Culturally Responsive Computing for American Indian Youth: Making Activities With Electronic Textiles in the Native Studies Classroom

By providing access to hands-on activities and the physical and digital tools necessary to complete them, maker activities encourage cross-disciplinary, interest-driven learning and problem solving in schools. However, maker movement efforts to broaden participation into computer science have largely ignored Indigenous populations. In this dissertation, I examine how electronic textiles (e-textiles) materials connects to the heritage craft practices found in many Indigenous communities. By design, e-textiles materials combine low-tech craft practices like sewing with high-tech engineering and programming. Framing learning computing within these two distinct but overlapping cultural contexts provides youth will a familiar context in which to learn something new (programming), promotes positive identity development, and fosters connections across multiple dimensions of youth’s lives. At the core of this work is design-based research into the development and implementation of a three-week electronic textiles unit in gender-segregated Native Studies class with American Indian youth (12-14 years old) at a charter school located on tribal lands in the Southwest. This unit was implemented four times over the course of the school year. Findings highlight how different groups of students (American Indian girls and American Indian boys) engaged with e-textiles activities and how their perspectives on computing developed through participation in the unit. In addition, the teacher’s perspective on integrating digital technologies in the Native Studies classroom is explored within the context of contemporary Federal Indian educational policy and practice. This work makes three significant contributions to ethnography, computing education, and American Indian education. First, it proposes a new methodology through the integration of ethnography with design-based research and critical Indigenous research approaches. Second, it contributes to the emerging field of culturally responsive computing by exploring what happens when computing moves beyond the screen and into the tangible realm. Third, it furthers our understandings of the role of digital technologies in American Indian education, with a particular focus on how making activities might contribute to increased educational sovereignty for Indigenous peoples throughout the United States

Culturally Responsive Computing for American Indian Youth: Making Activities With Electronic Textiles in the Native Studies Classroom

By providing access to hands-on activities and the physical and digital tools necessary to complete them, maker activities encourage cross-disciplinary, interest-driven learning and problem solving in schools. However, maker movement efforts to broaden participation into computer science have largely ignored Indigenous populations. In this dissertation, I examine how electronic textiles (e-textiles) materials connects to the heritage craft practices found in many Indigenous communities. By design, e-textiles materials combine low-tech craft practices like sewing with high-tech engineering and programming. Framing learning computing within these two distinct but overlapping cultural contexts provides youth will a familiar context in which to learn something new (programming), promotes positive identity development, and fosters connections across multiple dimensions of youth’s lives. At the core of this work is design-based research into the development and implementation of a three-week electronic textiles unit in gender-segregated Native Studies class with American Indian youth (12-14 years old) at a charter school located on tribal lands in the Southwest. This unit was implemented four times over the course of the school year. Findings highlight how different groups of students (American Indian girls and American Indian boys) engaged with e-textiles activities and how their perspectives on computing developed through participation in the unit. In addition, the teacher’s perspective on integrating digital technologies in the Native Studies classroom is explored within the context of contemporary Federal Indian educational policy and practice. This work makes three significant contributions to ethnography, computing education, and American Indian education. First, it proposes a new methodology through the integration of ethnography with design-based research and critical Indigenous research approaches. Second, it contributes to the emerging field of culturally responsive computing by exploring what happens when computing moves beyond the screen and into the tangible realm. Third, it furthers our understandings of the role of digital technologies in American Indian education, with a particular focus on how making activities might contribute to increased educational sovereignty for Indigenous peoples throughout the United States

The auditory environment of the young child

The basic aim of this study is to explore the nature and development of the child's ability to perceive, understand and interpret auditory stimuli from which ordinary linguistic cues have been eliminated or in which they have been severely reduced. The term "non-linguistic" as it will be used here needs clarification. It refers to the use of any acoustic material except the conventional vocal symbols of everyday speech. Thus, it does not exclude human vocalizations as such, but only those which carry the semantic content of the language of the individual or subject. Confusion is possible over this issue because of the wide definition of language currently held. Thus the first definition supplied by English and English (1958) is "any form of intercommunicative behaviour, verbal or non-verbal". To demarcate our area of interest more precisely it is necessary to attempt an a priori classification of the total acoustic environment of an individual of a given language and culture

