Translanguaging to enhance reading comprehension among first-year medical students

Since the turn of the century there has been an increase in the use of translanguaging in multilingual learning contexts. Many researchers have shown how translanguaging enhances multilingual students’ ability to understand academic content. This experimental study provides empirical evidence that translanguaging can enhance reading comprehension. An experimental group and a control group were used to establish whether there was a significant difference between the performances of the two groups after reading an academic text. Using the t-test analysis, the results show a significant difference in the performance of the control group and the experimental group. These findings prompt us to conclude that translanguaging is an effective strategy that enhances reading comprehension.

The Collision of the Experiential and Existential in the Brain/Heart-Mind/Soul Continuum

Focused in the physical, people are primarily experiential learners. Yet with the creation and sophistication of measurement techniques at the turn of the century, an understanding of experiential learning from the inside-out began to expand through neuroscience. There was recognition that people are holistic beings, and that the heart and mind are an integrated, biological, and complex part of the embodied human system. And within this system, through research in neuroscience, there are hints of what is possible. There is a brain/heart-mind/soul continuum, which brings to mind and to soul the potential for an existential state of learning while focused in the physical/etheric reality. Whether played out in the “virtual reality” of the mind or psychecology educational games, this existential state of creating, imagining, experiencing, and learning can fully engage our creative imagination while simultaneously engaging our higher mental faculties. In essence, through existential experiencing we are creating a symmetry, becoming the mirror of our soul. As above, so below.

Changes in the Financial System of Vas County at the Beginning of the 20th Century

The purpose of the study. To showcase the growth of the region’s savings banks network during the period of Hungary’s capitalist development between the turn of the century and the World War I. Applied methods. Primarily data published in the financial almanac ‘Magyar Compass’ and newspaper articles of the time were sourced for the purposes of the study. Of financial indicators, balance sheet total and aggregate cash turnover figures were used. The study presents the accessible data of all the savings banks in operation at the time. Outcomes. By the end of 1912, various types of financial services had already been available in 28 Vas County settlements with 53 savings banks operating in the county. Their number was augmented by five branches and two affiliates. The savings banks furthermore established 17 disbursement points. This network of financial institutions was complemented by the Austro-Hungarian Bank (Osztrák-Magyar Bank, OMB) and two discount houses operating in Szombathely. The market district of Szombathely covered the whole county. While several larger microregional money markets were created, significant amounts were repatriated by Hungarians emigrating to America. Amidst all these changes, two banks’ bankruptcies made it known nationwide that the development of the local financial network was not without its failures.

A Kaleidoscopic Gaze of India through Julio Barrenechea’s oeuvre

Latin American intellectuals have included India in their imagination since the advent of Modernism, a turn-of-the-century movement in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, the idea of India in Latin American imagination has been primarily mediated through a rather fixed European lens. Within the body of Latin American scholarly encounters, the works of Julio Barrenechea are worth mentioning. They have not been critically examined extensively in academia. The present study is an attempt to reflect upon the works of the author that resulted from his experiences during his sojourn as the Ambassador of Chile in India. He wrote Sol de la India, which was published in 1969 in New Delhi, during his stay in India. Another work titled La India no misteriosa based on his Indian experience was published posthumously in 1982 in Santiago. The first work is a collection of poems while the latter is in prose. Barrenechea has described with grace and sympathy the spiritual greatness of India but at the same time, he engaged critically with the distressing social and economic realities of the nation. In the present study, the researchers analyze the theme of his works encompassing India, which as such incorporate an essentially “Chilean gaze”.

Book review: Konarovskiy, M. A. (2020). Afghanistan at the Turn of the Century: A New Crossroads of Fate. Moscow: MGIMO publ., 356 p. (In Russian)

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The transition of insurgent-guerrilla movements to radical terrorist methods of struggle: retrospective features

The realities of modern reality indicate that there are a significant number of unjustified attempts to resolve controversial issues based on the use of force. The article shows the evolutionary processes of the transition of insurgent-guerrilla movements to radical terrorist methods of struggle in the period of 1991-2001 and reveals the reasons for this process. The article analyzes the definition of "international terrorism" in the modern sense, analyzes the characteristic features of international terrorism of the 1990s, the reasons for its spread, new forms of terrorist activity. The following methods were used in the study of the chosen topic: historical-genetic, comparative-historical; problem-chronological, the method of historical modeling. Authors conclude, there is no doubt that all the insurgent-guerilla movements, without exception, pursued their own goals. The most effective way to achieve them at the turn of the century turned out to be precisely terrorist attacks, which, with all the strength of state structures, were not possible to fend off. Thus, terrorism has become a strong weapon in the hands of weak players in the international arena.

Cities and News

This Element examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon that was at once wider and eminently urban.

A Spectral Spectacle

After Amsterdam’s late medieval Catholic monasteries were surrendered to the Protestant government in 1578, four of these properties were converted into an orphanage, mental asylum, and gender-specific reformatories respectively before the turn of the century. Portals with Dutch Mannerist expressions were installed at the principal entrances as a publicly visible feature of modernisation for the repurposed complexes. This essay is a study of these architectural objects and their socio-political value for the city’s philanthropic campaign that affirmed middle-class power. It argues that the portals, completed with narrative relief panels and didactic inscriptions, were a means for Amsterdam’s authorities to redefine the spectacle of social marginality. Once a concrete sight of panhandlers and vagrants occupying the urban landscape, to the general population underclass visibility became an abstract image of civic discipline. Such an image enabled sequestered and disappeared lives to reappear, with a spectral quality integral to Foucault’s analysis of modern society’s compulsion to stow away indigent bodies. Considering the seventeenth-century Dutch moral geography of moderating wealth through philanthropy, such a ‘spectral spectacle’ paralleled the Baroque theatricality of Counter-Reformation Rome as a spatial experience that advanced a more secular mode of devotion to the community.

A discussion on the new critical convergences towards the centrality of knowledge in school: the theories of the relation to knowledge of Bernard Charlot and the return of Michael Young's powerful knowledge

In the late 1960s, driven by the increasing capacity of computational data processing, statistics that linked school success with students' social backgrounds became the main argument in favor of the idea that schools -even the public ones- did little more than reproduce class inequalities and legitimize them by attributing school failure to the poor intellectual abilities of subordinate class students. Both in England and France, critical theories about education questioned the curriculum, which they saw as arbitrary and related to the interests and tastes of the privileged classes, as well as the authority of the teacher, transmitter of these contents and legitimizer of educative but especially social failure, of children from low strata. This apparent consensus is explicitly broken with the turn of the century, and authors such as Bernard Charlot in France and Michael FD Young in England, converge on pointing to knowledge as the central factor in educational work. The objective of this article is to examine the approaches of the two authors on this point, to compare both perspectives, and to propose overcoming visions of some distances that separate them. It concludes with a theoretical critique of both perspectives, an attempt of an overcoming synthesis, underlining the value of knowledge as a central factor in educational activities.