Negotiating Cross-cultural Misunderstandings in Collaborative Therapeutic Conversations

In this article we discuss how clients who have immigrated to Canada and Canadian counsellors negotiate cross-cultural misunderstandings as opportunities to transcend reified assumptions about cultures. Cultural differences as well as discrepancies in translation need to be worked out for counsellors and clients to arrive at shared understandings useful for clients. Arriving at shared understandings requires conversational partners to recognize and overcome how cultural differences may influence personal interpretation of each other’s actions. Misunderstandings, in this sense, highlight affiliative or disaffiliative choices to speakers. We suggest that counsellors can benefit from inviting clients’ initiatives and preferences to inform how relationships develop.     

La diferencia de sexo en la resolución de problemas aritméticos: un estudio transversal

Resumen

En este trabajo se estudia la diferencia entre los sexos en la resolución de problemas aritméticos verbales. Participaron 1.078 escolares de los grados 3.°, 4.°, 5.°, 6.° y 8.° de E.G.B. Se aplicó una prueba de 17 problemas aritméticos a los escolares de 3°, 4° y 5° en dos sesiones. También se aplicó una prueba de 4 problemas aritméticos a los escolares de 6.° y 8.° Los resultados indican que sólo en 8.° los varones son más hábiles que las mujeres resolviendo este tipo de problemas. Se hacen algunas consideraciones adicionales sobre los factores del contexto familiar y escolar que puedan incidir sobre los resultados.     

Older Characters in Teen Movies from 1980–2006

Although children as young as age three have already begun to manifest negative stereotypes toward older adults, attitudes toward older adults likely crystallize during late childhood and adolescence and become entrenched by the time an individual reaches young adulthood. Studies have shown that young people view older people in general as ineffective, dependent, lonely, poor, angry, overly wrinkled, ugly, dirty, disabled, and less physically active and healthy than younger adults. Because today's children and adolescents have less contact with older people than in past decades, it is likely that some young people get most of their information about older people and aging from the media. This is all the more likely during the teen years, when vulnerable adolescents purposely seek out certain media to form their identity. This content analysis examined the 60 most popular teen movies from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to determine how older people are portrayed. Older people were greatly underrepresented, according to their numbers in the actual U.S. population, making up only 7% of the total number of characters in teen movies. Older people were marginalized in terms of plot and were likely to be featured only as background characters. Of older characters, 60% were portrayed stereotypically, and only 45% of the older characters were portrayed in a positive manner. Also, 32% of older characters were portrayed in a negative manner, and one-fifth of older characters were portrayed only with negative characteristics. The stereotypes that adolescents today hold toward older people, including the belief that they are bad drivers, are angry most of the time, and are senile, were reflected in older character portrayals in these popular teen films. Given the negative representations of older people that adolescents are exposed to in their childhood and during the teen years, it is no wonder that they express negative attitudes toward older people. After years of exposure to media that negatively depict older adults, adolescents have been cultivated to stereotype older people. This has the potential to influence the quality of their interactions with older people, and also influence the way they come to view the prospect of getting old.     

Equity and Advocacy Expectations of Culturally Diverse Families’ Participation in Special Education

The authors contend that the equity and advocacy expectations imbedded in the legal mandate for parent participation in the special education decision-making process directly contradict the hierarchy of professional status and knowledge on which the positivist paradigm of professionalism is based, and are also in conflict with the values held by many families from culturally diverse backgrounds, contributing to low levels of participation and advocacy. They argue the need for professional education to incorporate opportunities for professionals to identify the cultural assumptions imbedded in the field of special education towards more balanced and effective collaboration.