The music teacher in ‘on-the-spot’ musical interactions: A practitioner research study

This practitioner research, conducted by a secondary school music teacher, deals with two complementary questions: the conceptual question how one could define the ‘artistry’ of a music teacher in the context of his teaching practice, and the empirical question in how far the music teacher’s actions can determine the quality of the musical interactions with his students. The paper elaborately describes the institutional context for this (doctoral) practitioner research study, and integrates two premises, one regarding the negative image of the school subject music, and another about the vagueness and the ongoing discussions about the required competences of a ‘good’ music teacher. The first question is dealt with in a theoretical way, resulting in a working definition for a music teacher’s ‘artistry’: ‘a music teacher’s “artistry” lies within the extent to which he can apply his musical competences in “immediate” teaching situations’. The second question is studied empirically using a set of qualitative data sources, derived from the practitioner researcher’s teaching practice, that were analysed by means of a self-developed ‘three-dimensional matrix of the music teacher’s real-time teaching actions’. This results in a set of 10 categories in which the music teacher clearly demonstrates ‘unprepared non-routinisedroutinized musical actions’.

Inevitability of the Poisson Bracket Structure of the Relativistic Constraints

The purpose of this paper is to shed some fresh light on the long-standing conceptual question of the origin of the well-known Poisson bracket structure of the constraints that govern the canonical dynamics of generally relativistic field theories, i.e. geometrodynamics. This structure has long been known to be the same for a wide class of fields that inhabit the space-time, namely those with non-differential coupling to gravity. It has also been noticed that an identical bracket structure can be derived independently of any dynamical theory, by purely geometrical considerations in Lorentzian geometry. Here we attempt to provide the missing link between the dynamics and geometry, which we understand to be the reason for this structure to be of the specific kind. We achieve this by a careful analysis of the geometrodynamical approach, which allows us to derive the structure in question and understand it as a consistency requirement for any such theory. In order to stay close to the classical literature on the subject we stick to the metric formulation of general relativity, but the reasoning should carry over to any other formulation as long as the non-metricity tensor vanishes. The discussion section is devoted to derive some interesting consequences of the presented result in the context of reconstructing the Arnowitt–Deser–Misner (ADM) framework, thus providing a precise sense to the inevitability of the Einstein’s theory under minimal assumptions.

Preserving preservationism (about free will)

This chapter addresses the question of how phenomenology might influence the reference conditions of the concept of free will. For descriptivists about reference, if the presentational content of free-agency phenomenology is libertarian, then descriptively libertarian reference conditions for the concept might be inherited from the phenomenology. In that case, eliminativism about the concept and denialism about free will would be true, assuming determinism. However, Gregg Caruso has maintained that even on a non-descriptivist and apparently preservationist and realist approach to the conceptual question, such as the natural-kind view, if the phenomenology has libertarian presentational content, then eliminativism and denialism are also true, once we assume determinism. Relying on the view about free-agency phenomenology developed in Chapter 4, this chapter provides a non-descriptivist defense of both preservationism and realism about free will, against Caruso’s claims. The chapter also considers Shaun Nichols’s discretionist position about free will.

A MOVEMENT EMERGING FROM MURDER DURING THE ERA OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC: THE DICHOTOMY OF GOOD VERSUS EVIL

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this theoretical paper was to examine the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Covid-19 pandemic in light of the good versus evil dichotomy. Background: African Americans, particularly males, are at an increased risk of dying from excessive police violence and abuse; the tragic death of George Floyd epitomizes this phenomenon. African Americans are also more likely than their Caucasian counterparts to contract and die from the COVID-19 disease and receive substandard care from health care workers. The social injustices amongst African Americans have led to the growth of social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM). Researchers on the BLM and COVID-19 pandemic have not examined the issue from the perspective of good versus evil to gain a better understanding of the social constructs. Methodology: An evaluation of 48 journal articles, books, and websites from 1930 to 2021 was analyzed to better understand the study variables. Findings: The question of the good versus evil dichotomy in relation to the BLM and COVID-19 pandemic is a convoluted conceptual question, which is a social construct, and therefore, upbringing, experience, and culture mediate people’s moral code. Impact on Society: A better understanding of the BLM amid the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to more awareness and analysis of our ethics and tolerance for those who we consider different.

Why There Is a Vestibular Sense, or How Metacognition Individuates the Senses

Should the vestibular system be counted as a sense? This basic conceptual question remains surprisingly controversial. While it is possible to distinguish specific vestibular organs, it is not clear that this suffices to identify a genuine vestibular sense because of the supposed absence of a distinctive vestibular personal-level manifestation. The vestibular organs instead contribute to more general multisensory representations, whose name still suggest that they have a distinct ‘sensory’ contribution. The vestibular case shows a good example of the challenge of individuating the senses when multisensory interactions are the norm, neurally, representationally and phenomenally. Here, we propose that an additional metacognitive criterion can be used to single out a distinct sense, besides the existence of specific organs and despite the fact that the information coming from these organs is integrated with other sensory information. We argue that it is possible for human perceivers to monitor information coming from distinct organs, despite their integration, as exhibited and measured through metacognitive performance. Based on the vestibular case, we suggest that metacognitive awareness of the information coming from sensory organs constitutes a new criterion to individuate a sense through both physiological and personal criteria. This new way of individuating the senses accommodates both the specialised nature of sensory receptors as well as the intricate multisensory aspect of neural processes and experience, while maintaining the idea that each sense contributes something special to how we monitor the world and ourselves, at the subjective level.

