In Their Own Words: Using Siblings’ Meanings about Daily Family Interaction to Understand the Influence of a Child with a Developmental Disability on the Sibling Experience

This study examined daily experiences of stress and coping among adolescent siblings of children with developmental disabilities. Early studies of this population have assumed that living with a disabled sibling is inherently stressful due to changes in the availability and allocation of familial resources. While recent work suggests that only a minority of nondisabled youth experience considerable stress related to family interactions involving a disabled sibling, few studies offer an understanding of how nondisabled siblings make meaning of their experiences and their attempts to cope with them. As such, we have a poor understanding of why some nondisabled siblings struggle while others do not. To address this gap in the literature, I drew on models of stress and coping to conduct a qualitative exploration of the cognitive appraisals used by nondisabled siblings during stressful family interactions. I conducted in-depth individual interviews with 11 nondisabled siblings (aged 10 to 17 years old) to elicit their descriptions of daily family interactions. The interviews were composed of audio-recorded dinner conversations and emotion maps as well as open-ended questions to elicit candid and detailed accounts of family life. Analyses of participants’ appraisal processes addressed the following questions: which aspects of daily family interactions they experienced as stressful and why they were appraised as stressful, how the participants attempted to manage these stressful interactions and why they chose particular coping behaviors and resources, and how their coordination of these appraisals were associated with their subsequent distress. The findings present three important clinical and research implications, including the importance of considering nondisabled siblings’ appraisals of stressful family interactions in clinical practice and research, the need to expand nondisabled siblings’ coping behaviors and resources for managing daily family-related stress, and the role of parents in nondisabled siblings’ experiences of stress

WHERE EXPERIENCES ARE: DUALIST, PHYSICALIST, ENACTIVE AND REFLEXIVE ACCOUNTS OF PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Dualists believe that experiences have neither location nor extension, while reductive and ‘non-reductive’ physicalists (biological naturalists) believe that experiences are really in the brain, producing an apparent impasse in current theories of mind. Enactive and reflexive models of perception try to resolve this impasse with a form of “externalism” that challenges the assumption that experiences must either be nowhere or in the brain. However, they are externalist in very different ways. Insofar as they locate experiences anywhere, enactive models locate conscious phenomenology in the dynamic interaction of organisms with the external world, and in some versions, they reduce conscious phenomenology to such interactions, in the hope that this will resolve the hard problem of consciousness. The reflexive model accepts that experiences of the world result from dynamic organism-environment interactions, but argues that such interactions are preconscious. While the resulting phenomenal world is a consequence of such interactions, it cannot be reduced to them. The reflexive model is externalist in its claim that this external phenomenal world, which we normally think of as the “physical world,” is literally outside the brain. Furthermore, there are no added conscious experiences of the external world inside the brain. In the present paper I present the case for the enactive and reflexive alternatives to more classical views and evaluate their consequences. I argue that, in closing the gap between the phenomenal world and what we normally think of as the physical world, the reflexive model resolves one facet of the hard problem of consciousness. Conversely, while enactive models have useful things to say about percept formation and representation, they fail to address the hard problem of consciousness

Collaborative action research in the chilean EFL classroom

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés, Licenciado en Educación)Este estudio discute los resultados obtenidos en una investigación cualitativa que involucra a un docente en formación como profesor-investigador en una Investigación-Acción, en un colegio de Santiago de Chile. El objetivo de este estudio fue explorar los beneficios de la Colaboración en Investigación-Acción como una práctica para promover la inclusión de la expresión oral del idioma inglés en las aulas chilenas. El profesor-investigador utilizó un diario como un instrumento para reflexionar sobre sus clases y actividades orales, las cuales fueron aplicadas en el colegio. Esas actividades orales fueron obtenidas de dos entrevistas grupales con docentes en formación de una universidad chilena, quienes fueron los colaboradores de este estudio, así como también la profesora mentora del colegio en el cual el profesor-investigador estaba haciendo su práctica. Los resultados mostraron que algunas de las actividades obtenidas en las entrevistas grupales promovieron la participación e interacción de los estudiantes durante las clases. Además, el profesor-investigador fue capaz de percibir la importancia de la reflexión de las actividades con el fin de hacer cambios y mejoras en su docencia. Asimismo, la colaboración entre pares, la cual fue representada en las entrevistas grupales, nos permitió reconocer nuestras fortalezas y mejorar nuestras debilidades cuando enseñamos. Finalmente, este estudio sugiere que todos los docentes deberían compartir sus experiencias, opiniones, sentimientos o pensamientos con sus colegas para así implementar colaboración, y también hacer de la reflexión un método habitual en su enseñanza para prevenir errores comunes representados por profesores en la sala de clases.This study discusses the outcomes of a qualitative research, which engaged a pre-service teacher as the teacher-researcher (T-R) in an Action Research (AR) design at a school in Santiago, Chile. The aim of this study was to explore the benefits of Collaborative Action Research (CAR) as a practice to foster the inclusion of speaking skills in Chilean EFL classrooms. The T-R used journals as an instrument to reflect on his teaching and speaking practices which were applied at the school. Those speaking practices were obtained from two group interviews with pre-service teachers from a Chilean university, who were the collaborators of this study, as well as the mentor teacher (M-T) from the school where the T-R was doing his practicum. The findings showed that the practices obtained in the group interviews encouraged students’ participation and interaction during classes. In addition, the T-R was able to perceive the importance of reflection on the practices in order to make changes and improvements in his teaching. Collaboration among peers, which was represented in the group interviews, allowed us to recognize our strengths and improve our weaknesses when teaching. Finally, this study suggests that all teachers should share their experiences, opinions, feelings, or thoughts with their colleagues in order to implement collaboration, and make reflection a common method in their teaching to prevent common errors committed by teachers in the classroom

