Meditative Silence and Reciprocity: The Dialogic Implications for Spiritual Sites of Composing

Recent studies of silence must focus on the dialogical nature of Eastern meditation, examining the values of meditative awareness and social theories of reciprocity

RESPONSE CHARACTERISTICS OF A SQUAT - AND COUNTERMOVEMENT JUMP

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REPRESENTATIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOSTALGIC MEMORIES: AN INTERGENERATIONAL COMPARATIVE STUDY INVOLVING NATIVE AND IMMIGRANT GREEKS

Nostalgia is defined as a reconstruction of important representational memories in the present. The present study aimed to investigate the process of objectification of nostalgic memories, and, also, the effects of gender, age/ generation, country of residence, and rate of occurrence of nostalgic memories. It draws on data from a sample of 226 female and male Greek natives and immigrants residing in Germany. The participants belonged to three different generations (young adults/children, adults/parents, elders/grandparents). They completed an open-ended questionnaire on nostalgic experiences, the associated reasons and elicited emotions. They also responded to the Southampton Nostalgia Scale measuring proneness to nostalgia. The results showed that nostalgic memories involved interactions with significant others, first-time experiences, places, periods of one’s life, and important events that contributed to the person’s identity formation (reasons). The elicited emotions were both positive and negative. Correspondence analysis showed that nostalgic memories were associated with participants’ immigration status (native/ immigrant) and generation. Immigrants and elderly participants were more sensitive to the nostalgic process. The implications of the study are discussed in terms of social representations of nostalgic memories and their interaction with identity dimensions

Participatory Action Research As Professional Development In Multicultural Education: What Are The Effects On A Staff In A New York City Public School?

This dissertation studies the impact of Participatory Action Research (PAR) as the format for professional development of teachers in the domain of multicultural education. The study was conducted in a public elementary school, hereby known as Queens Multicultural, within the New York City Department of Education. Using PAR as a guiding framework, eleven teachers at Queens Multicultural created the Multicultural Education Participatory Action Research (MEPAR) group to develop an approach to address multicultural education at the school level. PAR was found to be an effective form of professional development that allowed staff members to engage in deep and rich discussions about multicultural education, curriculum, and pedagogy. Through this experience, MEPAR teachers gained insight into what multicultural education means and how making small changes in their teaching practices could address four out of the five Dimensions of Multicultural Education as defined by James Banks (2006). This research project also found that while PAR was a valuable tool for teacher professional development, PAR was unable to bring about school-wide change. The implications of these findings points to the importance of strong leadership and prioritized goal-setting in order to bring about changes in school structures and culture

A novel framework for retrieval and interactive visualization of multimodal data

With the abundance of multimedia in web databases and the increasing user need for content of many modalities, such as images, sounds, etc. , new methods for retrieval and visualization of multimodal media are required. In this paper, novel techniques for retrieval and visualization of multimodal data, i. e. documents consisting of many modalities, are proposed. A novel cross-modal retrieval framework is presented, in which the results of several unimodal retrieval systems are fused into a single multimodal list by the introduction of a cross-modal distance. For the presentation of the retrieved results, a multimodal visualization framework is also proposed, which extends existing unimodal similarity-based visualization methods for multimodal data. The similarity measure between two multimodal objects is defined as the weighted sum of unimodal similarities, with the weights determined via an interactive user feedback scheme. Experimental results show that the cross-modal framework outperforms unimodal and other multimodal approaches while the visualization framework enhances existing visualization methods by efficiently exploiting multimodality and user feedback