Wellbeing: How we make sense of it and what this means for teachers

In this paper, the authors discuss their grounded research carried out with teachers about the wellbeing of teachers. They explore the importance of making the concept of wellbeing more intimate and consider hedonic and eudaimonic ways of looking at wellbeing. They present a model of layered reflection which illuminates key factors that have an impact on the wellbeing of teachers.     

A Typology of State Financial Aid Grant Programs Using Latent Class Analysis

Research in Higher Education - State financial aid grant programs are commonly categorized as either need-based, merit-based, or both, but their initial eligibility requirements include many more...     

Olfaction and emotion: The quest for olfactory restoration in two speech communities

ABSTRACT

Olfaction has been described as one of the least studied of the senses. This has certainly proven true in Communication. This project applies Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis to examine the role that olfaction plays in the cultural meaning systems of two speech communities: residents surrounding the Gowanus Canal and bereaved parents. The cultural hub used to explore the cultural significance of olfaction in both speech communities is feeling. The analyses illustrate how emotions are tied to associated sensations and further become activated through radiants of dwelling, relating and acting. The analysis also shows how olfaction may serve to unify and separate members of a community. The significance of this research encourages stretching the boundaries of communication studies by examining the less studied physical senses and the boundaries of Cultural Discourse Analysis by providing distinctions that others can incorporate when examining feelings.     

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Spelling of Inflected Verb Morphology in Children with Spelling Deficits

Children with spelling deficits demonstrate significant difficulty using inflectional morphology in their writing. This study investigated whether phonological deficits account for these pronounced difficulties or if they are more accurately explained by limitations in morphological or orthographic awareness. Twenty–six 11—13–year–old children with spelling deficits, 31 younger spelling–level–matched children, and 31 age–matched children were asked to spell a series of verbs with past tense and progressive markers in dictated sentences and in list form. Performance on spelling tasks was compared to performance on phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness tasks. Results suggest that children with spelling deficits have significant difficulty including inflections as well as spelling inflections and base words. Difficulty was most pronounced in a sentence context. Ability to spell inflectional forms was related to variation in morphological awareness in children with spelling deficits and to variation in orthographic awareness in spelling–level–matched children.     

A color image segmentation method as used in the study of ancient monument decay

In the cultural heritage area, it is of fundamental importance to characterize and classify the conservation state of the materials constituting ancient monuments, in order to study and monitor their decay. Generally, the decay diagnosis is provided by “naked eye” analysis done by expert scientists “walking around” the artifact and recording the conservation state of each individual element they observe. In this paper, a color image segmentation approach, based on histogram threshold and edge detection techniques is presented, to extract degradation regions, characterized by holes or cavities, from color images of stone-materials. The goal is to provide an aid to the decay diagnosis by segmenting degraded regions from color images, computing quantitative data, such as the area and perimeter of the extracted zones, and processing qualitative information, such as various levels of depth detected into the same zones. Since color is a powerful tool in the distinction between objects, a segmentation technique based on color, instead of intensity only, has been used to provide a clearer discrimination between regions. The study case concerns the impressive remains of the Roman Theatre in the city of Aosta (Italy). In particular, we have processed and analyzed some color images of the theatre puddingstones, acquired by a camera.