The personal is pedagogical (?): Personal narratives and embodiment as teaching strategies in higher education

This article is a piece of “self-reflexive action work”. In it, I critically explore the pedagogical value of infusing my personal narrative and embodiment as a queer person into the content of a series of lectures on sexuality and gender. In an academic culture that promotes objectivity, incorporating one’s personal narrative and embodiment into the learning space as an educator is often criticised for being excessive and disruptive. I argue that if approached strategically and with an ethic of care, infusing personal stories and embodiment into educational content is pedagogically performative with the potential to challenge dominant cultural ideologies like heteronormativity. I use autoethnographic memory work, reflections from my teaching diary and theoretical insights from various critical theorist and pedagogues to make an argument for a queer, dialogical performative pedagogy that contributes towards the possibility of students who are able to think critically about their own gendered positions and relations within a wider context of heteronormativity

Troubling whiteness: A critical autoethnographic exploration of being white in the context of calls for the decolonization of higher education

The context of higher education in South Africa continues to be a racialised space despite its transition from Apartheid to democracy in 1994. This article reports on a critical autoethnographic study that uses reflexive memory work to explore how the author can continue to position herself and practice as an educator within this current context of higher education. The central argument of the paper is that complex forms of identity politics and white fragility heighten a tendency for white people to respond with ‘injurious’ self-defensiveness when their whiteness is called out. Such responses are counter-productive to finding constructive ways of positioning oneself as a white person in the ongoing and wider project of decolonising higher education in South Africa. A process of critical reflectivity, mediated by a range of theoretical insights, enabled the author to work with her own white fragility and move beyond a limited defensiveness towards a position that allowed her to acknowledge her on-going whiteness while envisioning more constructive ways of being a white educator in the current South African context

The role of memory in processing relative clauses in children with Specific Language Impairment

Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between 2 components of memory - phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and working memory (WM) - and the control of relative clause constructions in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Children with SLI and 2 control groups - an age-matched and a younger group of children with typical development - repeated sentences, including relative clauses, representing 5 syntactic roles and 2 levels of matrix clause complexity. The Working Memory Test Battery for Children was administered. Results: All 3 groups showed significant associations between pSTM and both types of matrix clause construction. For children with SLI, significant associations emerged between (a) WM and more complex matrix clause constructions, (b) WM and relative clauses including a range of syntactic roles, and (c) pSTM and the least difficult syntactic role. In contrast, the age-matched control group could repeat almost all syntactic roles without invoking the use of either memory component. Conclusions: The role of pSTM and WM in the production of relative clauses by children with SLI is influenced by the degree of difficulty of the structure to be recalled. In therapy, the effect of WM limitations can be minimized by approaching each structure within the context of a simple matrix clause

A Survey of the Attitudes of Biology Teachers in the State of New Mexico Toward the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study Program

There has been a lot of discussion about the advances in science today and the need for better scientific training at the high school level. During the past decade, there have been research projects developed to up-grade the courses and include more sophisticated materials in the students\u27 biology curriculum at the earlier grade level

Profiling relative clause constructions in children with specific language impairment

This study highlights the importance of error analysis in providing a comprehensive profile of an individual’s grammatical ability with regard to relative clause (RC) constructions. The aim was to identify error patterns in the production of RCs by English-speaking, school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI) and to relate them to their level of competence with these structures. Children with SLI (mean age = 6;10, n = 32) and two control groups – a typically developing group matched for age (mean age = 6;11, n = 32) and a younger typically developing group (mean age = 4;9, n = 20), repeated sentences containing RCs that represented a range of syntactic roles. Data are presented on three distinct error patterns – the provision of simple sentences, obligatory relativizer omission and RC conversions. Each is related to the level of competence on RCs that each child has achieved