Mathematical stories: Why do more boys than girls choose to study mathematics at AS-level in England?

Copyright @ 2005 Taylor & FrancisIn this paper I address the question: How is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? I draw on the findings of a qualitative research study involving interviews with 43 young people all studying mathematics in post-compulsory education in England. Working within a post-structuralist framework, I argue that gender is a project and one that is achieved in interaction with others. Through a detailed reading of Toni and Claudia’s stories I explore the tensions for young women who are engaging in mathematics, something that is discursively inscribed as masculine, while (understandably) being invested in producing themselves as female. I conclude by arguing that seeing ‘doing mathematics’ as ‘doing masculinity’ is a productive way of understanding why mathematics is so male dominated and by looking at the implications of this understanding for gender and mathematics reform work.This work is funded by the ESR

Quantum mechanics: Myths and facts

A common understanding of quantum mechanics (QM) among students and practical users is often plagued by a number of "myths", that is, widely accepted claims on which there is not really a general consensus among experts in foundations of QM. These myths include wave-particle duality, time-energy uncertainty relation, fundamental randomness, the absence of measurement-independent reality, locality of QM, nonlocality of QM, the existence of well-defined relativistic QM, the claims that quantum field theory (QFT) solves the problems of relativistic QM or that QFT is a theory of particles, as well as myths on black-hole entropy. The fact is that the existence of various theoretical and interpretational ambiguities underlying these myths does not yet allow us to accept them as proven facts. I review the main arguments and counterarguments lying behind these myths and conclude that QM is still a not-yet-completely-understood theory open to further fundamental research.Comment: 51 pages, pedagogic review, revised, new references, to appear in Found. Phy

Naturalizing Qualia

Hill (2014) argues that perceptual qualia, i.e. the ways in which things look from a viewpoint, are physical properties of objects. They are relational in nature, that is, they are functions of objects’ intrinsic properties, viewpoints, and observers. Hill also claims that his kind of representationalism is the only view capable of “naturalizing qualia”. After discussing a worry with Hill’s account, I put forward an alternative, which is just as “naturalization-friendly”. I build upon Chirimuuta’s color adverbialism (2015), and I argue that we would better serve the “naturalizing project” if we abandoned representationalism and preferred a broadly adverbialist view of perceptual qualia

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Visual Acquaintance, Action & The Explanatory Gap

Much attention has recently been paid to the idea, which I label ‘External World Acquaintance’ (EWA), that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is partially constituted by external features. One motivation for EWA which has received relatively little discussion is its alleged ability to help deal with the ‘Explanatory Gap’ (e.g. Fish 2008, 2009, Langsam 2011, Allen 2016). I provide a reformulation of this general line of thought, which makes clearer how and when EWA could help to explain the specific phenomenal nature of visual experience. In particular, I argue that by focusing on the different kinds of perceptual actions that are available in the case of visual spatial vs. colour perception, we get a natural explanation for why we should expect the specific nature of colour phenomenology to remain less readily intelligible than the specific nature of visual spatial phenomenology

Just a Taste: Lectures on Flavor Physics

We review the flavor structure of the Standard Model and the ways in which the flavor parameters are measured. This is an extended writeup of the TASI 2016 lectures on flavor physics. Earlier versions of these lectures were presented at pre-SUSY 2015 and Cornell University's Physics 7661 course in 2010.Comment: 138 pages, includes problems and solutions. To be published in the proceedings of TASI 201