How African Nova Scotians envision culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as civic repair

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>This article presents findings that connect cultural trauma, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy and Black Canadians ' aspirations. African Nova Scotians constitute the largest multigenerational Black Canadian community, with 400years of presence in Atlantic Canada. Despite the end of de jure school segregation in 1954, African Nova Scotians’ social and cultural capital were not incorporated in curricular and pedagogical practices. Using the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this article draws from a qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with sixty participants. A cultural trauma process takes place after a traumatic event and involves a cycle of meaning-making and interpretation that can result in demands for reparation or civic repair. This study illustrates how through the cultural trauma process grounded in their collective memory, African Nova Scotians articulate an aspiration for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as a form of civic repair. This transformative pedagogy would facilitate a reconnection with their heritage and a fulfilment of the democratic goals of public education. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

The Present State of Existential Interventions Within Palliative Care

Existential psychotherapy is rooted in the European tradition of existential philosophy. Existential philosophers include Husserl and Heidegger, who were German, and Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, who were French. Their works contain existentially ultimate themes such as death, freedom, meaninglessness, and isolation. Based on their knowledge of existential philosophy, Binswanger, Frankl, and Boss developed the earlier existential psychotherapies such as Dasein-analysis and Logotherapy, while May, Laing, Yalom, May, and Wong started later existential psychotherapies in the British and American culture. Focusing on patients with advanced cancer and/or terminal care, we found nine types of existential psychotherapies which were investigated using randomized controlled trials (RCTs): Meaning-Centered Group Psychotherapy (MCGP), Individual Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (IMCP), Meaning-Making intervention (MMi), Meaning of Life Intervention, Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully (CALM), Hope Intervention, Cognitive and Existential Intervention, Dignity Therapy, and Life-Review Interviews, from 19 relevant RCTs. All deal with death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom. Particularly, MCGP, IMCP, MMi, Meaning of Life intervention, and CALM emphasize finding and/or making meaning in the individual's life. The effects on existential or spiritual well-being were confirmed in MCGP, IMCP, Meaning of Life intervention, and Life-Review intervention although the number of studies were very few. In the other interventions, there were heterogenous findings and again the number of studies was very small. Further studies are required to investigate the effects of existential psychotherapy on patients with advanced cancer.

How African Nova Scotians envision culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as civic repair

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>This article presents findings that connect cultural trauma, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy and Black Canadians ' aspirations. African Nova Scotians constitute the largest multigenerational Black Canadian community, with 400years of presence in Atlantic Canada. Despite the end of de jure school segregation in 1954, African Nova Scotians’ social and cultural capital were not incorporated in curricular and pedagogical practices. Using the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this article draws from a qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with sixty participants. A cultural trauma process takes place after a traumatic event and involves a cycle of meaning-making and interpretation that can result in demands for reparation or civic repair. This study illustrates how through the cultural trauma process grounded in their collective memory, African Nova Scotians articulate an aspiration for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as a form of civic repair. This transformative pedagogy would facilitate a reconnection with their heritage and a fulfilment of the democratic goals of public education. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome Systematic Misunderstandings Through Shared Meaning-Making

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions.

Meaning Making with Multiple Representations: a Case Study of a Preservice Teacher Creating a Digital Explanation

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to develop conceptual understanding, the paper presents an indicative case study of a 2nd-year preservice primary (K-6) teacher who created a digital explanation on the topic of ‘transparency’ for stage 3 children (ages 11–12). We focus on data gathered during the 3-h construction process including artefacts such as images, online searches, websites accessed and paper records used for planning; the digital explanation as product; audio and video capture of the construction process and pre- and post-construction interviews. Using multimodal analysis, we examine these data to understand how meanings are negotiated as the maker moves iteratively among multiple representations and through semiotic choices within these representations to explain the science concept. The analyses illustrate the complexity of the construction process while providing insight into the creator’s decision-making and to her developing semiotic and conceptual understandings. These findings allow us to build on the concept of cumulative semiotic progression (Hoban & Nielsen, Research in Science Education, 35, 1101-1119, 2013) by explicating the role of iterative reasoning in the production of pedagogic multimedia.

From crisis to reform? Exploring three post-COVID pathways

Crises are often viewed as catalysts for change. The coronavirus disease crisis is no exception. In many policy sectors, proponents of reform see this global crisis both as a justification and an enabler of necessary change. Policy scholars have paid ample attention to this crisis-reform thesis. Empirical research suggests that these proponents of crisis-induced change should not be too optimistic. The question remains why some crises give rise to reform whereas so many others do not. This paper focuses on one particular factor that crisis researchers have identified as important. Crisis research suggests that the outcome of the meaning-making process—the efforts to impose a dominant frame on a population—shapes the prospects of postcrisis change. The paper offers three ideal-typical framing scripts, which researchers can use to study postcrisis trajectories.

