Slovenian Primary School Teachers' Opinion on Interdisciplinary Approach Between Fine Art and Science Education

<p style="text-align: justify;">In this article we present research on Slovenian primary school teachers' opinion about the interdisciplinary approach between fine art and science education. With the help of questionnaires, interviews, and analysis of lesson plans, we determined how primary school teachers use this type of interdisciplinary approach, how often and what their views are. We included 138 primary school teachers from every region in Slovenia. It turned out that primary school teachers in Slovenia use an interdisciplinary approach between fine art and science teaching quite often and consider it useful to achieve different aspects of pupils' development. The study revealed that most teachers find it difficult to consider the educational goals of both fields (fine art, science). They often use the connection between the subjects only on an associative level - they only mention the teaching content of one subject quickly and carelessly, without making meaningful connections and without achieving the goals of both subjects. Content taught in this way cannot be considered a cross-curricular approach in the subject sense.</p>

Intergenerational Virtual Program: Promoting Meaningful Connections Across the Lifespan During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Intergenerational programs have long been identified as a way of promoting health and well-being for participants. Continuing such programs during pandemic restrictions is challenging and requires a novel approach. This community case study describes the use of co-design to create a high-level intergenerational program model, adapt it to specific community needs, and deliver it virtually with the aid of modern communication technology. Interviews conducted after the program had finished indicated that despite the challenges and limitations of the virtual environment, meaningful connections were achieved across three generations. The high-level program model may serve as a basis for other programs wanting to explore this area.

‘The wairua first brings you together’: Māori experiences of meaningful connection in neurorehabilitation

Background and Aims: Therapeutic connections enhance patient experience and outcomes after neurological injury or illness. While we have some understanding of the components necessary to optimise therapeutic connections, these have developed from western-centric ideals. This study sought to explore the perspectives of Māori brain injury survivors, and their whānau (wider family and community), to develop more culturally informed understandings of what matters most for Māori in the development and experience of therapeutic connection. Design and Methods: A bicultural approach underpinned by principles of Kaupapa Māori Research was used. Whānau views and experiences were gathered through wānanga (focus groups). These perspectives were analysed drawing on Māori methods of noho puku (self-reflection), whanaungatanga (relational linkage) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship). Findings: Three wānanga were held with 16 people – 5 brain injury survivors and 11 whānau members. The phrase ‘therapeutic connection’ did not resonate; instead, people spoke of meaningful connections. For rehabilitation encounters to be meaningful, three layers of connection were acknowledged. The elemental layer features wairua (spirit) and hononga (connection) which both underpinned and surrounded interactions. The relational layer reflects the importance of whānau identity and collectivism, of being valued, known, and interactively spoken with. Finally, the experiential layer consists of relational aspects important within the experience: relationships of reciprocity that are mana-enhancing and grounded in trust. These layers are interwoven, and together serve as a framework for meaningful connections. Conclusions: Meaningful connections in neurorehabilitation are underpinned by wairua and hononga; are multi-layered; are enabled through interactions with people, practice, process and place; are inclusive of whānau and resonate with Māori worldviews. The primacy of wairua and whānau within an interconnected view of health, challenges individualistic notions inherent in western health models and deepens existing understandings of meaningful connections in neurorehabilitation which can guide future rehabilitation research, teaching and practice.

The Sensorial Latency of Urban Spaces

<p>Architecture provides the platform for the inherent connections between people and their city to flourish. The urban realm naturally invites diverse people to inhabit and interact together, giving city life its vibrancy. Urban spaces encourage spontaneous interactions between people and with architecture, to produce creative acts of play and liberating moments of leisure. It has been suggested that these events encapsulate the everyday performance of the city and are the antithesis to everyday life. It is argued this performance is often ignored in modern urban design. It has been noted that Wellington’s waterfront offers areas where momentary and impotent engagement can be developed into meaningful experiences. Simultaneously, the importance and potency of sound within urban spaces may be undervalued. It is often argued that modern cities assault our senses with sounds leading to discomfort and distracted inhabitation, contributing to a lack of engagement. Urban sounds are commonly dampened in public spaces to combat this assault, but with more thoughtful design these sounds can be reinterpreted to augment the innate everyday performances. This thesis proposes that controlling how people experience urban sounds through architecture can create a deep sensory performance that increases engagement, awareness and interaction. This research explores ways to harness the latent sounds of the city to form meaningful connections between people and their city while providing moments of play and leisure. Once isolated and harnessed, the urban sounds’ unique and intrinsic power can aid the development of urban spaces, thus producing greater significance within the urban fabric. There will be focus on the connection between the senses, performance and the urban context. The opportunity to enable the acceptance of the environment and reflection on their city marks an important role within the urban fabric. Concurrently, this research explores how an intuitive drawing-led process can integrate and challenge the boundaries of both interior and the exterior urban realm. Other interior architectural strategies, together with soundscape design and urban interior principles aid this interdisciplinary exploration.</p>

The Sensorial Latency of Urban Spaces

<p>Architecture provides the platform for the inherent connections between people and their city to flourish. The urban realm naturally invites diverse people to inhabit and interact together, giving city life its vibrancy. Urban spaces encourage spontaneous interactions between people and with architecture, to produce creative acts of play and liberating moments of leisure. It has been suggested that these events encapsulate the everyday performance of the city and are the antithesis to everyday life. It is argued this performance is often ignored in modern urban design. It has been noted that Wellington’s waterfront offers areas where momentary and impotent engagement can be developed into meaningful experiences. Simultaneously, the importance and potency of sound within urban spaces may be undervalued. It is often argued that modern cities assault our senses with sounds leading to discomfort and distracted inhabitation, contributing to a lack of engagement. Urban sounds are commonly dampened in public spaces to combat this assault, but with more thoughtful design these sounds can be reinterpreted to augment the innate everyday performances. This thesis proposes that controlling how people experience urban sounds through architecture can create a deep sensory performance that increases engagement, awareness and interaction. This research explores ways to harness the latent sounds of the city to form meaningful connections between people and their city while providing moments of play and leisure. Once isolated and harnessed, the urban sounds’ unique and intrinsic power can aid the development of urban spaces, thus producing greater significance within the urban fabric. There will be focus on the connection between the senses, performance and the urban context. The opportunity to enable the acceptance of the environment and reflection on their city marks an important role within the urban fabric. Concurrently, this research explores how an intuitive drawing-led process can integrate and challenge the boundaries of both interior and the exterior urban realm. Other interior architectural strategies, together with soundscape design and urban interior principles aid this interdisciplinary exploration.</p>

Decolonial Possibilities of Reintroducing the Devil in the Public Space of Afro‐Ecuadorian Territories

The article discusses the decolonial possibilities of the collective design of a sound artwork in reimagining the role of two Afro‐Ecuadorian music and dance‐based events in the Afro‐Ecuadorian ancestral territories of North Esmeraldas and Chota‐Mira. The two events, Bomba del Chota and Marimba Esmeraldeña, emerged in the context of slavery and colonialism as a response of Afro‐Ecuadorians to the oppression and violence they endured. These two music and dance‐based events sustain a counter‐narrative of power and resistance for Afrodescendant peoples in Ecuador, weaving meaningful connections among them and other entities populating their territories, such as the “devil,” whose cohabitation with Afro‐Ecuadorians will be at the spotlight of our analysis. Based on the audio‐recorded testimonies of these connections that strongly existed until the 1970s, and of a sonic composition that was created from them, we propose a collaborative design of a sound artwork in the public spaces of the jungle in Esmeraldas and the mountain in Chota‐Mira. We discuss how a decolonial approach to the design of the artwork can serve as a dialogical space to engage inhabitants in their re‐connection to the possibilities of resistance that their ancestors nurtured in their territories through the practice of the two music and dance‐based events. Through a political reading of soundscapes, an argument is developed to show how sound constructs the public spaces that root people in their territories, connecting them with meaningful stories and practices that keep being forgotten due to the on‐going consequences of slavery and colonialism. The article contributes to the discussion about political ecologies and the collective production of public spaces as a joyful response to exclusion and oppression.

A deep-learning model for predictive archaeology and archaeological community detection

Deep learning is a powerful tool for exploring large datasets and discovering new patterns. This work presents an account of a metric learning-based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) applied to an archaeological dataset. The proposed account speaks of three stages: training, testing/validating, and community detection. Several thousand artefact images, ranging from the Lower Palaeolithic period (1.4 million years ago) to the Late Islamic period (fourteenth century AD), were used to train the model (i.e., the CNN), to discern artefacts by site and period. After training, it attained a comparable accuracy to archaeologists in various periods. In order to test the model, it was called to identify new query images according to similarities with known (training) images. Validation blinding experiments showed that while archaeologists performed as well as the model within their field of expertise, they fell behind concerning other periods. Lastly, a community detection algorithm based on the confusion matrix data was used to discern affiliations across sites. A case-study on Levantine Natufian artefacts demonstrated the algorithm’s capacity to discern meaningful connections. As such, the model has the potential to reveal yet unknown patterns in archaeological data.

