Promoting creative English teaching using Chinese culture for elementary schooling in Taiwan

To make English an interesting subject for elementary school students, teachers need to know what material attracts students, how to motivate students, and how to release students\u27 creativity. Therefore, This project incorporates the concepts of multiple intelligences, motivation, culture and language, and development of creativity to provide a model for promoting creative English teaching in the elementary schools of Taiwan. In addition, the content of the unit, based on Chinese culture and the comparison of Chinese and American cultures, is an innovative curriculum designed to motivate students to learn English

My Story. Digital Storytelling across Europe for Social Cohesion

‘My Story’ (Mysty) is a pan-European, Erasmus+ funded Digital Storytelling project focused on intercultural competency. It has eight partners (HE, secondary schools and NGOs) across four countries (Austria, Italy, Hungary and the UK) and involves the collection, editing and uploading of digital stories to a shared ‘toolbox’. These stories focus on ‘food’, ‘family’ and ‘festival’ and act as a platform for diversity awareness and digital upskilling. The project is driven by the principle that innovative teaching resources form part of broader pedagogic strategies that can actively help tackle issues of diversity common across the EU. The paper discusses the process the project went through, some of its challenges and its results and, on the basis of these, looks at the role digital storytelling as a way of expressing different ethical, cultural or personal issues

Performance Through an Avatar: Exploring Affect and Ideology Through Narrative in Videogames

Videogames are a major source of popular cultural narratives surpassing even Hollywood films. Videogames, however, cast the player as the active agent within the narrative as opposed to film, television, and traditional theatre where the separation between performer and audience is clearly demarcated. This dissertation investigates the affective potential of videogames realized through the relationship of the player and the avatar within the game world. Specifically, I look at the avatar as an affective conduit for the player, how the feedback between the player and avatar creates a cybernetic relationship, how this relationship changes the player, and how this change potentially augments the players interpretation of realityvirtual and otherwise. It is through this changed (and augmented) interpretation of reality that socio/political ideological meaningsintentional or notmay be absorbed by the player. Ethnographic research conducted with six volunteer participants combined with my own autoethnographic research into several recent popular videogames is intersected with theories of affect, embodiment, and ideology. My findings suggest that experience with the virtual realities of game worlds is one step removed from actual experience. Since videogames are composed of representations, the ideological positions embedded within those representations are not simply presented and understood like traditional theatre, film, and television, but are embodied by the player through the avatar as (nearly direct) experience. Theatre, film, and television have rich critical histories and this study of the players performance through the avatar as an affective conduit and receiver/transmitter of ideology joins the growing critical body of work regarding the newer storytelling medium of videogames

Object narratives, imaginings and multilingual communities: young people’s digital stories in the making

This paper draws on research from a global 5-year project, Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling (2012-2017), which links language and intercultural learning with literacy, active citizenship and the arts. A critical ethnographic approach was adopted in the research project and the multilingual digital stories were an integral part of the research process. With the project’s focus on multilingualism and creation of bilingual digital texts, young people had to imagine how to use language in new contexts, uncover narratives around objects, and negotiate interfaces between different cultural landscapes. The research findings revealed the complexity of multilingual digital storytelling and how young people (aged 6-18 years old) learnt to become meaning makers discovering their own voices in unfamiliar contexts. Through these digital stories the young people forged strong links with the past and created new multilingual communities

Putting Folklore To Use

Essays by thirteen folklorists explore applications in such areas as museums, aiding the homeless, environmental planning, art therapy, designing public spaces, organizing development, tourism, the public sector, aging, and creating an occupation\u27s image.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_folklore/1000/thumbnail.jp

Perpetuation Excellence in Teaching, Leadership, and Learning (PETLL): Pilot Implementation Study

A capstone submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in the College of Education at Morehead State University by Henry Webb and Jeff Hawkins on March 15, 2013