A Journey of Learning: Relations With the Land, Environmental Violence and Dispossession and Decolonizing Social Work

For the purposes of this Major Research Paper (MRP), I have chosen to situate my project in a position of intentional engagement with attempts to challenge settler colonialism. Toward this goal, I attempt to engage in learning about ways in which social work can engage in intentions of decolonizing. As a woman of mixed ancestry – both of settler and Haudenosaunee background – this MRP uses the Petal Flower Framework (Absolon, 2011) to support the process of learning of relations with Creation (the natural environment), with consideration of social work practice, and the ongoing systems which perpetuate violence against the environment. The journey involved in this process has included intentional thought in attempt to learn from Indigenous authors as I strive to decolonize my personal and professional journeys.

A Journey of Learning: Relations With the Land, Environmental Violence and Dispossession and Decolonizing Social Work

For the purposes of this Major Research Paper (MRP), I have chosen to situate my project in a position of intentional engagement with attempts to challenge settler colonialism. Toward this goal, I attempt to engage in learning about ways in which social work can engage in intentions of decolonizing. As a woman of mixed ancestry – both of settler and Haudenosaunee background – this MRP uses the Petal Flower Framework (Absolon, 2011) to support the process of learning of relations with Creation (the natural environment), with consideration of social work practice, and the ongoing systems which perpetuate violence against the environment. The journey involved in this process has included intentional thought in attempt to learn from Indigenous authors as I strive to decolonize my personal and professional journeys.

Weighted finite-state transducers for normalization of historical texts

This paper presents a study about methods for normalization of historical texts. The aim of these methods is learning relations between historical and contemporary word forms. We have compiled training and test corpora for different languages and scenarios, and we have tried to read the results related to the features of the corpora and languages. Our proposed method, based on weighted finite-state transducers, is compared to previously published ones. Our method learns to map phonological changes using a noisy channel model; it is a simple solution that can use a limited amount of supervision in order to achieve adequate performance. The compiled corpora are ready to be used for other researchers in order to compare results. Concerning the amount of supervision for the task, we investigate how the size of training corpus affects the results and identify some interesting factors to anticipate the difficulty of the task.

Learning of Pseudowords by Children of Different Ages in a Shared Book Reading Context

Shared book reading favors incidental learning of vocabulary; however, studies indicate that the previous vocabulary level of the child interferes with learning. The aim of this study was to compare the learning relations between pseudowords and figures of children aged 3 and 7 years in a shared book reading situation and to investigate the possible occurrence of the Matthew Effect. A book with four pseudowords developed for this study was read three consecutive times to 10 children of each age group. Matching-to-sample, exclusion, naming, and description of the use probes were applied immediately after the reading and one week later. No significant differences were found between the performances of both groups, except for the exclusion probes, without incidence of the Matthew Effect. Learning words is a continuous process that involves frequency and contexts of exposure to the words.