Preschoolers developing words and worlds

This is a participatory project developed in a Portuguese kindergarten and organized into two phases. The first is the development of a multidisciplinary activity plan made for and with children. The goal is to work with children in a TALK area inside the classroom to improve language, and to initiate them into Information Communication Technologies (ICT) skills promoting Media Education (ME) as well. In Portugal, ICT integration is rarely implemented at kindergarten age, and frequently uses dependent technologies (requiring adult assistance). On the other hand, in literature tangible interfaces are considered a good approach to fulfill child abilities and start digital literacy. The second phase intends to update a low-cost manipulative to the same end: a digital flannel board. Nevertheless, children are its design builders, and as co-researchers they will plan, execute, explore, play and evaluate their own interface.CIE

Words and Worlds: Irony Makes Literary Creations

In this paper I take up anew the suggestion recurrent in the work of Kierkegaard and Lukács, among others, that literature is fundamentally ironic. Literary creations, I argue, are ironic because they convey the real world, even though the worldhood of this world is ineffable. In creating a world from words in a novel or poem, the author confronts his or her own scepticism about the possibilities of written expression. Literary creations are only completed when the reader is able to engage with the world of words that is constituted in the work, and to realize that what is said in the writing does not exhaust the literary creation as a whole

Words and Worlds: Language and the Perceived Separation of Humans from Nature

Cultural representations· of the world permeate much of human experience of that world. In this society, it seems increasingly unlikely that there can be experience that is not somehow overlaid by representation. Under such circumstances, it is our forms of representation that have the greatest impact on how we understand, give meaning to, and value this place in which we live. Perhaps the most significant of those forms is language1 for it is both · the most pervasive and the one through which the others are most often interpreted

The Words and Worlds of Disability: Discourses on Disablement Within the Situated Practices of Service Providers

From a traditional perspective, disability stood outside the normal bounds of development, belonging within the realm of pathology and the disabled person was defined as deficient. Disability may also be characterized as an instance of human diversity and disabled as a designated identity that is socially constructed in an ongoing process—an interaction between individuals and social contexts. The process of disablement is linked to discourses used to define and act upon people ascribed with a disabled identity. This study assumes that disability is an instance of human diversity, a valid developmental trajectory, which is enacted and embedded in sociocultural, political, economic, historical, and discursive contexts. Discourses contribute to how disability is understood and then enacted in policies and situated everyday practices. With a focus on the human service delivery system for developmentally disabled people, I assessed discourses and conceptualizations of disability enacted by service providers through narrative inquiry. I also collaborated with service providers through a focus group discussion, guided by sociocultural theories on teaching and learning, to introduce neurodiversity and disablement as a contextualized process. The results of this study suggest the situated nature of discourse, with varying language as it relates to local practices. Situated practice-based discourses enacted “on the ground” were in tension with local/service-driven and deficit-based languages. The ways of conceptualizing and understanding disability, however, were consistently that of a socially contextualized construct. Service providers negotiated different positions in attempts to exercise agency and contest the designation of passivity attributed to disabled people they work with. Their language, however, varied and incorporated deficit-based, local, and situated practice-based discourses. Although disability is understood as a complex process beyond personal deficiency, discourses appear to remain in transition

The Classics, Race, and Community-Engaged or Public Scholarship

Our discipline has always been at, its core, concerned with language. At its best, The American Journal of Philology has professed to being a forum for those seeking knowledge of the words and worlds of Greece and Rome. It is unreasonable, however, to disentangle the discipline of philology and its allied fields – art history, philosophy, archaeology, and so forth – from the modern realities of slavery, race, and their impacts well after global abolition, emancipation, and any declaration of a post-racial period. That is, we bring a great deal of cultural baggage to what we call the Classics

Introduction: Themes and Issues in the Study of Indigenous Languages: Sharing Our Words and Worlds in Our Own Voices

Copyright © 2011 by Serafín M. Coronel-Molina & John H. McDowell. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) without written permission from the authors.This volume is the outcome of the First Symposium on Teaching Indigenous Languages of Latin America (STILLA), organized by the Minority Languages and Cultures of Latin America Program (MLCP) and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), which took place from August 14 to 16, 2008, at Indiana University at Bloomington. This event brought together instructors, practitioners, activists, indigenous leaders, scholars, and learners from around the globe, and was the first initiative of this scope in the world. It included research and pedagogy on the diverse languages and cultures of indigenous populations in Latin America and the Caribbean

The words and worlds of literary narrative: the trade-off between verbal presence and direct presence in the activity of reading

This paper disputes the notion, endorsed by much of narrative theory, that the reading of literary narrative is functionally analogous to an act of communication, where communication stands for the transfer of thought and conceptual information. The paper offers a basic typology of the sensorimotor effects of reading, which fall outside such a narrowly communication-based model of literary narrative. A main typological distinction is drawn between those sensorimotor effects pertaining to the narrative qua verbal utterance (verbal presence) and those sensorimotor effects pertaining to the imaginary physical world(s) of the story (direct presence). While verbal presence refers to the reader's vicarious perception of the voices of narrators and characters, direct presence refers to the emulated sensorimotor experience of the imaginary worlds that the narrators' and characters' utterances refer to. The paper further elaborates on how, by which kinds of narrative content and structure, direct presence may be prompted. The final section addresses some of the observational and historical caveats that must be attached to any theoretical inquiry made into the sensorimotor effects of reading. As a preliminary for further research, a few ideas about the model's potential for empirical validation are put forward. A brief, tentative history of the sensorimotor benefits of literary narrative reading is then outlined

Words and Worlds: Catholic Charismatic Prayer as Meaning-Making in Post- Modernity

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