Graduates' Perceptions and Evaluation of Study Programmes: Analytical Framework and Methodological Considerations

This paper aims to draw scientific attention to the significance and usefulness of socio- logical approach, namely higher education (HE) graduates’ perceptions survey as a one of the mechanisms to collect and use graduate feedback facilitating the study programmes’ evaluation, and in turn, enlarging our knowledge on the enhancement of HE quality, the improvement of graduate employability, and effective ways of smoothing the transition from education to work. The emphasis is being placed on critical description of the analytical framework set out by authors of the international research project - DEHEMS on HE graduates feedback. The DEHEMS project uses secondary - processed data based on primary - raw data as generated by two Europe-wide and large-scale research projects: REFLEX and HEGESCO. The paper comprises four parts. Firstly, the basic conceptual question is analysed, that is, the role and the need for the use of feedback from graduates collected through national and international surveys perceived as a measure of HE programme evaluation (pro- gramme performance, teaching effectiveness). A particular attention is given to its two main elements: programme activities/components and programme outcomes/impact, as per programmes logic model. The second part is devoted to the discussion on the analyt- ical framework and methodological approach adopted in the DEHEMS study. The third part contains key elements of analytical framework presented in schematic form. Finally, some brief conclusions and further study directions follow.

A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks

An extensive body of empirical research has revealed remarkable regularities in the acquisition, organization, deployment, and neural representation of human semantic knowledge, thereby raising a fundamental conceptual question: What are the theoretical principles governing the ability of neural networks to acquire, organize, and deploy abstract knowledge by integrating across many individual experiences? We address this question by mathematically analyzing the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear networks. We find exact solutions to this learning dynamics that yield a conceptual explanation for the prevalence of many disparate phenomena in semantic cognition, including the hierarchical differentiation of concepts through rapid developmental transitions, the ubiquity of semantic illusions between such transitions, the emergence of item typicality and category coherence as factors controlling the speed of semantic processing, changing patterns of inductive projection over development, and the conservation of semantic similarity in neural representations across species. Thus, surprisingly, our simple neural model qualitatively recapitulates many diverse regularities underlying semantic development, while providing analytic insight into how the statistical structure of an environment can interact with nonlinear deep-learning dynamics to give rise to these regularities.

Types and Tactics of Questioning used by a Native-speaker Teacher in Teaching Active and Passive Classes

The purposes of this study are to find out what are the types of questions and questioning tactics used by native speaker teacher of English in teaching passive and active classes and what are the tactics of questioning used related to each type of questions being used by the native speaker teacher of English in passive and active Speaking 1 classes. The theories are taken from Wragg and Brown (2001). According to Wragg and Brown (2001) there are 3 types of questioning which are conceptual question, empirical question, and value question. Other than that, there are 7 tactics of questioning which are structuring, pitching and putting clearly, directing and distributing, pausing and pacing, prompting and probing, listening to replies and responding, and sequencing (Wrag & Brown, 2001). The findings showed that the teacher of Speaking 1 used the same types of questions which are conceptual and empirical types of questions. Furthermore, tactics of questioning that the teacher used are different in active and passive classes. The teacher mostly used empirical types of questioning for both passive and active classes. In teaching passive class, the teachers mostly asked sequencing of questions as the tactics of questioning. On the other hand, in active class, the teacher mostly asked prompting and probing as the tactics of questioning. Keywords: types of questions, tactics of questioning, native speaker teacher of English

A Concept without Consensus: Conceptualisation of the ‘Situation’ Notion in the Rome Statute

In response to quelling Libya’s popular uprising against the authoritarian rule of Gaddafi, the United Nations Security Council referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court. Subsequently, the Office of the Prosecutor brought four cases against the most responsible seniors for attacking civilians protesting the Gaddafi regime in 2011. Later, the Prosecutor went behind the borders of the original situation by prosecuting Al-Werfalli, who was accused of crimes taking place in the summer 2017, when there was no repressive apparatus against Gaddafi’s opponents. This recent case may pose a jurisdictional challenge that leads to a conceptual question: what does the concept of a ‘situation’ mean? The Court’s jurisdiction limits the contours of a situation. The main constituent element of a situation is a concrete crisis that differentiates the situation from others. This contextual element will be discussed in this article.

Molecular flexibility of DNA as a key determinant of RAD51 recruitment

The timely activation of homologous recombination is essential for the maintenance of genome stability, in which the RAD51 recombinase plays a central role. Biochemically, human RAD51 polymerises faster on single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) compared to double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), raising a key conceptual question: how does it discriminate between them? In this study, we tackled this problem by systematically assessing RAD51 binding kinetics on ssDNA and dsDNA differing in length and flexibility using surface plasmon resonance. By fitting detailed polymerisation models informed by our experimental datasets, we show that RAD51 is a mechano-sensor that exhibits a larger polymerisation rate constant on flexible ssDNA compared to rigid ssDNA or dsDNA. This model presents a new general framework suggesting that the flexibility of DNA, which may increase locally as a result of DNA damage, plays an important role in rapidly recruiting repair factors that multimerise at sites of DNA damage.