Transition Planning for Secondary LD Students

Despite increasing legal requirements in planning and documentation, transition outcomes for secondary LD students continue to fall short of pre-graduation expectations. As students move from the supportive and controlled environment of public school education systems to the less structured world of work or post-secondary education, a myriad of skills, supports, and coordinated efforts are needed for optimal outcomes. As the number of students qualifying for services continues to rise, analysis of the shortcomings and successes of the current special education transition strategies is becoming increasingly important. This meta-synthesis of the literature on transitioning secondary LD students investigates the realities of secondary transition planning and the difficulties in implementation

‘If your daughters are inclined to love reading, do not check their Inclination'

This paper examines attitudes to the education of children in elite families in eighteenth-century Scotland revealed in various letters, private papers, and memoirs. It takes as its starting point Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s famous advice to her daughter, Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute (1718-1794), on the education of her granddaughters. Lady Louisa Stuart, one of those six granddaughters, went on to become a writer as well as an avid reader, and later recalled the childhood pleasures of reading books from her grandmother’s vast library. Provision for the education of her daughters and grandchildren, at home and abroad, can also be traced in some detail in the meticulous Household Book and notebooks kept by Lady Grisell Baillie (1665-1746). Her daughter Griseld, Lady Murray (1693-1759), later commemorated her famous mother’s commitment to education. Attitudes to reading, learning languages and education through travel to Europe can be traced in the private papers of these families, and in the views of the children who went on to express their appreciation in memoirs and biographies published in honour of their mothers and grandmothers

War of words: Daniel Defoe and the 1707 Union

The Union of Scotland and England on 1 May 1707 was – and for some still is – undoubtedly contentious. This essay takes a close look at the language Defoe employed in his History of the Union, the language of persuasion, and perhaps also of propaganda, and in particular at some of the rhetorical figures and strategies he had refined as a journalist and pamphleteer. Some of the language he used provoked a small pamphlet war, in which his very words were flung back at him. In the second part of this essay I consider how Defoe handled outstanding Scottish historical grievances at the time of the Union, by examining his account of one of the most contentious political issues of the day, the Darien disaster, before offering some conclusions about the insights afforded by such a historical linguistic analysis

Speculative animation: digital projections of urban past and future

This paper will explore the growing presence of digital animation within the work of contemporary visual artists, architects and designers concerned with urban geography. More precisely, it will examine how the use of digital animation has become a primary method for both envisioning alternative urban futures and reconstructing the traumatic past within socially and politically engaged work. In the context of urban speculation, digital animation has most often been used as a tool for visualizing large-scale, capital-intensive development plans. This is an animated future consisting of digital visualizations of high-end real-estate and populated by affluent, happy, racially homogeneous render ghosts. Alternatively, artists and designers have begun to employ similar software tools and digital animation techniques in order to re-potentialize the productive powers of the speculative. The paper will focus on four examples, two past and two future-oriented. The work of Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture project has increasingly involved the use of digital animation techniques to both reconstruct and visualize key dates or events within moments of humanitarian crisis. In the Rafah: Black Friday case study, for example, digital animation and 3D modelling are used to reconstruct and present key events in a particularly intense four days of bombing during the 2014 Israeli military offensive in Gaza. The conceptual artist Stan Douglas has recently, and uncharacteristically, adopted digital animation and gaming technologies in his Circa 1948 collaboration with the NFB. The interactive app recreates a largely overlooked element of Vancouver’s past, the historical slum area of Hogan's Alley, notorious for its bootlegging, gambling and prostitution. The “speculative architect” Liam Young has been employing digital animation techniques to present urban scenarios that teeter between the utopian and dystopian. And finally, the artist Larissa Sansour merges live action and digital animation to visually depict bleak and disturbingly convincing Palestinian futures