Towards a Theory of Practice: Critical Transdisciplinary Multiliteracies

About the book: Education institutions and organizations throughout the world are currently being held accountable for achieving and maintaining historically unmatched standards of academic quality and performance. Accreditation bodies; policy makers; boards of trustees; and teacher, parent, and student groups all place educational institutions and organizations under unprecedented accountability pressures. The aim of this volume is to explore and better understand how these pressures are impacting a broad range of social and cultural issues and, subsequently, how these issues impact student motivation and learnin

From intersubjectivity to interculturalism in digital learning environments

The paper presents the work of the research program “Studies on\ud Intermediality as Intercultural Mediation” a joint international venture that seeks\ud to provide blended-learning -both online and in-classroom- methodologies for the\ud development of interculturalism and associated emotional empathic responses\ud through the study of art and literary fiction.1\ud Technological development is consistent with human desire to draw on\ud previous information and experiences in order to apply acquired knowledge to\ud present life conditions and, furthermore, make improvements for the future.\ud Therefore, it is logical that human agentive consciousness has been directed\ud towards encouraging action at a distance by all possible means. The evolution in\ud media technologies bears witness to this fact.\ud This paper explores the paradoxes behind the growing emphasis on spatial\ud metaphors during the 20th-century and a dynamic concept of space as the site of\ud relational constructions where forms and structural patterns become formations\ud constructed in interaction, and where the limit or border becomes a constitutive\ud feature, immanently connected with the possibility of its transgression. The paper\ud contends that the development of mass media communication, and particularly the\ud digital turn, has dramatically impacted on topographical spaces, both sociocultural and individual, and that the emphasis on „inter‟ perspectives, hybridism,\ud ambiguities, differences and meta-cognitive articulations of awareness of limits\ud and their symbolic representations, and the desire either to transgress limits or to\ud articulate „in-between‟, intercultural „third spaces‟, etc. are symptomatic of\ud structural problems at the spatial-temporal interface of culture and its\ud representations. Finally, the paper brings into attention research on the\ud neuroscientific basis of intersubjectivity in order to point out the material basis of\ud human knowledge and cognition and its relationship to the archiving of historical\ud memory and information transfer through education. It also offers and brief\ud introduction to the dynamics of SIIM

Textual Mediation in Simulated Nursing Handoffs: Examining How Student Writing Coordinates Action

In clinical nursing simulations, a group of students provide care for a robotic patient during a structured scenario. As care is transferred from one group to another, they participate in a patient handoff, with outgoing students passing key information onto incoming students. In healthcare, the nursing handoff is a critical and perilous communication moment that is mediated by a range of participants and texts. Drawing on observations and video recordings of 52 simulation handoffs in the United States, this article examines how two student-designed texts – a collaborative patient chart and individual notes – are leveraged during the handoff. I also consider how handoff talk and writing changes as student nursing knowledge increases over the course of a year. By focusing on textual mediation of the simulated nursing handoff, this article contributes to existing research on professional writing pedagogy and to nursing scholarship on the handoff. Ultimately, it argues that a textual mediation framework can help bridge class room and professional contexts by evaluating student writing not for how successfully it meets a set of imposed criteria but for how effectively it supports classroom activities

Reinventing discovery learning: a field-wide research program

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. Whereas some educational designers believe that students should learn new concepts through explorative problem solving within dedicated environments that constrain key parameters of their search and then support their progressive appropriation of empowering disciplinary forms, others are critical of the ultimate efficacy of this discovery-based pedagogical philosophy, citing an inherent structural challenge of students constructing historically achieved conceptual structures from their ingenuous notions. This special issue presents six educational research projects that, while adhering to principles of discovery-based learning, are motivated by complementary philosophical stances and theoretical constructs. The editorial introduction frames the set of projects as collectively exemplifying the viability and breadth of discovery-based learning, even as these projects: (a) put to work a span of design heuristics, such as productive failure, surfacing implicit know-how, playing epistemic games, problem posing, or participatory simulation activities; (b) vary in their target content and skills, including building electric circuits, solving algebra problems, driving safely in traffic jams, and performing martial-arts maneuvers; and (c) employ different media, such as interactive computer-based modules for constructing models of scientific phenomena or mathematical problem situations, networked classroom collective “video games,” and intercorporeal master–student training practices. The authors of these papers consider the potential generativity of their design heuristics across domains and contexts

Semiotic approach to a practice-oriented knowledge transfer

Knowledge is a valuable asset in organisations that has become significant as a strategic resource in the information age. Many studies have focused on managing knowledge in organisations. In particular, knowledge transfer has become a significant issue concerned with the movement of knowledge across organisational boundaries. One way to capture knowledge in a transferrable form is through practice. In this paper, we discuss how organisations can transfer knowledge through practice effectively and propose a model for a semiotic approach to practice-oriented knowledge transfer. In this model, practice is treated as a sign that represents knowledge, and its localisation is analysed as a semiotic process

Carpool Karaoke: Deconstructing the directly lived experience of hearing oneself singing

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of postmodern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature

Tasks, cognitive agents, and KB-DSS in workflow and process management

The purpose of this paper is to propose a nonparametric interest rate term structure model and investigate its implications on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities. The nonparametric spot interest rate process is estimated from the observed short-term interest rates following a robust estimation procedure and the market price of interest rate risk is estimated as implied from the historical term structure data. That is, instead of imposing a priori restrictions on the model, data are allowed to speak for themselves, and at the same time the model retains a parsimonious structure and the computational tractability. The model is implemented using historical Canadian interest rate term structure data. The parametric models with closed form solutions for bond and bond option prices, namely the Vasicek (1977) and CIR (1985) models, are also estimated for comparison purpose. The empirical results not only provide strong evidence that the traditional spot interest rate models and market prices of interest rate risk are severely misspecified but also suggest that different model specifications have significant impact on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities.

Improving work processes by making the invisible visible

Increasingly, companies are taking part in process improvement programmes, which brings about a growing need for employees to interpret and act on data representations. We have carried out case studies in a range of companies to identify the existence and need of what we call Techno-mathematical Literacies (TmL): functional mathematical knowledge mediated by tools and grounded in the context of specific work situations. Based on data gathered from a large biscuit manufacturing and packaging company, we focus our analysis here on semiotic mediation within activity systems and identify two sets of related TmL: the first concerns rendering some invisible aspects visible through the production of mathematical signs; the second concerns developing meanings for action from an interpretation of these signs. We conclude with some more general observations concerning the role that mathematical signs play in the workplace. The nee

Internal Chronotopic Genre Structures : The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in the Context of the Belgian Literary Polysystem

One of the most fundamental problems of systemic approaches to literature is the question of how systemic principles might be translated into a manageable methodological framework. This contribution proposes that a combination of functionalistsystemic theories (in casu Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory – especially the textually oriented versions – and the prototypical genre approach proposed by Dirk De Geest and Hendrik Van Gorp 1999) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory shows great promise in this respect. Since I am primarily interested in literary genres, the prototypical genre approach assumes a central position in my theoretical framework. My main argument is that Bakhtin’s chronotope concept offers interesting perspectives as a heuristic tool within a functionalist-systemic approach to genre studies, enabling the study not only of the constitutive elements of genre systems, but also of their mutual relations. Bakhtin’s own vague definitions of the concept somewhat hamper the process of putting it into practice for this purpose, but with the aid of the distinction between generic and motivic chronotopes, that problem can be solved. A detailed, comprehensive account of the theoretical premises underlying my proposal can be found in Bemong (under review); here I restrict myself to the basics