Haunted Trauma Narratives of Inclusion,Race, and Disability in a School Community

By typical definitions in the special education world, inclusion would not be recognizable as it exists at Memorial Elementary. Memorial is responding to a widely documented trend in public schools: over-representation of students of color, particularly Black and Brown students, in high-incidence special education categories, including emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). I conceptualize EBD as unacknowledged suppression of hauntings from transgenerational trauma—legacies of institutional racism, poverty, and attempts at dehumanization. My primary hypothesis is that Memorial’s practice and ethic of unconditional belonging has been a transformation afforded by being haunted. I argue that haunted trauma narratives affirm and reconstruct the personhood of students of color with ghosts of trauma. Through narrativizing, students of color and educators rebuild inclusion from difference-as-allowed toward Martin Luther King Jr.’s (2001) “beloved community” (p. 458). That is, Memorial has redesigned school structures, educators’ beliefs and practices, interactions with children and their families, and other aspects of everyday systems to be organized around the intersections of race, trauma, identity, and community. Though dreaming is undeniably difficult, Memorial also illustrates the transformative power of affective forces from ghosts that demand hope, justice, and healing.     

Are model PISA pupils happy at school? Quality of school life of adolescents in Finland and Korea

This paper explores the quality of school life (QSL) of two ‘model pupils’ in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, Finland and Korea, and investigates students’ views on the central aspects of QSL (general satisfaction, peer relations and teacher–student relations) using PISA 2012 data. It also seeks to interpret how specific institutional and sociocultural aspects are linked to QSL. The analyses show that Finnish and Korean adolescents’ views on QSL are less positive compared with the OECD average; Finnish adolescents’ views on QSL are more positive than those of Korean adolescents regarding general satisfaction and peer relations but are not clearly related to teacher–student relations. Since Finnish and Korean adolescents’ views on QSL partly differ from those of their Nordic and East Asian counterparts, the distinct Nordic or East Asian image of QSL could not be revealed in the study. This article proposes that QSL demands more attention in the era of ‘rankings and benchmarked educational models’, with consideration to the universality and uniqueness of institutional, sociocultural and historical factors of one’s own and others’ schooling.     

Family Processes and Psychosocial Problems of the Young Korean Gifted

It is widely known that Korean parents have a high aspiration for providing opportunities of higher education and high expectations for their children’s academic achievement. Young Korean gifted children with ages from four to ten years did not show many psychosocial problems. However, some showed such problems as distractibility and inattentiveness, aggressiveness, helplessness, or psychiatric symptoms, when parents exert pressure, fathers are not involved in education, or parents do not discipline children’s behavior. Korean young gifted children showed high motivation for learning, when parents provide support, help, and supervision on TV watching. Based on the results, it was suggested that parents provide support for learning, rather than pressure on learning, and discipline their children’s behavior when they are young. In addition, fathers need to be more involved in their children’s learning in order to prevent psychosocial problems of the young gifted.     

Science-specialist Student-teachers Consider Promoting Technological Design Projects: Contributions of Multi-media Case Methods

In school science, students often experience simplistic representations of knowledge-building practices in science and technology – which, in reality, are complex, unpredictable and theory-limited. While there are a great variety of reasons (many of which are beyond teachers' direct control), this occurs partly because teachers of science generally have not had such realistic experiences. While student-teachers can develop this kind of meta-scientific literacy in university-based science teacher education programmes, this depends on the extent to which activities are legitimised through close associations with authentic school contexts. In this paper, we report effects on science-specialist student-teachers' conceptions about science and technology, and corresponding priorities for school science, after interacting with a case documentary that depicted students collaborating in development and evaluation of pneumatic-controlled robotic arms. Data, including video footage of student-teachers' interactions with cases and audio recordings of interviews with them and their teacher, indicated that many student-teachers developed more naturalistic perspectives on knowledge development in science and technology and corresponding pedagogical priorities. At the same time, most also recommended an apprenticeship for students, gradually moving them from unrealistic (e.g., following a linear model for technological design) to more realistic (e.g., accommodating flexibility in design, while pointing out such limits to creativity as techno-determinism) problem solving contexts.     

Graphs in the COVID-19 news: a mathematics audit of newspapers in Korea

Educational Studies in Mathematics - Visual displays in the news media become critical during escalating events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as they facilitate the communication of complex...     

Unsupervised word sense disambiguation for Korean through the acyclic weighted digraph using corpus and dictionary

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is meant to assign the most appropriate sense to a polysemous word according to its context. We present a method for automatic WSD using only two resources: a raw text corpus and a machine-readable dictionary (MRD). The system learns the similarity matrix between word pairs from the unlabeled corpus, and it uses the vector representations of sense definitions from MRD, which are derived based on the similarity matrix. In order to disambiguate all occurrences of polysemous words in a sentence, the system separately constructs the acyclic weighted digraph (AWD) for every occurrence of polysemous words in a sentence. The AWD is structured based on consideration of the senses of context words which occur with a target word in a sentence. After building the AWD per each polysemous word, we can search the optimal path of the AWD using the Viterbi algorithm. We assign the most appropriate sense to the target word in sentences with the sense on the optimal path in the AWD. By experiments, our system shows 76.4% accuracy for the semantically ambiguous Korean words.     