An Inquiry into Gardner\u27s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Strengths of Students Placed in Special Education under Mildly Disabled Categories

This study explored the strengths displayed by 4th-5th grade students placed in special education under mildly disabled categories as compared to the intelligences defined by Howard Gardner in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Gardner, 1983, 1999). These categories consist of Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) and Mildly Intellectually Disabled (MUD). Critics maintain that special education has been focused on the weaknesses of students while overlooking their strengths (Miller, 1993; Armstrong, 2000). Under new legislation and new performance goals for special education, the time has come to focus on students\u27 strengths and equal opportunities for students to learn the curriculum mandated by our state. Theoretically, this study was grounded in John Dewey\u27s (1910) theory of education, specifically transformative thinking, and Maxine Greene\u27s (1995) theory of releasing the imagination. Methodologically, it was grounded in Max Van Manen\u27s (1990) phenomenological hermeneutics (researching the lived experiences of students labeled disabled and their teacher and interpreting the experiences of these students and the strengths they exhibit), and Clandinin and Connelly\u27s (2000) narrative inquiry (telling the stories of a special education teacher and her students). Data collection methods included classroom observations, teacher, parent, and student interviews, research journals, and field notes Key findings of this study indicated that parents, the teacher and the paraprofessional were able to recognize distinct strengths in the student participants. However, the students themselves had difficulty naming their strengths. The strengths observed by the parents, the teacher and paraprofessional, and those identified by the student participants, particularly spatial and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence patterns as identified by Gardner (1983, 1999), are areas most neglected by our school curriculum. Examples given by the student participants of what they found easy to learn were hands-on or experiential types of activities. Perhaps the most significant finding of the study was that the eight intelligence categories formulated by Howard Gardner (1983, 1999) do not fully capture the ways these students demonstrated strengths in the classroom and at home. It is my hope that we can find ways to allow these groups of labeled individuals to have a place in our schools without being isolated in a pull-out program. It is my hope that public school can move beyond the standardized tests that have no meaning once a student leaves school. It is my hope that through telling the stories of these students, all members of society can recognize that these labeled individuals do not fit the mold, but have much to offer society and deserve the chance at life often denied

Gendered language in recent short stories by Japanese women, and in English translation

This article analyses five recent Japanese short stories written by women, with female first person narrators, and the English translations of these stories. I examine how the writers interact with the culturally loaded concept of gendered language to develop characters and themes. The strategies used by translators to render gendered styles into English are also discussed: case-by-case creative solutions appear most effective. ‘Feminine’ and other gendered styles are used to index social identity, to highlight the difference between the social and inner self, and different styles are mixed together for impact. Gendered styles, therefore, are of central importance and translators wishing to adhere closely to the source text should pay close attention to them. All the narrators of the stories demonstrate an understanding of ‘social sanction and taboo’. Two accustom themselves to a socially acceptable future, another displays an uneasy attitude to language and convention, while others fall into stereotypes imposed on them or chastise themselves for inappropriate behaviour. The stories illustrate the way in which gendered language styles in Japanese can be manipulated, as both the writers and the characters they create deliberately use different styles for effect

The Impact of Training on Women's Micro-Enterprise Development

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Physics Avoidance & Cooperative Semantics: Inferentialism and Mark Wilson’s Engagement with Naturalism Qua Applied Mathematics

