Drawing As a Space for Social-Cognitive Interaction

Drawing is recognized as a powerful tool to learn science. Although current research has enriched our understanding of the potential of learning through drawing, scarce attention has been given to the social-cognitive interactions that occur when students jointly create drawings to understand and explain phenomena in science. This article is based on the distributed and embodied cognition theories and it adopted the notion of we-space, defined as a complex social-cognitive space, dynamically established and managed during the ongoing interactions of the individuals, when they manipulate and exploit a shared space. The goal of the study was to explore the role that collaborative drawing plays in shaping the social-cognitive interaction among students. We examine this by a fine-grain multimodal analysis of a pair of middle school students, who jointly attempted to understand and explain a chemical phenomenon by creating drawings and thinking with them. Our findings suggest that collaborative drawing played a key role in (i) establishing a genuine shared-action space, a we-space, and that within this we-space it had two major functions: (ii) enabling collective thinking-in-action and (iii) simplifying communication. We argue that drawing, as a joint activity, has a potential for learning, not restricted to the cognitive process related to the activity of creating external visual representations on paper; instead, the benefits of drawing lie in action in space. Creating these representations is more than a process of externalization of thought: it is part of a process of collective thinking-in-action.

Balanced Leadership Case Study

This case study discusses the application of balanced leadership in Transport for New South Wales in Australia (Transport). It reports on three aspects of balanced leadership in Transport: how decisions are made regarding projects and programs; how leadership shifts between the vertical leader (project or program manager) and horizontal leader (subject matter experts in teams); and elements of socio-cognitive space that support the transition between vertical and horizontal leadership. The predominant methodology used to deliver programs in Transport was found to be agile, and all the programs delivered from the unit where the interviewees were located were aimed at supporting the creation of value from big data. The unit managing programs in this organization was not fully involved in implementing projects in the programs, creating an additional level of leadership where some tasks were also undertaken by project team members in a vendor’s organization.

Coordination through the Socio-Cognitive Space

This chapter addresses the coordination between the project manager and project team members during balanced leadership. This coordination takes place through a socio-cognitive space (SCS), consisting of the joint understanding between the project manager and project team about (a) the shared mental model for project execution (i.e., skill needs, ways to collaborate, and the understanding of the context of the project); (b) the currently empowered leader; and (c) the level of efficacy of the empowered leader. Then the content of the three SCS dimensions in projects with different project management methodologies is reviewed. These differences uncover the ontological differences underlying balanced leadership in different types of projects. The chapter finishes with a quantitative assessment of horizontal leadership’s relative impact on project success and its mediation by the SCS, showing the relative importance of the three concepts for project performance.

Balanced Leadership Case Studies

This book has presented a theory of project leadership from the perspective of balancing leadership between the project manager and horizontal leaders. The theory offers an explanation on how the shifting of leadership in projects between formally appointed leaders and project team members occurs, and how social and cognitive structures enable such shifts. This chapter draws on two Canadian case studies and applies the perspective of socio-cognitive space to understand how shifting of leadership was enabled. It shows the nature of the dimensions of socio-cognitive space; i.e., empowerment, efficacy, and shared mental models, how these processes evolve, and the role they play in supporting the dynamics of the shifting of leadership.

SYNTACTIC SYNONYMY AS ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES OF AUTHOR’S IDIOSTYLE (based on French fiction of the XXth – the beginning of the XXIst centuries)

