Critical Discourse Analysis as an Instrument to Enhance Social Justice Among Teenage Mothers

The aim of this study is to present how critical discourse analysis was used to enhance social justice among teenaged mothers. Critical discourse analysis was used to promote critical dialogue between the socially legitimate structures and the marginalized teenaged mothers to deconstruct text and discourses that perpetuate social injustice. The study is anchored on community engagement. Data was generated with seven teenaged mothers, parents, and community leaders. Individual interviews, focus group discussions, and reflections were used to generate data with co-researchers. The study found that when teenaged mothers are exposed to social marginalization, they are denied the needed support in the development of personal, cultural, and social skills. Through critical dialogue, social text and discourses were deconstructed to co-create contextual and shared meaning leading to social justice for the marginalized teenaged mothers. The study concludes that critical discourse analysis is most appropriate in studies with youth or marginalized groups.

Mission Possible: Intercultural Communication and the Quest for Finding Shared Meaning

The source of objective meaning is a controversial topic. For most of human history, religion had a monopoly on meaning, truth, and values. But from the nineteenth century onwards and with relativism gaining more popularity, this began to change, leaving most people divided into two main camps: those who believe in the existence of objective meaning and truth and those who maintain that such concepts simply do not exist. The resulting impossibility of finding shared meaning is very problematic, especially when it comes to intercultural communication. In fact, to speak of communication is to speak of common meaning. In this paper, I attempt to provide a definition for intercultural communication, explore the issue of shared meaning, and propose a culture-free approach to the latter—one that is based on reverting to an axiomatic understanding of the notion of meaning. My aim is to conclude that the failure of both dogmatism and relativism to sustain intercultural communication should not be interpreted pessimistically. Quite the opposite, it should be viewed as an opportunity to investigate other promising alternatives, mainly Sam Harris’s science of morality.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: The Role of Diversity in Anti-Racist Education

Diversity is a strange fruit that requires critical analysis to understand its meaning, value and impact on education. Depending on the era, diversity has been defined in a number of different ways and has a variety of meanings across a range of contexts. The lack of shared meaning and understanding of diversity and who controls the diversity narrative have significant implications for the development of anti-racist pedagogy in gerontological education. This presentation will discuss the history and evolution of the “diversity discourse” and how mainstream notions of diversity impact diversity initiatives, curriculum design and anti-racist pedagogy. Strategies for engaging in an historical analysis of diversity and how this process relates to the design, leadership and ownership of anti-racist curriculum will be discussed, as well as the role of gerontology in leading these efforts.

Toddlers as active, competent story weavers: Lexie’s story

Communication and literacy development of young children is shaped by the nature of social and cultural relationships in everyday situations. Few studies, however, have explored early story experiences encountered by infants and toddlers in naturalistic settings. We argue that personal stories about everyday lived experiences are a vital context for considering how toddlers develop communicative competencies as they participate in these stories within their families and communities. The paper presents selected findings from a qualitative study underpinned by a broad theoretical view of story embedded in a sociocultural, participatory framework. We contend that stories are collaborative, social endeavours in which intersubjectivity is accomplished collectively and multimodally. Evidence is offered of the communicative process enacted by 1-year-old Lexie, her parent, teacher and peers, as they shared meaning together in a personal story about eating lunch. Lexie and her family were participants in a wider study of the story experiences of 1-year-old toddlers, within and across their family home and early childhood settings, in a culturally diverse community of Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on multimodal ethnography and video data, findings illustrate how Lexie and her family, teacher and peers actively participated together in the weaving of a shared personal story using verbal, visual and kinaesthetic forms of communication. The study contributes to the field of early childhood literacy by providing unique insights into the potential of everyday personal stories as a valuable context for exploring ways children’s communicative competencies are developed through relationships in family and community settings.

CAN FIGURES PERSUADE? ZEUGMA AS A FIGURE OF PERSUASION IN LATIN

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements (usually nouns or prepositional phrases) with a third (usually a verb) that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context.

The importance of shared meaning making for sustainable knowledge translation and health literacy. An example from kidney transplantation

The aim of the present paper is to describe and discuss how recent theories about translation, bridging medical and humanistic understandings of knowledge translation, in the medical humanities (Kristeva et al 2018) can bring about a new understanding of health literacy in the context of patient education. We argue that knowledge translation must be understood as a simultaneous interrogation of the patient’s and the health care providers co-construction of new and shared meanings that can create realities with medical consequences. To illustrate our points, we will describe the case of Jim, a kidney transplant recipient who received standard patient education, but lost the graft (the new kidney). If we apply Kristeva’s view onto this context, graft function is not merely a biology but a complex bio-cultural fact. In this perspective, graft function is seen as a phenomenon that embraces translation between health as a biomedical phenomenon and healing as lived experience, and that opens for shared meaning -making processes between the patient and the health care provider. In Jim’s case this means that we need to rethink the approach to patient education in a way that encourage the patient’s idiosyncratic way of thinking and experiencing – and transform health information into a means for sustaining Jim’s particular life – not life ‘in general’. The patient education program did not take into consideration the singularities of Jim’s biographical temporality, with its changes in everyday life, priorities, attitudes and values. The arguments are generic and could be applied to other contexts.

Ensuring Quality Transitions From Early Years’ Establishments Into Primary Schools: Putting Research Into Practice

Preschool to primary school transitions can be a time of anxiety for pupils, parents, and practitioners. The purpose of this study was to investigate what should be in place to support transitions and develop a shared understanding of what constitutes a nurturing transition for children. It is hoped that sharing this across service providers will increase consistency of practice. The design took a flexible qualitative approach to ensure the co-creation of shared meaning. Following an initial exploratory activity using a Person Centered Planning (PCP) approach, four qualitative activities were identified. Early years’ staff, primary teachers, parents, and pupils were recruited as participants from within a Scottish local authority to take part in these collaborative activities with qualitative and quantitative components, which enabled the co-construction of a transition timeline that articulates the core activities needed for optimal early years’ centers (EYC) to primary transitions. This timeline outlines various preparatory activities that can be taken for all pupils and also those with identified additional support needs (ASNs). In addition, examples of excellence were identified. While this document illustrates examples of good practice, it is not meant to replace other existing positive transition work; rather it is a guide that can enhance existing procedures within any given context.

A Semantic Analysis of Corona Virus Pandemic Terms

Various epidemics in recent years have introduced myriad of challenges to the entire world. COVID-19 disease is the latest crisis with its attendant health and language issues. With its emergence, COVID-19 introduced into the global linguistic repertoire an avalanche of unknown vocabulary to the ordinary language user. In today’s world, language is not only available for communication; it is a tool that contributes to maintaining global peace and order. In bridging diverse communities of humanities in the world, shared meaning becomes a platform for mutual understanding, promoting intellectual development and collaborative research efforts. The current study aims to explore and explicate the novel language of COVID-19, thereby making meaning accessible for clarity of communication. The qualitative method of analysis which relied on secondary data from different online COVID-19 glossaries was utilised. Data collection was a total of 149 terms, out of which 34 were purposively selected for analysis. This was to examine their semantic meaning and also ascertain their word relations. The study investigates the process of developing meaning mechanisms in the use COVID-19 terms among language users. The study found that the COVID-19 has a distinct vocabulary that can be analysed linguistically. The literature review in this study highlighted past researches on COVID-19 as descriptive, others on the frequency count of words and the etymology of terms.