Mark Wilson argues that the standard categorizations of "Theory T thinking"— logic-centered conceptions of scientific organization (canonized via logical empiricists in the mid-twentieth century)—dampens the understanding and appreciation of those strategic subtleties working within science. By "Theory T thinking," we mean to describe the simplistic methodology in which mathematical science allegedly supplies ‘processes’ that parallel nature's own in a tidily isomorphic fashion, wherein "Theory T’s" feigned rigor and methodological dogmas advance inadequate discrimination that fails to distinguish between explanatory structures that are architecturally distinct. One of Wilson's main goals is to reverse such premature exclusions and, thus, early on Wilson returns to John Locke's original physical concerns regarding material science and the congeries of descriptive concern insofar as capturing varied phenomena (i.e., cohesion, elasticity, fracture, and the transmission of coherent work) encountered amongst ordinary solids like wood and steel are concerned. Of course, Wilson methodologically updates such a purview by appealing to multiscalar techniques of modern computing, drawing from Robert Batterman's work on the greediness of scales and Jim Woodward's insights on causation

One story, many journeys: an auto/biographic narrative case study of a community-university partnership

This is the story of a project to connect the resources of a university to the struggles of a group of Congolese asylum seekers in the city of Derby. It represents a case study of a whole process: this includes a specific project established to explore how a university might fulfil its stated goals of being closely anchored in the local and regional community; and how it might engage and marshal its resources to provide educational and maybe research opportunities, while giving priority to community-based projects that tackle social disadvantage. The thesis is made up of a number of overlapping elements: there is the story of the project itself, of why the University became involved, and the nature of the interaction with a particular community, as seen through the eyes of some of the Congolese and me the project coordinator/researcher. It includes my struggles to establish a steering committee with the Congolese and the creation of a range of educational/recreational resources to help members of a community manage the difficult, stressful and even traumatic processes of asylum. The project led to the establishment of a community association and various initiatives to dialogically engage with the community and gather diverse narratives. Finally it led to various outcomes leading to what might be a ‘Reconnecting the hearts and minds’ project, that created spaces for story telling for a number of women and men migrants. The project also included an evaluation, which developed at its core, into a collection of narratives chronicling the difficult processes of forced migration, where people experience the pain of family separation, the dislocation of landing in a foreign country. A country whose language was different, whose customs were strange and where the processes of claiming asylum could be alienating, and where racism is experienced. We can call this project and its evaluation a piece of action research with a series of narratives at its heart. The project and evaluation together raise questions about the role of creative activity and narrative in managing painful transitions. There is another story within the bigger one, however, a story of a project coordinator and his relationship with the community and the University of Derby... of initial enthusiasm followed by marginalisation and the closure of a supportive community development unit in the University; and of the placement of this role, for want of a better home, in the marketing department. This is also a narrative of registering for a doctorate, of being rejected, and of seeking to think through, with the help of others, what a good enough doctorate might entail. The end product has become a process of auto/biographical narrative reflexive research in which the narratives of the migrants intertwine with the researcher’s own; around the themes of dislocation, and of the struggles for voice and agency. The basic threads of the study are of a dislocating experience, and of how resources of hope can be found in creative activity – whether a sewing class, telling stories, fashion shows or engaging in auto/biographical narrative reflexivity. The basic argument has to do with tokenism and the disrespect that can surround university civic engagement as well as how asylum seekers are treated callously more generally; but also how resources of hope can make a difference. There is also the troubling issue of voice in research and whose story really counts; of a white, middle class male engaging with distressed women migrants, and of what might have been a silencing of the women concerned. But through values of commitment, and of learning to listen, the project became more dialogical, as evidenced in the women’s stories

Unsupervised compositionality prediction of nominal compounds

Nominal compounds such as red wine and nut case display a continuum of compositionality, with varying contributions from the components of the compound to its semantics. This article proposes a framework for compound compositionality prediction using distributional semantic models, evaluating to what extent they capture idiomaticity compared to human judgments. For evaluation, we introduce data sets containing human judgments in three languages: English, French, and Portuguese. The results obtained reveal a high agreement between the models and human predictions, suggesting that they are able to incorporate information about idiomaticity. We also present an in-depth evaluation of various factors that can affect prediction, such as model and corpus parameters and compositionality operations. General crosslingual analyses reveal the impact of morphological variation and corpus size in the ability of the model to predict compositionality, and of a uniform combination of the components for best results

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge