Towards critical literacy : literature and teachers' reactions to reader-response theories : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Second Language Teaching at Massey University

Much poststructuralist literary theory, in particular that derived from reader-response theories, points to the need for the development in readers of a more critical literacy. Earlier researchers and educators in the field of reader-response theories, indicated a move away from the New Critics' structuralist focus on the author's intention and a text-based meaning, to acknowledge the active role of the student/reader in the creation of meaning. Enlarging on the subjective role of the student/reader, later researchers, in particular the Social and Cultural theorists, introduced a more critical element by focusing on the importance of context itself. Further studies, under the influence of Foucault, developed this focus to include the idea that author, text and reader are constructed by discourses. A renewed awareness of how texts actually work and of the power inherent in all language, has led to the emergence of critical literacy. This research, working on the premise that practice often lags behind theory, examines constraints that may inhibit the development of critical literacy (through teaching with literature) in the New Zealand contexts of both secondary English (including classrooms with mainstreamed ESOL students) and ESOL (from a range of institutions). Two surveys, one for each teaching context, analyse teachers' reactions to concepts of reader-response theories with a view to determining the nature and prevalence of these constraints. The analysis reveals that in the mainstream context, contraints emerge in the areas of curriculum design (including examination and assessment procedures), teacher education, and students' receptivity while in the ESOL context, curriculum design and teacher development are significant. The ESOL context also reveals that there is a paucity of teaching with literature in language classrooms which means that the vehicle for the development of critical literacy, is denied students

The Independent Counsel Statute: Bad Law, Bad Policy

The Watergate scandal-and the crisis in public confidence in government it spawned-left us many legacies, one of which is the Independent Counsel ( IC ) statute. Over twenty years after the fact, the lessons of the scandal itself continue to be the dominant reference. It is time to evaluate the lessons of Watergate\u27s legacies and, in particular, the IC mechanism

Alaska Criminal Statute Cross-Reference Guide

This guide provides cross-references between Alaska criminal statutes and National Criminal Information Center (NCIC), Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Alaska OBTS, and Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) codes. The guide also includes brief annotations of each statute. The guide is also available in a computerized version. An accompanying volume, Conversion Tables for Use with the Alaska OBTS Database and the Alaska Criminal Statute Cross-Reference Guide, is designed for use with printed versions of the guide. The guide reflects legislative changes in Alaska Statutes through 1997, but is no longer updated.Bureau of Justice Statistics. Grant No. 94-BJ-CX-KOO

Skilling: More Blind Monks Examining the Elephant

Most academics and practitioners with whom the author has discussed the result in Skilling v. United States believe that it is a sensible decision. That is, the Supreme Court did the best it could to limit the reach of 18 U.S.C. § 1346, which all nine justices apparently believed—correctly—was, on its face, unconstitutionally vague. Congress responded quickly and with little consideration with the supremely under-defined § 1346. In the over twenty years since the statute\u27s enactment, the Courts of Appeals have been unable to come up with any unified limiting principles to contain its reach. The Skilling Court, evidently reluctant to again throw the matter back to Congress given that institution\u27s previous default, and not satisfied with the Courts of Appeals\u27 efforts, was determined to come up with its own narrowing interpretation. Thus, the majority deemed it appropriate to rewrite the statute to cover what it concluded was the core of the criminality the prosecutors had addressed in bringing § 1346 cases-bribery and kickbacks. The Court comes up with narrowing constructions to avoid constitutional difficulties in many statutory interpretation cases, the argument goes, and this construction is one that many in the academic and practice communities believe is reasonable. The author’s quibble with this consensus lies in her conviction that what the Court did in Skilling is as patently unconstitutional as § 1346—and that its foray into legislation is not of only academic concern. It clearly accepted Congress\u27 delegation of law-making authority and essentially promulgated a new statute out of the dog\u27s breakfast that was pre-Skilling § 1346. Some would argue that this is a good thing from a practical, if not an orthodox separation-of-powers, point of view. The author focuses on Professor Dan M. Kahan\u27s long-standing arguments in this regard. Kahan favors administrative specification of the content of arguably vague criminal prohibitions, but he believes that if one has to choose between judicial gap-filling and congressional action, the former is preferable to the latter. Kahan has argued that the Court ought to come clean and simply acknowledge that it has long been engaged in interstitial lawmaking because Congress has declined to legislate with any specificity and [a] criminal code at least partially specified by courts is both less costly and more effective than is a code fully specified by Congress. The author disagrees with Kahan’s conclusion about the viability and attractiveness of this delegation of authority to federal courts to fill in the blanks in otherwise underspecified statutory schemes. The honest-services fraud theory, which culminated in Skilling, presents a wonderful example of how criminal law ought not be made, whether viewed from an institutional, societal, or individual standpoint

Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns

Deep cover HCI: the ethics of covert research

No abstract available

Enter the Circle: Blending Spherical Displays and Playful Embedded Interaction in Public Spaces

Public displays are used a variety of contexts, from utility driven information displays to playful entertainment displays. Spherical displays offer new opportunities for interaction in public spaces, allowing users to face each other during interaction and explore content from a variety of angles and perspectives. This paper presents a playful installation that places a spherical display at the centre of a playful environment embedded with interactive elements. The installation, called Enter the Circle, involves eight chair-sized boxes filled with interactive lights that can be controlled by touching the spherical display. The boxes are placed in a ring around the display, and passers-by must “enter the circle” to explore and play with the installation. We evaluated this installation in a pedestrianized walkway for three hours over an evening, collecting on-screen logs and video data. This paper presents a novel evaluation of a spherical display in a public space, discusses an experimental design concept that blends displays with embedded interaction, and analyses real world interaction with the installation

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

Spectroscopy and Photometry of Cataclysmic Variable Candidates from the Catalina Real Time Survey

The Catalina Real Time Survey (CRTS) has found over 500 cataclysmic variable (CV) candidates, most of which were previously unknown. We report here on followup spectroscopy of 36 of the brighter objects. Nearly all the spectra are typical of CVs at minimum light. One object appears to be a flare star, while another has a spectrum consistent with a CV but lies, intriguingly, at the center of a small nebulosity. We measured orbital periods for eight of the CVs, and estimated distances for two based on the spectra of their secondary stars. In addition to the spectra, we obtained direct imaging for an overlapping sample of 37 objects, for which we give magnitudes and colors. Most of our new orbital periods are shortward of the so-called period gap from roughly 2 to 3 hours. By considering the cross-identifications between the Catalina objects and other catalogs such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we argue that a large number of cataclysmic variables remain uncatalogued. By comparing the CRTS sample to lists of previously-known CVs that CRTS does not recover, we find that the CRTS is biased toward large outburst amplitudes (and hence shorter orbital periods). We speculate that this is a consequence of the survey cadence.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. 35 pages, including 7 figure

Lexical acquisition in elementary science classes

The purpose of this study was to further researchers' understanding of lexical acquisition in the beginning primary schoolchild by investigating word learning in small-group elementary science classes. Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of semantic scaffolding (e.g., use of synonymous terms) and physical scaffolding (e.g., pointing to referents) in children's acquisition of novel property terms. Children's lexical knowledge was assessed using multiple tasks (naming, comprehension, and definitional). Children struggled to acquire meanings of adjectives without semantic or physical scaffolding (Experiment 1), but they were successful in acquiring extensive lexical knowledge when offered semantic scaffolding (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also shows that semantic scaffolding used in combination with physical scaffolding helped children acquire novel adjectives and that children who correctly named pictures of adjectives had acquired definitions