Mental Perturbance

Understanding intrusive mentation, rumination, obsession, and worry, known also as "repetitive thought" (RT), is important for understanding cognitive and affective processes in general. RT is of transdiagnostic significance—for example obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia and addictions involve counterproductive RT. It is also a key but under-acknowledged feature of emotional episodes. We argue that RT cannot be understood in isolation but must rather be considered within models of whole minds and for this purpose we suggest an integrative design-oriented (IDO) approach. This approach involves the design stance of theoretical Artificial Intelligence (the central discipline of cognitive science), augmented by systematic conceptual analysis, aimed at explaining how autonomous agency is possible. This requires developing, exploring and implementing cognitive-affective-conative information-processing architectures. Empirical research on RT and emotions needs to be driven by such theories, and theorizing about RT needs to consider such data. Mental perturbance is an IDO concept that, we argue, can help characterize, explain, and theoretically ground the concept of RT. Briefly, perturbance is a mental state in which motivators tend to disrupt, or otherwise influence, executive processes even if reflective processes were to try to prevent or minimize the motivators’ influence. We draw attention to an IDO architecture of mind, H-CogAff, to illustrate the IDO approach to perturbance. We claim, further, that the intrusive mentation of some affective states— including grief and limerence (the attraction phase of romantic love) — should be conceptualized in terms of perturbance and the IDO architectures that support perturbance. We call for new taxonomies of RT and emotion in terms of IDO architectures such as H-CogAff. We point to areas of research in psychology that would benefit from the concept of perturbance.

Curating a Future Earth

In fall 2019, I enrolled in SFU's President’s Dream Colloquium course, Creative Ecologies: Reimagining the World. One of the scholars we read was anthropology professor Dr. Shannon Mattern. My creative response to Mattern’s paper—"The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments”—offered an alternative way to engage with her scholarship. In searching for poetic and concise turns of phrase, I noted how her word choice and image-making related to her essay’s construction. I sought out bits of data from her paper, re-arranged them into a cohesive unit, and from this garnered a deeper meaning of her intent and expertise. I also noted what was absent or lacking, and this deficit of words, specifically toward ‘should we be exploiting the planet for research?’ inspired me to emphasize this in my found poem.

Teaching Science with Intention and Connection

This article focuses on teaching science through Vision I, Vision II and Vision III which is an increasingly important but understudied aspect of science literacy. Dr. Poh Tan and Eduardo Gluck, interviewed Clarah Menezes, an elementary school teacher in Novo Hamburgo in Southern Brazil. Clarah teaches Grades 4-5 within a marginalized community and most of her students have varied levels of literacy and numeracy. Dr. Tan visited Clarah when she went to Brazil in 2018 as a visting scholar. Dr. Tan and Clarah have been working together for the past year on disrupting traditional approaches to teaching science. Clarah’s new approach to teaching science is built on Dr. Tan’s framework that builds upon Roberts and Bybee’s attributes of a scientifically literate person. Dr. Tan’s framework includes a perspective of teaching science from a relational and more than human connection with entities, including animals, nature and material. In this interview, Clarah shares her experiences, struggles and insights into teaching science by applying the three-vision framework.

Seeking to Engage

Simon Fraser University, from the time of its opening in the 1960s, has striven to be a modernist and progressive educational institution. These characteristics are reflected in the architectural designs of its campuses, its epistemological orientations and offerings, and its policies. The university also states an ambition to be "Canada's most engaged university" on its website (sfu.ca/about.html). It is in considering this last point that this paper questions and considers SFU's 'engagement' in the context of the emerging environmental crisis. In particular, this paper focuses attention on the Burnaby Mountain campus and considers its place - geographically, architecturally, and culturally, and how these considerations of place intertwine and contribute or detract from a sense of engagement. Overall, this author posits that Simon Fraser's Burnaby Mountain campus is critically alienated from the in-situ forest that surrounds it, through character and gesture, and this is most unfortunate given a stated need by experts and educators to deepen engagement with natural environments in this time of crisis. Insights from place-based education identify that in-situ ecological knowledge, and insights arising from First Nations peoples, can help to grow new knowledge and awareness, deepen resiliency, and affect positive cultural change. The author suggests that Simon Fraser's Burnaby Mountain campus is an appropriate location to grow such a place-based education program and deepen its engagement in new, valuable ways.