Investigating relative clauses in children with specific language impairment

Background: It is well documented that children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) experience significant grammatical deficits. While much of the focus in the past has been on their morphosyntactic difficulties, less is known about their acquisition of complex syntactic structures such as relative clauses. The role of memory in language performance has also become increasingly prominent in the literature. Aims: This study aims to investigate the control of an important complex syntactic structure, the relative clause, by school age children with SLI in Ireland, using a newly devised sentence recall task. It also aims to explore the role of verbal and short-termworking memory in the performance of children with SLI on the sentence recall task, using a standardized battery of tests based on Baddeley’s model of working memory. Methods and Procedures: Thirty two children with SLI, thirty two age matched typically developing children (AM-TD) between the ages of 6 and 7,11 years and twenty younger typically developing (YTD) children between 4,7 and 5 years, completed the task. The sentence recall (SR) task included 52 complex sentences and 17 fillers. It included relative clauses that are used in natural discourse and that reflect a developmental hierarchy. The relative clauses were also controlled for length and varied in syntactic complexity, representing the full range of syntactic roles. There were seven different relative clause types attached to either the predicate nominal of a copular clause (Pn), or to the direct object of a transitive clause (Do). Responses were recorded, transcribed and entered into a database for analysis. TheWorkingMemory Test Battery for children (WMTB-C—Pickering & Gathercole, 2001) was administered in order to explore the role of short-term memory and working memory on the children’s performance on the SR task. Outcomes and Results: The children with SLI showed significantly greater difficulty than the AM-TD group and the YTD group. With the exception of the genitive subject clauses, the children with SLI scored significantly higher on all sentences containing a Pn main clause than those containing a transitive main clause. Analysis of error types revealed the frequent production of a different type of relative clause than that presented in the task—with a strong word order preference in the NVN direction indicated for the children with SLI. The SR performance for the children with SLI was most highly correlated with expressive language skills and digit recall. Conclusions and Implications: Children with SLI have significantly greater difficulty with relative clauses than YTD children who are on average two years younger—relative clauses are a delay within a delay. Unlike the YTD children they show a tendency to simplify relative clauses in the noun verb noun (NVN) direction. They show a developmental hierarchy in their production of relative clause constructions and are highly influenced by the frequency distribution of the relative clauses in the ambient language

A scalability study into Server Push technologies with regard to server performance

The dissertation summarises the results of a performance analysis of the use of Node.js (JavaScript) for the execution of high volumes of long-running requests on a single fixed size server. The Node.js performance is compared to a traditional Java threaded model using the industry standard Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 7 hosting environment. The results indicate that Node.js can provide significant performance improvements in this type of task

In pursuit of a critical (African) psychology pedagogy in a South African university: a critical self-study.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.This thesis explores the under-researched nexus between critical psychology and critical pedagogy in the South Africa context. Adopting a self-study approach, it investigates how critical pedagogy might inform the pedagogical practices of critical psychologists teaching in the higher education context. The thesis uses findings from five smaller studies, using a range of qualitative methods (discourse analysis, classroom based study, critical autoethnography, personal history), to explore various aspects of my positioning and educational practices as a critical pedagogue teaching critical psychology in the South African context. Self-study is validated as a form of critical praxis, where critical reflection, action, and theory work together to transform educational spaces. The thesis demonstrates the effectiveness of self-study methodology for exploring the ways in which the wider socio-historical and political context mediates educator subjectivities and manifests in various pedagogical practices. The thesis, based on a collective reading of the five studies, culminates in the proposition of seven principles that might underlie a Critical (African) Psychology Pedagogy (C(A)PP), that is particularly relevant to the South African context

A narrative and hermeneutic approach to understanding the career development of ten professional black South African women.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sci.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2002.This study uses a narrative and hermeneutic approach to explore the career development often professional Black South African women. Using an interview guide developed by Brown and Gilligan (1991) and adapted by Mautner and Doucet (1996) career narratives were collected from the ten women. The narratives were analysed using a Reading Guide (Tappan and Brown, 1992). This method involved reading each narrative a number of times, focusing on a particular aspect of the respondent's narrative with each reading. Four major themes emerged through the process of interpretation; 1) contextualised career narratives, 2) positive non-directional career narratives, 3) the social embeddedness of the career narratives and 4) gendered career development. A number of recommendations for research, practice and theory building were made on the basis of the interpretation