Intersubjectivity: Conceptual Considerations in Meaning-Making With a Clinical Illustration

This manuscript explores intersubjectivity through a conceptual construct for meaning-making that emphasizes three major interrelated elements–meaning making in interaction, making meaning with the body as well as the mind, and meaning making within an open dynamic system. These three elements are present in the literature on intersubjectivity with a wide range of terms used to describe various theoretical formulations. One objective of this manuscript is to illustrate how such a construct can be useful to understand the meaning-making observed in psychoanalysis, such as in the treatment of a young child on the autistic spectrum. The challenges in establishing an intersubjective state with a child on the autistic spectrum serve to highlight important features of intersubjectivity. As an important background to this clinical illustration, we illustrate the construct with the scientific paradigm of the well-known face-to-face still-face.

Between division and connection: a qualitative study of the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on social relationships in the United Kingdom

Background: The first national COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom between March to July 2020 resulted in sudden and unprecedented disruptions to daily life. This study sought to understand the impact of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as social distancing and quarantine, on people’s lived experiences, focusing on social connections and relationships. Methods: Data were generated through 20 in-depth online and telephone interviews, conducted between May and July 2020, and analysed using thematic analysis informed by an ecological framework. Results: Findings show that the use of NPIs impacted social relationships and sociality at every level, disrupting participant’s sense of self; relationships with their partners, household members, neighbours, and communities; and polarising social and political views. However, experiences of personal meaning-making and reflection, and greater social connectedness, solidarity, and compassion – despite physical distance – were also common. Conclusions: Participant’s lived experiences of the first UK lockdown underscore the interconnectedness of relationships at the individual, community and societal level and point towards the important role of trust, social cohesion, and connectedness in coping with pandemic stress and adversity. Where infectious disease prevention measures rupture sociality, support for social connection at every relational level is likely to help build resilience in light of ongoing COVID-19 restrictions.

Ethnicity and Gender in Museum Representations of Human Evolution

Scientific representations of human evolution often embrace stereotypes of ethnicity and gender that are more aligned with socio-cultural discourses and norms than empirical facts. The present study has two connected aims: to understand how ethnicity and gender are represented in an exhibition about human evolution, and to understand how that representation influences learners’ meaning making. First, we analysed an exhibition with realistic reconstructions of early hominids in a museum of natural history, to identify dualisms related to the representation of gender and ethnicity that have been recognised in research. Then, we studied the processes of meaning making in the exhibition during an out-of-school educational activity, in which groups of teenaged students explore and discuss the hominid reconstructions. Our results show that the exhibition displays human evolution in the form of a linear sequence from a primitive African prehistory to a more advanced European present. Behind this depiction of human evolution lies stereotypic notions of ethnicity and gender: notions that were incorporated into the students’ meaning making during the educational activity. When students noticed aspects of ethnicity, their meaning making did not dispute the messages represented in the exhibition; these were accepted as scientific facts. Conversely, when the students noticed aspects related to gender, they often adopted a more critical stance and challenged the representations from different perspectives. We discuss the implications of our findings for exhibit design and evolution education more generally. In doing so, we offer our perspectives on the design of learning environments to salvage inherently sexist, racist, imperial science.

Remarks on Multimodality: Grammatical Interactions in the Parallel Architecture

Language is typically embedded in multimodal communication, yet models of linguistic competence do not often incorporate this complexity. Meanwhile, speech, gesture, and/or pictures are each considered as indivisible components of multimodal messages. Here, we argue that multimodality should not be characterized by whole interacting behaviors, but by interactions of similar substructures which permeate across expressive behaviors. These structures comprise a unified architecture and align within Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture: a modality, meaning, and grammar. Because this tripartite architecture persists across modalities, interactions can manifest within each of these substructures. Interactions between modalities alone create correspondences in time (ex. speech with gesture) or space (ex. writing with pictures) of the sensory signals, while multimodal meaning-making balances how modalities carry “semantic weight” for the gist of the whole expression. Here we focus primarily on interactions between grammars, which contrast across two variables: symmetry, related to the complexity of the grammars, and allocation, related to the relative independence of interacting grammars. While independent allocations keep grammars separate, substitutive allocation inserts expressions from one grammar into those of another. We show that substitution operates in interactions between all three natural modalities (vocal, bodily, graphic), and also in unimodal contexts within and between languages, as in codeswitching. Altogether, we argue that unimodal and multimodal expressions arise as emergent interactive states from a unified cognitive architecture, heralding a reconsideration of the “language faculty” itself.