School in the (im)possibility of future: Utopia and its territorialities

Abstract

Utopia makes itself heard as Raphael voices a critique of who we are and configures that no-where which, paradoxically, we want to reach. We look to Deleuze and Guattari when we say that that critique can be envisioned as resistance to the present. In the passage from no-where to now-here, we revisit the territories of utopia as critique of our times, as a way to approach the question of who we are and who we want to be. In our view, education still rests on the image of a future that unfolds in the encounter with others. Education and its need/potential to enable tomorrows, to invent promises that look to places of desire, spaces that take shape as heterotopias. The notion of utopia is strained at root because defined as a no-where. At school, it is bound to the potential to create new possibilities and alternatives for life in the here and now. In this article, we will grapple with the work we do in university classrooms and in educational institutions in the slums on the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires as a gateway from which to envision and to problematize the world. From there, we will approach the voices where other possibilities are conquered and other spaces created on the basis of the unpredictable, voices rooted in education and the need for it that produce and produce themselves in the tensions of that (im)possibility. In sum, wording the world as creation of worlds.     

Teachers' memories of disciplinary control strategies from their own school days

This article provides a vision of school disciplinary strategies as provided by childhood school memories of practicing or unemployed teachers. This narrative approach allows us to understand the school and its daily routines and rituals from an insiders' point of view, drawing upon the double perspective teachers employ when reflecting on their own experience as school children. The results of the study demonstrate a wide range of disciplinary practices coinciding with a Foucauldian disciplinary structure – a system of micro‐penalty governing time, activity, behavior, speech, the body, and sexuality. Analyzing the systemic regulation of bodies in schools can uncover institutional meanings and make them available for questioning, perhaps even negotiation. Recognizing the ways in which teachers' roles are inextricably bound with the disciplinary power relations of their institutions can help alleviate frustration and burnout and help teachers make more informed pedagogical decisions.     

Teachers negotiating discourses of gender (in) equality: the case of equal opportunities reform in Andalusia

This article is focused on the analysis of the narratives produced by a group of teachers, experts in coeducation, while they were discussing their everyday activities. They are responsible for the implementation of a Plan for Gender Equality in public secondary schools in Andalusia (Spain). This study is based on contributions about doing gender view, according to which gender is not an attribute of individuals, but a way of making sense of interactions and practising a complex system as functioning on three levels: sociocultural, interactional, and individual. We use these levels to understand gender culture in schools through teachers’ discourse. Our interest lies particularly in the meanings, contradictions, difficulties, and conflicts experienced by expert teachers in co-education. Our study was based on group discussions with teachers in charge of the plan for equal opportunities between women and men in school settings. Results show teachers’ conflicts about meanings and how they are supposed to apply the Equality Plan. We observed interactional levels during these conflicts and analysed how teachers construct and validate their discourse.     

Ten years of preanalytical monitoring and control: Synthetic Balanced Score Card Indicator

Introduction

Preanalytical control and monitoring continue to be an important issue for clinical laboratory professionals. The aim of the study was to evaluate a monitoring system of preanalytical errors regarding not suitable samples for analysis, based on different indicators; to compare such indicators in different phlebotomy centres; and finally to evaluate a single synthetic preanalytical indicator that may be included in the balanced scorecard management system (BSC).

Materials and methods

We collected individual and global preanalytical errors in haematology, coagulation, chemistry, and urine samples analysis. We also analyzed a synthetic indicator that represents the sum of all types of preanalytical errors, expressed in a sigma level. We studied the evolution of those indicators over time and compared indicator results by way of the comparison of proportions and Chi-square.

Results

There was a decrease in the number of errors along the years (P < 0.001). This pattern was confirmed in primary care patients, inpatients and outpatients. In blood samples, fewer errors occurred in outpatients, followed by inpatients.