Toward a reconceptualization of information seeking research: focus on the exchange of meaning

This paper reports the results of a preliminary study of interpersonal information seeking interactions between a user and a human information source. The study showed that users specify their information needs (uncertainty) largely in terms of what they know (certainty) during the interaction. The articulated certainty and uncertainty in the interaction can be classified as utterances focusing on either the topic (what the user is talking about) or comment (how that topic fits in with the user's situation or problem). We suggest that user studies in information seeking research should conceptually realign from an emphasis on user's uncertainty- and topic-based matching to the inclusion of user's certainty and comment dimensions in order to develop a more linguistically robust, multi-dimensional approach to matching for information retrieval.     

Clothing as a source of fibres within museums

This paper examines the role of visitors’ clothing as a source of fibres and dust in museums. Some idealised experiments determined the mass of fibres and dust emitted from clothing and the range of particle sizes found. In chamber studies it was possible to examine the effect of different humidity and airflow on fibre release. Image analysis was used to determine particle size from sub-micron to giant particles including clothing fibre. Clothing was a significant contributor to fibre and dust generation and at low humidity winter garments composed largely of wool was especially large. High air velocity increased particle shedding from clothing. Clean clothing typically released a third to a tenth the weight of particulate material from dirty clothing. It is possible that the fibres and dust produced indoors from visitors could be reduced by an air-shower at the entrance, but less intrusive procedures such as keeping visitors at a distance from objects may be preferable.     

Mapping physical education teachers’ professional learning and impacts on pupil learning in a community of practice in South Korea

Background: A new national physical education (PE) curriculum has been developed in South Korea and PE teachers have been challenged to deliver new transferable educational outcomes in character development through PE. In one geographical area, in order to support teachers to make required changes, a Communities of Practice (CoP) approach to continuing professional development (CPD) was adopted. Rather than being based in a single-school, this CoP brought PE teachers together from a number of schools with the aim of sharing learning and impacting on pedagogies, practices and pupils’ learning in character development through PE.

Aims: To map and analyse the ways in which teachers (i) learnt about character education in a CoP, (ii) used this learning to inform their pedagogies and practices, and (iii) impacted on pupil learning in and beyond PE.

Method: The participants were a university professor, 8 secondary school PE teachers from 8 different schools and 41 pupils. Data collection was undertaken in two phases in Autumn 2014 and Spring 2015. In-depth qualitative data were collected in the CoP and the teachers’ schools using individual interviews, focus groups with pupils, observations of lessons, open-ended questionnaires and document analysis. Data were analysed using a constructivist revision of grounded theory.

Findings: There was clear evidence of teacher learning in the CoP and changes to their pedagogies and indirect teaching behaviours (ITBs). Pupils were also able to identify the new intended learning about character development at both cognitive and behavioural levels, although there was little evidence of understanding about or intention to transfer this learning beyond PE (which was the original aim of the Government’s character education initiative). Barriers to teacher and pupil learning are also discussed.

Conclusion: Teachers’ professional learning in the CoP impacted on the development of both teachers’ pedagogies and ITBs which then influenced pupils’ learning, however, linking teachers’ professional learning to pupils’ learning remains challenging. This study has added further insights into the complexity of the processes linking policy, teachers’ learning and pupils’ learning outcomes. While it was possible to trace clear pathways from the CoP to teachers’ learning, and in some cases to pupils’ learning, it was also apparent that a wide range of factors intervened to influence the learning outcomes.     

Accuracy of sequential sub-field synchronization of multiple digital camcorders through numerical optimization

The use of digital camcorders in biomechanical analyses can introduce errors due to inter-camera time offsets. The faster the motion being recorded the greater the error. A sequential synchronization method was developed in this study to achieve sub-field camera synchronization for multiple camcorders through numerical optimization. A recreational golfer performed ten drives while being recorded with four digital camcorders (60-Hz sampling rate). Video signals were sampled at 10,000 Hz to determine the actual inter-camera time offsets. The optimized inter-camera time offsets were computed based on three markers placed on the shaft, each separated by 200 mm. The inter-camera time offset error was computed as the difference between the optimized and actual inter-camera time offsets. The inter-camera time offset error reduced on average from 0.518 to 0.019 fields (1 field = 16.7 ms) or less due to sequential optimization. The optimized global reconstruction errors were less than 19% of the unadjusted values. It was concluded that the ability to synchronize multiple (two or more) cameras using a sequential sub-field optimization strategy promises to extend the use of relatively inexpensive digital camcorders to motions considered too fast for the low field rates of such cameras. The sequential approach presented provides a balance between computation time and reconstruction accuracy.