When arts and crafts education meets Fascism: the Friuli mosaic school, 1922-1943

This paper examines the early history of the Friuli Mosaic School (FMS), an Italian arts and crafts school specialising in mosaic and terrazzo. The history of the FMS opens up a rare window into an often-overlooked field in the history of education: arts and crafts schools in Fascist Italy (1922–1943). Then, the FMS excelled in mosaic education and production and gained the trust of the regime, which notably commissioned the school to produce large mosaic works for the Foro Italico sports complex in Rome. Yet, as this paper contends, the FMS–Fascist Italy relationship was primarily functional rather than political. Similarly, the FMS adopted a pragmatic approach in times of economic hardship by becoming an active agent for its students and alumni who were compelled to emigrate. The migrant trajectory of alumnus Ettore Lorenzini to the United States was paradigmatic of this.     

Differences in Effectiveness Between Primary Schools and their Impact on Secondary School Recommendations

In school effectiveness research differences between schools are mainly expressed in percentages of the variance in cognitive test scores. This article focuses on the impact these differences in effectiveness have on the school career of pupils. The analyses were executed on the data of a school effectiveness study carried out in 1987 and 1988. Two groups of outlier primary schools were selected. The pupils were divided into four categories based on their IQ-score, and into four categories based on their SES-score. Four dependent variables were used: test scores on language, test scores on mathematics, expectations for the follow-up secondary school type based on these test scores, and the actual secondary school recommendation given by the teacher. For all groups of pupils the average scores on mathematics, language and the total standard test score differ significantly for both low- and high-effective schools. The actual recommendation for type of secondary education does not differ significantly. This leads to the conclusion that the recommendations given to the other pupils in the same grade seem to be important; schools tend to recommend a secondary school type according to a normal distribution. High-effective schools tend to recommend beneath, while low-effective schools tend to advise above the expectations.     

Conceptual and empirical differences among various value-added models for accountability

Accountability systems in education generally include indicators of student performance. However, these indicators often differ considerably among the various systems. More and more countries try to include value-added measures, mainly because they do not want to hold schools accountable for differences in their initial intake of students. This study presents a conceptual framework of these value-added measures, resulting in an overview of 5 different types. Using data from Dutch secondary schools, we empirically provide estimates of these different measures. Our analyses show that the correlation between the different types of school effects estimated is rather high, but that the different models implicate different results for individual schools. Based on theoretical considerations, arguments are given to use the following indicators in the value-added accountability models: prior achievement, student-level background characteristics, and compositional characteristics of the student population.     

Black Swan,Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a fruitful context for thinking about Deleuze's conceptualisation of structural transformation as a ‘presubjective’ process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballet's new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan – a role that mirrors Nina's character in real life, and for which she is well suited – but also as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite alien to Nina. The film traces Nina's desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she enters into a ‘becoming-swan’ that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuze's writings on cinema, on ‘becoming-animal’, and on ‘Porcelain and Volcano’, this essay reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuze's political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these structures of necessary coherence also ‘cracking up’ and being destroyed in the process?     

Adaptive synchronization of unknown heterogeneous agents: An adaptive virtual model reference approach

This work deals with state synchronization of heterogeneous linear agents with unknown dynamics. The problem is solved by formulating the synchronization problem as a special model reference adaptive control where each agent tries to converge to the model defined by its neighbors. For those agents that do not know the reference signal that drives the flock, a fictitious reference is estimated in place of the actual one: the estimation of such reference is distributed and requires measurements from neighbors. By using a matching condition assumption, which is imposed so that the agents can converge to the same behavior, the fictitious reference estimation leads to adaptive laws for the feedback and the coupling gains arising from distributed matching conditions. In addition, the coupling connection is not scalar as in most literature, but possibly vector-valued. The proposed approach is applicable to heterogeneous agents with arbitrarily large matched uncertainties. A Lyapunov-based approach is derived to show analytically asymptotic convergence of the synchronization error: robustification in the presence of bounded errors or unknown (constant) leader input is also discussed. Finally, a motivational example is presented in the context of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control and numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Trading performance for state constraint feasibility in stochastic constrained control: A randomized approach

Constrained control for stochastic linear systems is generally a difficult task due to the possible infeasibility of state constraints. In this paper, we focus on a finite control horizon and propose a design methodology where the constrained control problem is formulated as a chance-constrained optimization problem depending on some parameter. This parameter can be tuned so as to decide the appropriate trade-off between control cost minimization and state constraints satisfaction. An approximate solution is computed via a randomized algorithm. Precise guarantees about its feasibility for the original chance-constrained problem are provided. A numerical example shows the efficacy of the proposed methodology.