Learning from Ninjas: young people’s films as a lens for an expanded view of literacy and language

This article examines young people’s films to provide insights about language and literacy practices. It offers a heuristic for thinking about how to approach data that is collectively produced. It tries to make sense of new ways of knowing that locate the research in the field rather than in the academic domain. The authors develop a lens for looking at films made by young people that acknowledge multiple modes and materiality within their meaning-making practices. We make an argument about the cultural politics of research, to consider how the language and literacy practices of young people are positioned. We argue for more consideration of how language and literacy appear entangled within objects and other stuff within young people’s media productions, so as to trouble disciplinary boundaries within and beyond literacy and language studies

Desarrollo, subjetividad y transgresiones identitarias en las costas del sur- austral chileno

This work is part of an investigation into the contemporary dynamics of development and modernization in the southern and far southern coastal areas of Chile, specifically the shoreline of the northern part of the Aysen Region. The objective is to propose a theoretical-conceptual reflection to enable ethnographic data to be framed as a problem and interpreted as a function of a political reading which - why not say so? - could transform the world of the southern and far southern coastal zone. The central argument of the text is hypothetical: the dilemmas of development, in the current circumstances of the coasts of the Aysen Region, are susceptible of resolution (at least up to a point) from a conscious, reflexive change of perspective on culture as the word is understood in anthropology. Este trabajo se enmarca en una investigación sobre las dinámicas contemporáneas del desarrollo y la modernización en las costas sur-australes de Chile, específicamente en el litoral norte de la región de Aisén. A partir de un conjunto de datos etnográficos se propone una reflexión teórico-conceptual que permita problematizar e interpretar esos datos en función de una lectura política y, por qué no decirlo, transformadora del mundo costero sur-austral. El argumento central del texto tiene carácter hipotético: las encrucijadas del desarrollo, en las actuales coyunturas de las costas aiseninas, son susceptibles de ser resueltas (al menos hasta cierto punto) a partir de un giro reflexivo y consciente sobre eso que en antropología llamamos cultura

Generating route-level mutually exclusive service areas: comparative study of alternative methods

Willing-to-walk distance was investigated as a means of measuring spatial accessibility of bus stops and of examining the effectiveness of alternative methods of generating mutually exclusive transit service areas at the route level. First, the walking distance to and from a transit stop was investigated with onboard survey data. Two methods in geographical information systems - the combination of Thiessen polygon and buffer and the network distance-based service area - were compared as strategies for generating mutually exclusive service areas. For the examination of the effectiveness of these two methods, all mutually exclusive service areas were validated with a spider diagram generated from an onboard survey. Measures of urban form were also statistically tested for comparison of the two methods. A case study of a single route, serving the Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, metropolitan area, was performed with data from various sources, such as Google's General Transit Feed Specification, an onboard survey, parcel-level land uses, and the U. S. Census street network. Validation with onboard survey data demonstrates the strengths of each method. Results also show that the network-based service area, a popular geographical information system method for service area analysis, does not yield a more meaningful strategy for generating mutually exclusive transit catchment areas, especially when spacing between stops is very small

Early childhood pedagogies: spaces for young children to flourish

This paper introduces the Special Issue of Early Child Development and Care focused on Early Childhood Pedagogy. It opens by considering past and present discourses concerning early childhood pedagogy, and focus is given to established philosophical underpinnings in the field and their translation to contemporary guidance, alongside research and policy. It is argued that early childhood pedagogy is a contested, complex and diverse space, yet these factors are entirely appropriate for supporting young children to flourish as valued individuals in different contexts. Building on this argument, it is posited that it may be more appropriate to discuss early childhood pedagogies rather than early childhood pedagogy. The paper goes on to critique a range of established early childhood pedagogies, before introducing 18 papers from across the world that make exciting new contributions to the discourse. It is intended that this collection will inspire new debates and fresh endeavours concerning early childhood pedagogies

Impact pathway evaluation: an approach for achieving and attributing impact in complex systems

Agricultural development is fundamentally a social process in which people construct solutions to their problems, often by modifying both new technologies and their own production systems to take advantage of new opportunities offered by the technologies. Hence, agricultural change is an immensely complex process, with a high degree of non-linearity. However, current 'best practice' economic evaluation methods commonly used in the CGIAR system ignore complexity. In this paper we develop a two-stage monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment approach called impact pathway evaluation. This approach is based on program-theory evaluation from the field of evaluation, and the experience of the German development organization GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit GmbH). In the first stage of this approach, a research project develops an impact pathway for itself. which is an explicit theory or model of how the project sees itself achieving impact. The project then uses the impact pathway to guide project management in complex environments. The impact pathway may evolve, based on learning over time. The second stage is an ex post impact assessment sometime after the project has finished, in which the project's wider benefits are independently assessed. The evaluator seeks to establish plausible links between the project outputs and developmental changes, such as poverty alleviation. We illustrate the usefulness of impact pathway evaluation through examples from Nigeria and Indonesia. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved