On Mathematics as Sense-Making: An Informal Attack on the Unfortunate Divorce of Formal and Informal Mathematics

The connection between time and power has been studied extensively. A common strategy through which street-level bureaucrats exert power and dominance over their clients consists of imposing protracted waiting and maintaining uncertainty regarding the outcomes of waiting. In this study, I argue that another facet of power in organizations is related to the temporal typification of cases. By exploring the triage work in two emergency departments (EDs), I show that nurses and clerks identify patterns in the temporal distribution of visits and attach clinical and moral meanings to them. The temporal typifications are sense-making devices through which triage workers orient to patients. They form a stock of tacit experiential knowledge that delineates specific expectations about the legitimacy of cases and the worth of patients. These expectations impact the unfolding and structure of triage admission interviews and contribute to the prioritization of cases. The study brings into conversation the sociological literature on time and power with the study of the moral evaluation of patients to examine temporal typifications as an organizational resource in healthcare settings. It contributes to a better understanding of triage workers’ experiential knowledge and the practical accomplishment of moral evaluation in EDs.

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Four Poems From an Insurrection

International Review of Qualitative Research ◽

10.1177/19408447211002760 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 194084472110027

Author(s):

Kurt Borchard

Keyword(s):

Political Legitimacy ◽

Free Form ◽

Sense Making ◽

Word Play ◽

The U.S

I present four poems written in response to the U.S. Capitol insurrection. The poems are constructed through fragments of contemporary phrases, words from national anthems and pledges, and word play through spelling, phonetics, and semantics. They produce discordant, emergent sense-making through free form verse composed during a singular crisis of political legitimacy.

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Students’ suspension of sense making in problem solving

ZDM ◽

10.1007/s11858-020-01215-0 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Gemma Carotenuto ◽

Pietro Di Martino ◽

Marta Lemmi

Keyword(s):

Problem Solving ◽

Qualitative Study ◽

Word Problem ◽

Word Problems ◽

Mathematical Problem ◽

Critical Issue ◽

Mathematical Problem Solving ◽

Sense Making ◽

Mathematical Problems

AbstractResearch on mathematical problem solving has a long tradition: retracing its fascinating story sheds light on its intricacies and, therefore, on its needs. When we analyze this impressive literature, a critical issue emerges clearly, namely, the presence of words and expressions having many and sometimes opposite meanings. Significant examples are the terms ‘realistic’ and ‘modeling’ associated with word problems in school. Understanding how these terms are used is important in research, because this issue relates to the design of several studies and to the interpretation of a large number of phenomena, such as the well-known phenomenon of students’ suspension of sense making when they solve mathematical problems. In order to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon, we describe a large empirical and qualitative study focused on the effects of variations in the presentation (text, picture, format) of word problems on students’ approaches to these problems. The results of our study show that the phenomenon of suspension of sense making is more precisely a phenomenon of activation of alternative kinds of sense making: the different kinds of active sense making appear to be strongly affected by the presentation of the word problem.

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Showing as sense-making in oral presentations: The speech-gesture-slide interplay in TED Talks by Professor Brian Cox

Journal of English for Academic Purposes ◽

10.1016/j.jeap.2021.101002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 101002

Author(s):

Simon Harrison

Keyword(s):

Sense Making ◽

Oral Presentations ◽

Ted Talks

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The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150319000639 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 49 (1) ◽

pp. 107-138

Author(s):

Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Keyword(s):

Crime Fiction ◽

Trade Flows ◽

Uneven Development ◽

Sense Making ◽

Narrative Fiction ◽

World Systems ◽

Wuthering Heights ◽

Life And Death ◽

History Of ◽

Atlantic Slavery

This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights () can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.

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