The effect of age on students’ conceptions of agriculture

Agricultural literacy is increasingly regarded as an important issue in sustainability education, yet little survey data regarding children and adolescents are available. We therefore surveyed two different age groups, fifth and sixth graders (n=122) and tenth graders (n=158) of German schools, about their conceptions of farmers’ duties, thereby identifying seven distinct conceptions. The conception most frequently mentioned by the younger students was animals (85.7 per cent) followed by processing (68.7 per cent), whereas the older students named the conception plants (76.0 per cent) most often, followed by animals (65.2 per cent). We found discrepancies in the sub-conceptions of animals between the two age groups, but none in plants. Ecologyrelated aspects (5.1 per cent) were only mentioned by the older students. We then examined the effect of a student having an agricultural family background on the conceptions named. Only 25 per cent of the younger students and none of the older students reported a past contact with farms through visits or guided tours. We found that regardless of having an agricultural family background, most students lack an understanding of the impact of agriculture on the environment. Consequently, we conclude that agricultural education in German schools does not adequately teach modern agricultural practices or the importance of modern agricultural challenges

Orangutans have larger gestural repertoires in captivity than in the wild—A case of weak innovation?

Whether nonhuman species can change their communicative repertoire in response to socio-ecological environments has critical implications for communicative innovativeness prior to the emergence of human language, with its unparalleled productivity. Here, we use a comparative sample of wild and zoo-housed orangutans of two species (Pongo abelii, Pongo pygmaeus) to assess the effect of the wild-captive contrast on repertoires of gestures and facial expressions. We find that repertoires on both the individual and population levels are larger in captive than in wild settings, regardless of species, age class, or sampling effort. In the more sociable Sumatran species, dominant use of signals toward single outcomes was also higher in captive settings. We thus conclude that orangutans exposed to more sociable and terrestrial conditions evince behavioral plasticity, in that they produce additional innate or innovated signals that are highly functionally specific. These findings suggest a latent capacity for innovativeness in these apes' communicative repertoires

Da.zwischen: Musik erleben – Erleben vermitteln: Interinstitutionelle-interdisziplinäre-intermediale Arbeitstagung der Musikpädagogik 12.-13. Mai 2023: Tagungsband

Der vorliegende Tagungsband eröffnet Einblicke in ausgewählte Beiträge, Workshops, Gruppenimprovisationen und Performances der Arbeitstagung „DaZwischen 2023“: einer Initiative für eine interdisziplinäre musikpädagogische Begegnung von Lehrenden und Studierenden, Mitwirkenden und Teilnehmenden verschiedener Hochschulen und Universitäten. Das Dazwischen entfaltete sich zwischen den Disziplinen und Arbeitsfeldern und eröffnete sich in pädagogischen und spezifisch musikpädagogischen Aspekten. Im Kontext der Vermittlung des Ästhetischen, des ästhetischen Erlebens und der Intention, ästhetisches Erleben zu inszenieren, wurden unbestimmbare, widersprüchliche und ambivalente Zustände beschrieben und diskutiert. Geschieht Improvisation aktiv oder passiv, vollzieht sich Bildung in Freiheit oder intentional, was bewegt – oder lässt sich bewegen? Im DaZwischen erfüllt sich Unerfüllbares, verwirklicht sich Unplanbares. Der vorliegende Band fasst die ersten Impulse des in der Entwicklung begriffenen Symposiums zusammen und bietet Anknüpfungspunkte für eine interdisziplinäre Betrachtung der Didaktiken ästhetischer und musikalischer Bildung.The conference report offers an insight into lectures, group improvisations and performances from the 'DaZwischen 2023' labour conference. This event was created as an initiative for an interdisciplinary music education encounter between teachers and students from various institutions. In the context of conveying the aesthetic - the aesthetic experience and the intention of staging aesthetic experience - indeterminable, contradictory and ambivalent states of aesthetic consciousness and experiencing were described and discussed. This volume summarizes the initial impulses of this specific symposium and its stage in development and offers points of departure for an interdisciplinary consideration of the didactics of aesthetic and musical education

Operationalizing Intentionality in Primate Communication: Social and Ecological Considerations