City of Women

Two consecutive projects confirmed Tommy Tune’s vision and versatility. In 1981, Tune directed the American premiere of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, his first non-musical. This “comedy of multiple orgasms,” as it was billed, featured a first act set in colonial Africa in 1880 and a second act in contemporary London a century later. Tune staged the first act with sketch-comedy speed and vaudeville humor, as the characters played out their sexual frustrations and transgressed boundaries of race and class. Once again, he used performance tropes of earlier eras to communicate a contemporary viewpoint. His direction of the second act was more somber and thoughtful as the characters, liberated from patriarchal oppression and allowed to express their sexuality freely, search for meaningful connections. While Cloud 9 was enjoying a long and successful run off-Broadway, Tune embarked on Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s film 8½, about a celebrated but creatively stalled Italian filmmaker. Tune insisted that the show be peopled by an all-female cast surrounding the filmmaker. On a stunning white-tiled spa setting made up of stationary boxes, the women—each dressed in black—were summoned from his mind and memories to comment upon and take part in the action. With Nine, Tune established a pattern of staging an entire show around a stationary obstacle (in this case, the boxes)––an obstacle he consistently overcame through imagination and daring. Nine was a stunning directorial achievement that solidified Tune’s stature as a creative mastermind of the Broadway musical.

Talking About Transition: An Exploration of the Secondary to Tertiary Transition Process for Music Students in a New Zealand Context

<p>There are complex challenges facing music students majoring in performance in New Zealand as they transition from secondary to tertiary study. As a result of their pretertiary experiences, these students form identities and develop subjectivities that are often discordant with notions of a broadly conceived degree-level education. Through exploring transition using ethnographic and interpretive approaches, it is clear that significant numbers of performance students are not engaging with the more theoretical aspects of their music degrees and can in fact be actively resistant to acquiring knowledge in areas of the curriculum that they perceive as falling outside those necessary to become a performer. This research suggests that education systems in secondary schools in New Zealand contribute considerably to these student subjectivities as despite individual levels of knowledge that students bring to their tertiary studies, these systems result in significant homogenous subjectivities and approaches. More generally, secondary schools appear unable to consistently prepare music students for their tertiary music studies for reasons that include curricula that is: widely interpreted, compartmentalised, heavily weighted towards assessments, and, in terms of performance assessments, lacking in validity. In ‘talking about transition’ within a New Zealand context, questions arise concerning pre-determined educational practices, which present unnecessary and prohibitive hurdles that can serve to culturally alienate our own students. For this reason and others, this research suggests these students will benefit from socio-culturally relevant pedagogical practice in addition to systems that provide accessible, manageable, and meaningful connections between secondary and tertiary levels of knowledge. Research findings also suggest that improved communication between education sectors and between institutions and students is key to empowering students with regard to their own learning.</p>

Talking About Transition: An Exploration of the Secondary to Tertiary Transition Process for Music Students in a New Zealand Context

<p>There are complex challenges facing music students majoring in performance in New Zealand as they transition from secondary to tertiary study. As a result of their pretertiary experiences, these students form identities and develop subjectivities that are often discordant with notions of a broadly conceived degree-level education. Through exploring transition using ethnographic and interpretive approaches, it is clear that significant numbers of performance students are not engaging with the more theoretical aspects of their music degrees and can in fact be actively resistant to acquiring knowledge in areas of the curriculum that they perceive as falling outside those necessary to become a performer. This research suggests that education systems in secondary schools in New Zealand contribute considerably to these student subjectivities as despite individual levels of knowledge that students bring to their tertiary studies, these systems result in significant homogenous subjectivities and approaches. More generally, secondary schools appear unable to consistently prepare music students for their tertiary music studies for reasons that include curricula that is: widely interpreted, compartmentalised, heavily weighted towards assessments, and, in terms of performance assessments, lacking in validity. In ‘talking about transition’ within a New Zealand context, questions arise concerning pre-determined educational practices, which present unnecessary and prohibitive hurdles that can serve to culturally alienate our own students. For this reason and others, this research suggests these students will benefit from socio-culturally relevant pedagogical practice in addition to systems that provide accessible, manageable, and meaningful connections between secondary and tertiary levels of knowledge. Research findings also suggest that improved communication between education sectors and between institutions and students is key to empowering students with regard to their own learning.</p>