An educated Sint Maartener? National belonging in a primary school on Sint Maarten

Both in academia and in everyday discourse, the belief in the (re)production of national ideology and related civil culture(s) within state schools has remained strong. This idea(l) has also become salient among a growing number of educational specialists, anti-colonial activists and policymakers on Sint Maarten, the Dutch or southern side of the bi-national, Caribbean island St. Martin. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork I show how the different elites’ imaginations of the nation were remade and unmade by the teacher and pupils in a sixth-grade classroom in a public school. Lingering colonial relations, ongoing migration and popular culture challenged a well-bounded, shared imagination of the educated Sint Maartener

Advances in MASELTOV – Serious Games in a Mobile Ecology of Services for Social Inclusion and Empowerment of Recent Immigrants

Immigration imposes a range of challenges with the risk of social exclusion from the information society (Halfman 1998), such as, getting into communication with the local society and understanding the culture of their host nation. Failure to address these challenges can lead to difficulties in the frame of integrating into the society of the host country, leading to fragmented communities and a range of social issues. As part of a comprehensive suite of services for immigrants, the European project seeks to provide both practical tools and learning services via mobile devices, providing a readily usable resource for immigrants. We introduce recent results, such as the game-based learning aspect of the MASELTOV project is introduced, with the rationale behind its design presented. In doing so, the benefits and implications of mobile platforms and emergent data capture techniques for game-based learning are discussed, as are methods for putting engaging gameplay at the forefront of the experience whilst relying on rich data capture and analysis to provide an effective learning solution

Lakeside View: Sociocultural Responses to Changing Water Levels of Lake Turkana, Kenya

Throughout the Holocene, Lake Turkana has been subject to drastic changes in lake levels and the subsistence strategies people employ to survive in this hot and arid region. In this paper, we reconstruct the position of the lake during the Holocene within a paleoclimatic context. Atmospheric forcing mechanisms are discussed in order to contextualize the broader landscape changes occurring in eastern Africa over the last 12,000 years. The Holocene is divided into five primary phases according to changes in the strand-plain evolution, paleoclimate, and human subsistence strategies practiced within the basin. Early Holocene fishing settlements occurred adjacent to high and relatively stable lake levels. A period of high-magnitude oscillations in lake levels ensued after 9,000 years BP and human settlements appear to have been located close to the margins of the lake. Aridification and a final regression in lake levels ensued after 5,000 years BP and human communities were generalized pastoralists-fishers-foragers. During the Late Holocene, lake levels may have dropped below their present position and subsistence strategies appear to have been flexible and occasionally specialized on animal pastoralism. Modern missionary and government outposts have encouraged the construction of permanent settlements in the region, which are heavily dependent on outside resources for their survival. Changes in the physical and cultural environments of the Lake Turkana region have been closely correlated, and understanding the relationship between the two variables remains a vital component of archaeological research