Educational Change and NEXTSchool

In this paper, we examine the current literature on whole-school-system change processes, and the ways in which research findings may be applied to schools in Quebec, Canada. Throughout the paper we use a current school change initiative, NEXTschool, to explore the possibilities and challenges that some of this literature presents, applied to a specific context. At the conclusion we offer a conceptual framework that underpins how we conceptualize the NEXTSchool initiative. The review focuses on three fields that have emerged as relevant to current change movements: 21st century educational change/reform, power dynamics, and design thinking as a systems-change process.

Towards a New Teaching Approach for Scientific Literacy

Through the three-visions framework, a science educator approaches her science lessons and her practice from a more purposeful and intentional place and building and understanding the relation to the subject of study beyond an objective view can potentially bring more meaningful learning for the students.

Internacionalização e Políticas Linguísticas: Análise dos Elementos de Conceituação e das Ações Presentes no Plano de Internacionalização da Universidade de Brasília (UnB)

A internacionalização, movimento decorrente da globalização, tem demandado que os sistemas educacionais de diversos país realizem processos de cooperação bilateral e multilateral, bem como estimulem novas formas de regulação de suas políticas educacionais. Em vista disso, considerando o contexto da elaboração de políticas linguísticas para a promoção da internacionalização do Ensino Superior brasileiro como ação que colabora com os resultados das avaliações às quais sãos submetidas as universidades, apresentamos algumas considerações a respeito das perspectivas teóricas da internacionalização do Ensino Superior e estabelecemos um diálogo com o construto de políticas linguísticas. Em seguida, descrevemos e analisamos os elementos que compõem a conceituação de internacionalização e de política linguística presentes no Plano de Internacionalização (PI) da Universidade de Brasília (UnB), vigente de 2018 a 2022, no sentido de compreender a perspectiva a partir da qual esse documento apresenta as ações e as metas a serem executadas nos âmbitos do ensino, da pesquisa e da extensão. Essa investigação qualitativa aplicou a metodologia de análise de conteúdo, por essa adotar normas sistemáticas de extrair os significados temáticos de um texto com a finalidade de interpretá-lo objetivamente. Os resultados indicaram que o PI da UnB apresenta uma conceituação de internacionalização e de política linguística socio-culturalmente situadas, pois as metas do documento em questão se propõem a responder questões pontuais referentes à elevação dos índices de desenvolvimento da educação brasileira na atualidade. Internationalization, a movement resulting from globalization, has demanded that the educational systems of various countries undertake bilateral and multilateral cooperation processes, as well as stimulate new forms of regulation of their educational policies. In view of this, considering the context of the elaboration of language policies to promote the internationalization of Brazilian education as an action that collaborates with the results of the evaluations to which the universities are submitted, we present some considerations about the theoretical perspectives of the internationalization of higher education and we establish a dialogue with the language policy construct. Then, we describe and analyze the elements that make up the conceptualization of internationalization and language policies present in the Internationalization Plan (IP) of the University of Brasília (UnB), in force from 2018 to 2022, in order to understand the perspective from which this document presents the actions and goals to be implemented in the areas of education, research and service. This qualitative investigation applied the content analysis methodology, since it adopts systematic norms to extract the thematic meanings of a text in order to interpret it objectively. The results indicated that UnB's IP presents a socio-culturally situated conceptualization of internationalization and language policies, since the goals of the document propose to answer specific issues for the increase in the development rates of Brazilian education today.

Interculturality and Internationalization

The article aims to analyze the constructs of interculturality and internationalization based on a theoretical framework that is rooted in sociology and political economics (internationalization) and in sociology and decolonial studies (interculturality) and to understand the contributions of critical interculturality to the development of an alternative notion of educational internationalization. Methodologically, this work is constituted as a qualitative study, of the descriptive and exploratory type, using bibliographic sources. In the first and second part of the article, the main approaches and debates about interculturality internationalization of higher education that take place in Latin America, are discussed. In a third part, these two approaches are analyzed in dialogue, emphasizing similarities between them. Finally, the main contributions of critical interculturality to the development of an alternative process of educational internationalization are presented, highlighting the importance of prioritizing inclusion, of establishing relationships under conditions of equity and an expanded epistemic field.