In this article the syntactic synonyms as one the characteristics of the author’s idiostyle are defined as the co(n)textually preferential options formed in the continuum language → discourse as a result of the phased phenomenological cognitive polyoperations at the levels of primary and secondary consciousness: destruction and reconstruction of being and its structures and categories → sublinguistic schemes → primary (pivotal) structures → secondary reduced, extended and quantitatively equacomponential one-basis and two-basis synonymic transforms. Transformational processes and the primary structure are revealed by means of the procedure of inverse reconstruction (discourse → language). The author’s idiostyle is considered as the correlation of different degree of individual and collective cognitive spaces that conditions the choice and actualization of some synonymic structures. Three types of author’s idiostyle are distinguished: 1) diffuse (dominance of the collective cognitive space over the individual one which is revealed through the realization of synonymic structures characteristic to a certain epoch; 2) personal (prevalence of the individual cognitive space over the collective one, that is the actualization of grammaticalized synonymic utterances appropriate for another epoch, of typical agrammaticalized synonymic structures characteristic to another epoch or non-characteristic to the described epoch, of non-typical agrammaticalized synonymic structures. The french writer’s idiostyle of the XXth – the beginning of the XXIst centuries is analyzed using the examples of different semantic-structural types of synonymic preferential options (reduced mono- and polypredicative constructions with the participial and gerundial head lexemes, asyndetic conditional structures and extended with the predicates and presentatives synonymic structures) and it is proved the coexistence of two phenomena: reduction and extension in the modern French fiction despite of the general tendency of the economy of means of expression of author’s thought

TRADITIONAL FOLK IDEAS ON GOOD AND EVIL AND THEIR REPRESENTATION IN THE CHUVASH LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEW

В статье предпринята попытка выявить национально-культурные особенности репрезентации концептов «добро» и «зло» в чувашской языковой картине мира. В работе применен антропоцентрический подход к анализу языковых явлений. Исследование выполнено на материале, отобранном из лексикографических и фольклорных источников. Моделирование одного из значимых фрагментов чувашской языковой картины мира производится на основе положений когнитивно-дискурсивного подхода к анализу языка, выдвинутых Е. С. Кубряковой. В работе использованы метод концептуального анализа, дистрибутивный анализ, метод компонентного анализа, а также оппозитивный анализ. Исследование показало, что когнитивные категории добра и зла в традиционном народном сознании функционируют как базовые элементы культурного кода нации. Они характеризуются оппозитивными семантическими отношениями, но при этом образуют единую смысловую парадигму. Эти когнитивные категории получают репрезентацию в языке и дискурсе. Исследование позволило выявить пять основных способов языковой и дискурсивной репрезентации дихотомии «добро - зло» через семантические ряды с выражаемыми обобщенными значениями. Дискурсивная репрезентация добра и зла как важных когнитивных категорий в паремиологическом фонде носит исторический характер и может в определенной степени не соответствовать современным представлениям об этих понятиях. Постулирована возможность расширения когнитивного пространства добра и зла в чувашской языковой картине мира. The article attempts to identify the features of national culture in the representation of the concepts of “good” and “evil” in the Chuvash linguistic worldview. The study employed an anthropocentric approach to the analysis of the linguistic phenomena and is based on the material selected from lexicographic and folklore sources. Modeling of one of the most significant fragments of the Chuvash linguistic worldview is based on the provisions of the cognitive approach to language analysis put forward by E. Kubryakova. The authors used the method of conceptual analysis, distributive analysis, component analysis, and opposition analysis. The study showed that the cognitive categories of good and evil in the traditional folk ideas function as basic elements of the cultural code of the nation. They are characterized by oppositional semantic relations, but they form a single semantic paradigm. The study revealed five main ways of linguistic and discursive representation of the conceptual opposition “good - evil” through semantic series with expressed generalized meanings. The discursive representation of good and evil as important cognitive categories in the Chuvash folklore is historical in nature and may to some extent not correspond to modern ideas about these concepts. The paper states the possibility of expanding the cognitive space of good and evil in the Chuvash linguistic worldview.

Demonstrative Reference and Cognitive Space: A Memory Game on Mandarin-Speaking Children

The development of pragmatic ability is an essential topic in language acquisition, among which demonstratives are significant to reflect human’s cognition of the relation between language and the environment. The purpose of this research is to investigate the acquisition of spatial demonstratives “zhe” (this) and “na” (that) of Mandarin-speaking children through experimental design (different tool use, e.g. participants pointed at the objects with their finger or a laser pen), exploring the influence of perceptual distance on children’s choice of spatial demonstratives. Through comparison with adults’ data, results supported the view that 5- to 6-year-old children have already developed adult-like cognitive space when it comes to the use of spatial demonstratives, which produced an effect on the use of spatial demonstratives, proving speaker’s subjective involvement in choosing the proximal or distal demonstrative in the process of communication, and rendering more evidence on children’s early development of pragmatic ability.