Distal Communication by Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Evidence for Common Ground?

van der Goot et al. (2014) proposed that distal, deictic communication indexed the appreciation of the psychological state of a common ground between a signaler and a receiver. In their study, great apes did not signal distally, which they construed as evidence for the human uniqueness of a sense of common ground. This study exposed 166 chimpanzees to food and an experimenter, at an angular displacement, to ask, “Do chimpanzees display distal communication?” Apes were categorized as (a) proximal or (b) distal signalers on each of four trials. The number of chimpanzees who communicated proximally did not statistically differ from the number who signaled distally. Therefore, contrary to the claim by van der Goot et al., apes do communicate distally.     

LEVERAGING RESOURCES THROUGH STRATEGIC ALLIANCES FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

The Michigan Technical Education Center (M-TEC) at Bay de Noc Community College is leading the way in workforce development for Michigan's Upper Peninsula. By leveraging resources through strategic alliances with industry, government, labor, and education, the M-TEC has become a powerful tool for training solutions. A March 1998 State of Michigan initiative sought applications from community colleges interested in a no more business as usual approach to technical skills training. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) awarded the M-TEC construction grant to Bay College in January 1999; groundbreaking took place in May 1999 and the center was dedicated in March 2000. The M-TEC concept - anytime, anywhere, customized training - proved itself through dramatic first-year increases in the number of workers trained (89%), total training hours (90% ), and MEDC training grant funds (500%). This has been accomplished in part through the impressive variety of resources the M-TEC leveraged from its strategic alliances. The M-TEC's sustaining partners, a group that has doubled in size after 1 year of operation (i.e., from 9 to 18), have increased the capacity of the center, even as they have contributed to its operation's budget. Equipment the center could not afford is now in use because the supplier wants its local customers to have access to it - and because the center could provide the training laboratories to house it. Dedicated computer laboratories make workforce training simple, with resources always available when needed by business and industry. The M-TEC is generating multiple revenue streams through nontraditional means to meet the state s 5-year mandate of self-sufficiency.     

A concurrent model of the wilderness therapy process

Abstract

Though wilderness therapy programs are growing in number and popularity, the theoretical basis for distinguishing wilderness therapy from traditional therapeutic modalities is lacking. Existing models describing the wilderness therapy process have been stage-based, meaning the process has been conceptualized as sequential and discrete. Lost in this conceptualization of the wilderness therapy process is the dynamic and interrelated nature of therapeutic factors reasoned to be present at all times and to varying degrees. To address the limitations of stage based models and the lack of a strong theoretical basis in wilderness therapy, a concurrent model of the wilderness therapy process is proposed. This proposed model consists of three factors believed to be unique to the wilderness therapy milieu: Wilderness, Physical Self, and Social Self. The constituents of each of these factors are detailed and theoretical rationale for inclusion provided. In addition hypotheses about the intensity of each of these factors are discussed as a function of the temporal progression of the wilderness experience (e.g. entrance into wilderness program, exiting wilderness program). Advantages of the proposed model as well as suggestions for model testing and refinement are included.     

Bookstores - Los Angeles

“Larry Edmunds Cinema and Theater Bookshop”, Inc. 6658 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. 90028: This bookstore was mentioned earlier in BBB under cinema [I:6:5 and II:4:6]

“Acres of Books”, 240 Long Beach Blvd., Long Beach, Calif. 90802: Dr. Kittross described this bookstore in an early issue of BBB [I:4:3]

“The Book Shelf”, 1217 South Hawthorne Blvd., Hawthorne, Calif. 90250.

“Gene de Chene Bookseller”, 11552 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90025.

“Dawson's Book Shop”: 533 North Larchmont, Los Angeles, Calif. 90004.

“Cosmopolitan Book Shop”: 7007 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, Calif. 90038.

“West Los Angeles Bookstore”, 1670 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90025.

“Wilshire Books”, 3018 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, Calif. 90406.     

Creative in finding creativity in the curriculum: the CLIL second language classroom

Modern education is often characterized by a tension between learning and creativity (Connery et al. in Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts, 2010). ??The Arts????if attended to at all??is often positioned as a distinct element of the broader curriculum, and separate from teaching and learning within other curricular domains. Yet, despite being largely neglected within contemporary social constructivist literature, Vygotsky??s sociocultural theory of mind (Vygotsky in Mind in society, 1978; Vygotsky in The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1: Problems of general psychology, 1987)) has as its core a fundamental concern for creativity, affect, and emotion as the basis for human development. This paper argues that Vygotsky??s understanding of catharsis??in particular, the transformative potential of emotion??gives cause to rethink the qualitative nature of pedagogy, and especially the importance of ??mundane creativity?? (Holzman in Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts, 2010, p. 27) at the core of teaching and learning. This, in turn, opens up new possibilities for conceiving of how creativity might be understood and realized within and across different dimensions of the curriculum more broadly. For an empirical example to explore these constructs, the paper considers data from a ??content and language integrated learning?? (CLIL) context. Emerging in the mid-1990s as a European response to the success of the Canadian French immersion method for teaching languages (Johnson and Swain in Immersion education: International perspectives, 1997), CLIL sets out several guiding principles for integrating second language (L2) with content to develop both simultaneously. With a focus on how Japanese mediates a unit of work on Geography, the study highlights how the integrated language/content focus affords a space for creative pedagogical engagement in terms of learners making their own creative choices on what language to use, and how it could be used, to facilitate the learning of both language and content (Bachman and Palmer in Language assessment in practice: Developing language assessments and justifying their use in the real world, 2010; Mahn and John-Steiner in The gift of confidence: A Vygotskian view of emotions, 2002).