Critical Pedagogies of Place: Some Considerations for Early Childhood Care and Education in a Superdiverse ‘Bicultural’ Aotearoa (New Zealand)

National education policy must respond to demographic changes.  In Aotearoa (New Zealand), recent immigration policy changes have resulted in the new challenge of superdiversity, which is overlaid in a bicultural context of the longstanding impacts of the colonisation of the Indigenous Māori.  The lack of equity in this ‘bicultural’ arrangement remains to be fully resolved due to the dominance of the settler culture. The early childhood care and education sector requires of its teachers a deep cultural understandings of and engagement with all those children and families present in the education settings. This article provides a discussion of the dilemma of superdiversity faced by a ‘bicultural’ education policy environment. It then describes the results of a study that utilised a process of documentary analysis to critically examine the macro- and micro-level policy statements and reports with regard to bicultural and cultural diversity matters in early childhood care and education settings in Aotearoa (New Zealand).   The implications of the findings point to challenges faced by teachers when translating policy commitments into pedagogical enactment. The findings suggest that it is important for teachers to not only engage deeply with the Indigenous Māori language, culture, and local histories of connectedness with place, but that this engagement should also be made available to immigrant children and families.  Teachers can engage with immigrant families’ important stories and histories of connectedness to the special places of their homelands.  The paper concludes with discussion of recommendations regarding the need for both pre-service and in-service education for teachers in relation to these important issues of equity, social justice, culture, diversity and place-connectedness

The Implementation of Mindfulness and Dance/Movement Therapy For Women with Postpartum Depression: A Literature Review

This literature review discusses the impact and effectiveness of using mindfulness-based interventions and a dance/movement therapy approach on mothers with postpartum depression (PPD) to promote their holistic well-being. The experience of giving birth and the transition to motherhood can be rewarding and remarkable, yet challenging and overwhelming. It is widely suggested if a mother who suffers from postpartum depression is left untreated and unattended, the ongoing depression and emotional distress can have negative impacts on their child’s well-being and development. The practice of mindfulness with women with PPD is suggested to be significant in reducing depression and improving psychological well-being especially concerning a decrease in stress and anxiety. Dance/movement therapy, a bodily-oriented modality with its emphasis on non-verbal expression and communication, is used to foster a mother’s well-being, and their attachment and attunement with their child. This thesis aims to explore the existing research on the implementation of mindfulness-based interventions and a dance/movement therapy approach on women with postpartum depression

The Role of Qualia Structure in Mandarin Children Acquiring Noun-modifying Constructions

Department of Chinese and Bilingual StudiesRefereed conference pape

Left-behind experience and language proficiency predict narrative abilities in the home language of Kam-speaking minority children in China

IntroductionStudies have documented that child experiences such as external/environmental factors as well as internal factors jointly affect acquisition outcomes in child language. Thus far, the findings have been heavily skewed toward Indo-European languages and children in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. By contrast, this study features an understudied minority language Kam, and a group of so-called left-behind children in China growing up in a unique social-communicative environment.MethodsFifty-five bilingual children aged 5–9 acquiring Kam as home language were assessed using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS MAIN). Twenty-three “two parents-left” children (mean age = 6;8, range: 5;0–9;2) remained in rural areas while both parents went to cities for employment, and they were raised by their grandparents. Thirty-two were “one parent-left” peers (mean age = 7;3, range: 5;0–9;3) who also resided in rural areas but were raised by one parent. Oral narrative texts were analysed for macrostructure based on story structure (SS), story complexity (SC) and internal state terms (IS). The study examined whether and how narrative production is predicted by internal factors such as chronological age and linguistic proficiency of a child and an external factor such as left-behind experience. Four measures were scored as outcome measures: SS, SC, IS type, IS token. Four measures were taken as predictors: chronological age, left-behind experience, scores in a lexical production task, and scores in a sentence repetition task tapping expressive morphosyntactic competence.ResultsResults showed that left-behind experience consistently predicted all four outcome measures, where the “two parents-left” children scored significantly lower than their “one parent-left” peers. Expressive vocabulary scores predicted three measures: SS, SC, and IS Token. Expressive morphosyntactic scores predicted SS and SC. Age, by contrast, did not predict any outcome measure.DiscussionThese findings suggested that being left-behind by both parents may be a negative prognostic indicator for the development and maintenance of heritage language abilities in ethnic minority children. We further discussed the conceptual significance of what it means for a child to be left-behind, by relating to more basic external factors in language development, including caregiver educational level, and amount of home language and literacy support by the caretakers

Do you know what I want? : Revisiting women development needs

Population Ageing continues to intensify in Hong Kong while the Feminisation of elderly population has become a prominent trend. Since an elderly\u27s quality of life is closely related to his/her life-course experience, Asia-Pacific Institute of Ageing Studies of Lingnan University (APIAS) accepted the Hong Kong Women Development Association\u27s commission to develop the Women Development Index, so as to enable earlier intervention to improve women\u27s later lives

子非魚，焉知魚樂乎? : 重訪女性發展需求

香港老龄化情況加劇，而老年人口女性化的趨勢也更加明顯。由於長者群組之生活質素與其生命歷程有著密切的關係，因此嶺南大學亞太老年學研究中心就接受香港婦聯的委託，翼透過建立婦女發展指標，儘早介入以助改善女性之晩年生活

Throughput Maximization in Multiprocessor Speed-Scaling

We are given a set of $n$ jobs that have to be executed on a set of $m$ speed-scalable machines that can vary their speeds dynamically using the energy model introduced in [Yao et al., FOCS'95]. Every job $j$ is characterized by its release date $r_j$, its deadline $d_j$, its processing volume $p_{i,j}$ if $j$ is executed on machine $i$ and its weight $w_j$. We are also given a budget of energy $E$ and our objective is to maximize the weighted throughput, i.e. the total weight of jobs that are completed between their respective release dates and deadlines. We propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm where the preemption of the jobs is allowed but not their migration. Our algorithm uses a primal-dual approach on a linearized version of a convex program with linear constraints. Furthermore, we present two optimal algorithms for the non-preemptive case where the number of machines is bounded by a fixed constant. More specifically, we consider: {\em (a)} the case of identical processing volumes, i.e. $p_{i,j}=p$ for every $i$ and $j$, for which we present a polynomial-time algorithm for the unweighted version, which becomes a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm for the weighted throughput version, and {\em (b)} the case of agreeable instances, i.e. for which $r_i \le r_j$ if and only if $d_i \le d_j$, for which we present a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm. Both algorithms are based on a discretization of the problem and the use of dynamic programming

Additive bases arising from functions in a Hardy field

A classical additive basis question is Waring's problem. It has been extended to integer polynomial and non-integer power sequences. In this paper, we will consider a wider class of functions, namely functions from a Hardy field, and show that they are asymptotic bases.Comment: 11 pages, reference problem fixe