An intentional transfer of information is central to human communication. When comparing nonhuman primate communication systems to language, a critical challenge is to determine whether a signal is used in intentional, goal-oriented ways. As it is not possible to directly observe psychological states in any species, comparative researchers have inferred intentionality via behavioral markers derived from studies on prelinguistic human children. Recent efforts to increase consistency in nonhuman primate communication studies undervalue the effect of possible sources of bias: some behavioral markers are not generalizable across certain signal types (gestures, vocalizations, and facial expressions), contexts, settings, and species. Despite laudable attempts to operationalize first-order intentionality across signal types, a true “multimodal” approach requires integration across their sensory components (visual-silent, contact, audible), as a signal from a certain type can comprise more than one sensory component. Here we discuss how the study of intentional communication in nonlinguistic systems is hampered by issues of reliability, validity, consistency, and generalizability. We then highlight future research avenues that may help to understand the use of goal-oriented communication by opting, whenever possible, for reliable, valid, and consistent behavioral markers, but also taking into account sampling biases and integrating detailed observations of intraspecific communicative interactions

Communicative complexity and development in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) in the wild

In my doctoral thesis I examined the diversity and ontogeny of gestural communication in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) living in their natural environments. Great apes use gestures as intentional and flexible communicative strategies in a wide range of social contexts, which has led many researchers to emphasize the role of gestures in the evolution of language. However, little is known about the ontogeny of these communicative means, especially in wild ape communities that are not influenced by a human-modified environment. The developmental approach yet comprises an indispensable tool to gain insights into the cognitive complexity underlying gestural communication. Since we can only understand the communicative abilities of a species if within-species variability is considered, I conducted the first study on ape gestural communication in multiple social groups using a consistent methodology across study sites and subsequent years. I observed chimpanzees living in two communities of different subspecies (P. t. schweinfurthii at Kanyawara, Kibale National Park, Uganda, and P. t. verus at Taï South, Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire). Additionally, I included corresponding data on mother-infant dyads in two bonobo communities: LuiKotale at the fringe of Salonga National Park, and Wamba in the Luo Scientific Reserve, Democratic Republic of the Congo. I thus had the exceptional opportunity to compare social groups of different communities and sub-species, and for mother-infant interactions also different ape species.To better understand the communicative complexity of these species, I combined the comparative with the developmental approach, which included cross-sectional comparisons between individuals of different groups, as well as longitudinal comparisons of the same individual between subsequent years. To assess general developmental transitions of the infants and to ensure comparability across species, this thesis was built upon methods developed by researchers investigating communicative development of human and non-human primates. Moreover, I adopted a conversation-analytic, multimodal framework derived from linguistics to gain a deeper understanding of chimpanzee communication. I specifically focused on three communicative contexts—mother-infant joint travel, play solicitation and food sharing—to assure that the examined signals actually carried the ‘meaning’ perceived by the observer (i.e. ‘goal-outcome matching’). Thus, my thesis differed substantially from the majority of gestural research on great apes that included entire gestural repertoires of ape species across all age groups. The major results of my thesis are summarized below:First, based on my findings on the development and inter-individual variability of gesture production, my co-authors and I constructed a revised theory of gestural acquisition termed Social Negotiation. According to this theory gestures represent the output of social interactions, shared understanding and mutual construction in real time by both interactants. This study thus provided further support that apes acquire their gestures via learning mechanisms, as opposed to genetic predisposition (Chapter II). Second, by adopting a conversation-analytic framework for mother-infant interactions in chimpanzees and bonobos in Chapter III I demonstrated that both species are capable of engaging in cooperative, sequential turn-taking interactions to achieve a joint goal. Moreover, I found profound differences related to structural and temporal parameters of communicative interactions between the two species. In Chapter IV I demonstrated that chimpanzees possess the cognitive flexibility to adjust their gestural signalling to attributes of the recipient, and that age and relationships of the interactants strongly affected gestural usage. Lastly, I examined and compared gestural performance of infant chimpanzees in three social contexts and showed that communicative development crucially relies on interactive experience with social partners outside the mother-infant dyad (Chapter V).Overall, my thesis provides hitherto undocumented evidence to which extent communicative abilities in chimpanzees and bonobos are linked to input from their complex social environment. With my work I hope to have stimulated future studies to also adopt a more holistic view of ape communication in natural environments. Further in-depth studies of ape gestural production are necessary to test the Social Negotiation Hypothesis in detail and to examine the usage of gestural signals in relation to developmental phase, social context and interaction partner. Hence, future comparative research should implement a developmental approach and incorporate different signal modalities and social settings. This enables us to test how the ecology and social structure of a species shapes its communicative complexity. In turn, this might shed further light on the extent to which communicative and cognitive abilities of our primate ancestors informed the evolution of the unique human communication system that we termed ‘language’.publishe