Visualizing Culturally Relevant Science Pedagogy Through Photonarratives of Black Middle School Teachers

This study situated in a Southern resegregated Black middle school involved four Black teachers and two White science educators’ use of photonarratives to envision culturally relevant science pedagogy. Two questions guided the study: (1) What community referents are important for conceptualizing culturally relevant practices in Black science classrooms? and (2) How do teachers’ photonarratives serve to open conversations and notions of culturally relevant science practices? The research methodologically drew upon memory-work, Black feminism, critical theory, visual methodology, and narrative inquiry as “portraiture.” Issues of positionality and identity proved to be central to this work, as three luminaries portray Black teachers’ insights about supports and barriers to teaching and learning science. The community referents identified were associated with church and its oral traditions, inequities of the market place in meeting their basic human needs, and community spaces.     

Swapping documents and terms

Experiments were conducted to explore the impact of combining various components of eight leading information retrieval systems. Each system demonstrated improved effectiveness through the use of blind feedback, also known as pseudo-relevance feedback, a form of query expansion. Blind feedback uses the results of a preliminary retrieval step to augment the efficacy of a secondary retrieval step. The hybrid combination of primary and secondary retrieval steps from different systems in a number of cases yielded better effectiveness than either of the constituent systems alone. This positive combining effect was observed when entire documents were passed between the two retrieval steps, but not when only the expansion terms were passed. Several combinations of primary and secondary retrieval steps were fused using the CombMNZ algorithm; all yielded significant effectiveness improvement over the individual systems, with the best yielding an improvement of 13% (p = 10⁻⁶) over the best individual system and an improvement of 4% (p = 10⁻⁵) over a simple fusion of the eight systems.     

China’s International Education Initiatives and View of Its Role in Global Governance

China is becoming an increasingly important actor in global governance. This paper contends that China participates by promoting its own global governance concepts on the one hand and by complying with the established global norms on the other. The paper introduces several key global governance concepts of the Chinese government and argues that they are likely to persist due to their roots in traditional Chinese Daoist and Confucian philosophies. It then focuses on China’s initiatives in education—the creation of Confucius Institutes and China’s involvement in United Nations (UN) educational initiatives—as examples of the Chinese approach. Finally, the paper discusses China’s educational profile in relation to its broader role in global governance.     

The First Mile

This article argues that the current universal service policies fail to appreciate first-mile issues, that is, how connectivity looks, feels, and behaves from the subscriber's perspective. For individuals and households, connectivity is not just merely a stretch of wire but an important connection that takes them out to a broader world, encapsulating network interface devices, the software, and training, as well as incentives to create content and contribute to the community. Universal service should represent the sum total of the capabilities that extend users into the networked nation, rather than just a "last-mile" collection of vendor-related concerns and constraints.     

Invenzione e Fantasia: The (Re)Birth of Imagination in Renaissance Art

The notion of imagination is central to our contemporary western conception of and valuing of art. Yet the conception of imagination upon which this valuing rests is based on certain assumptions about art-making and about persons. Imagination refers to the creation of an idea or artifact from the mind of the creator. That a work of art arises from the imagination of an artist is thus taken to mean that the work is a reflection of the person's individuality, an authentic product of the artist's inner being. As such is will be marked by originality since each person is unique. There is, moreover, a belief that external constraints on the imagination of the artist are inhibiting and that she should be free to express her visions or emotions without constraints. Historically, however, the centrality of imagination viewed in this way has been the product of gradual development. This paper examines one particularly important moment in this development, that is, the Renaissance in Italy. By examining the changes in the nature, practice, and conception of art during this period, the paper probes the changing assumptions about the connection between imagination and art.