Are Your Friends!

If you are an artificial intelligence researcher, you should look to video games as ideal testbeds for the work you do. If you are a video game developer, you should look to AI for the technology that makes completely new types of games possible. This chapter lays out the case for both of these propositions. It asks the question "what can video games do for AI", and discusses how in particular general video game playing is the ideal testbed for artificial general intelligence research. It then asks the question "what can AI do for video games", and lays out a vision for what video games might look like if we had significantly more advanced AI at our disposal. The chapter is based on my keynote at IJCCI 2015, and is written in an attempt to be accessible to a broad audience.Comment: in Studies in Computational Intelligence Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 669 2017. Springe