Conclusion

We present a practical and effective methodology to monitor unsuitable sample preanalytical errors. The synthetic indicator results summarize overall preanalytical sample errors, and can be used as part of BSC management system.Key words: Preanalytical phase, errors in laboratory medicine, balanced scorecard, patient safety     

Introducing structure management in automatic reference resolution: An XML-based approach

References to parts of structured documents use their structure to locate the piece of document which is the reference target. On the other hand, XML has become an increasingly important language for structured documents. One of its most important related languages is XPath, the language that permits fragments of XML documents to be selected. In this article we present a methodology, and an application case, to automatically extract and solve references to fragments of structured documents. This approach combines structure manipulation and information extraction, to enhance reference extraction tools by improving the precision of the references extracted. We take advantage of XML markup to locate the position within the structure in which the references are found. The use of XPath, one of the most important XML related languages, for reference resolution is original: the resolution tool automatically builds XPath expressions. This proposal is inspired (and implemented) from our work with legislative documents.     

CHARACTERIZING THEMATIZED DERIVATIVE SCHEMA BY THE UNDERLYING EMERGENT STRUCTURES

This paper reports on different underlying structures of the derivative schema of three undergraduate students that were considered to be at the trans level of development of the derivative schema (action–process–object–schema). The derivative schema is characterized in terms of the students’ ability to explicitly transfer the relationship between a function and its first derivative to the derivative function and the second derivative. This conscious shift of properties of derivatives is differently manifested by the students in the trans level of development of the derivative schema and can be considered evidence of the different characteristics of the thematization of derivative schema. From here we suggest that there are different underlying structures in the constructed schema due to the consciousness in which students use the relations between a function and its derivative.     

Clusters,convergence, and economic performance

This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in regional industry performance. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be declining in the level of economic activity of that industry. At the same time, positive spillovers across complementary economic activities can provide an impetus for agglomeration: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be increasing in the “strength” (i.e., relative presence) of related industries. Building on Porter (1998, 2003), we develop a systematic empirical framework to analyze the role of regional clusters – groups of closely related industries operating within a particular region – in the growth of regional industries. We exploit data from the US Cluster Mapping Project to examine the effects of agglomeration within regional clusters after controlling for convergence at the region-industry level. Our findings suggest that industries located in a strong cluster register higher employment and patenting growth. Regional industry growth also increases with the strength of related clusters in the region and with the strength of similar clusters in adjacent regions. We also find evidence of the complementarity between employment and innovation performance in regional clusters: both the initial employment and patenting strength of a cluster have a separate positive effect on the employment and patenting growth of the constituent industries. Finally, we find that new regional industries emerge where there is a strong cluster. These findings are consistent with multiple types of externalities arising in clusters, including knowledge, skills, and input–output linkages.     

Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: The question of its construct validity

Some cognitive dimensions are internationally considered by psychologists to describe and to assess creativity. For example, (Guilford, P. (1976). Creatividad y Educación. Buenos Aires. Ed. Paidos) and (Torrance, E. P. (1977). Discovery and nurturance of giftedness in the culturally different. Reston, VA: Council on Exceptional Children) suggested fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration are the main cognitive processes used to define and assess creativity. However, data from several empirical studies did not confirm a factor structure in accordance with such cognitive functions, despite of the wide use of TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) in different countries. In this paper, we present new data collected in Spain and Portugal with TTCT. According to our data, those cognitive functions supposedly present on a subject's performance are not so strong as to explain the variance in scores. Elaboration factors assume some variance explanation, but the main factors are identified with the products in each subtest, suggesting the importance of format, content and demand on TTCT specific tasks. Consequently, we suggest some reflections to amplify the debate concerning the definition of creativity and its evaluation in psychology.     

Influence of social cognitive and gender variables on technological academic interest among Spanish high-school students: testing social cognitive career theory

This study tested social cognitive career theory (SCCT) in the technological domain with 2,359 high-school students in Asturias (Spain). Path analyses were run to determine the influence of gender on the SCCT model and to explain the influence of personal (emotional state, gender-role attitudes), contextual (perceived social supports and barriers), and cognitive (self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations) variables on technological interest. The results almost entirely confirm the SCCT model for Spanish high-school students in both the boys’ and girls’ samples. Further, the results show that girls and boys do not differ significantly as far as the different variables are concerned.