Activity of Prefrontal Cortex in Teachers and Students during Teaching of an Insight Problem

Metacognitive functions are important for both teachers and students to facilitate teaching and learning. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a proven role in metacognition. As a pilot study, we evaluated the PFC activity of teachers and students using near‐infrared spectroscopy devices to explore the neural mechanism of PFC underlying metacognitive function during teaching and problem‐solving processes. In 14 student‐teacher pairs, participants in the teacher role gave hints via a tablet screen to facilitate solving of a tangram puzzle task by participants in the student role. The PFC activity of teachers increased after giving hints but not while planning hints. The PFC activity of students increased upon task solving after receiving hints. The PFC of teachers might play a metacognitive role in monitoring their own teaching results. The PFC activity of students might be related to the creativity process after gaining insights, as well as metacognitive process for monitoring their own behavior.     

Leaving It Up to the Industry: People With Disabilities and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

This article examines whether Section 255 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act achieves accessibility for people with disabilities. Taking the interest group approach, it shows that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implemented Section 255 in a way that is favorable to the telecommunications industry and not to people with disabilities. The FCC's regulations only encourage the telecommunication industry to consider accessibility issues for people with disabilities. This proindustry regulatory bias is in keeping with the established pattern of policymaking in other areas concerning people with disabilities. The paper argues that if the FCC continues to rely on the voluntary efforts of the industry, people with disabilities will not enjoy benefits of access to telecommunications systems.     

Putting Making into High School Computer Science Classrooms: Promoting Equity in Teaching and Learning with Electronic Textiles in Exploring Computer Science

Recent discussions of making have focused on developing out-of-school makerspaces and activities to provide more equitable and enriching learning opportunities for youth. Yet school classrooms present a unique opportunity to help broaden access, diversify representation, and deepen participation in making. In turning to classrooms, we want to understand the crucial practices that teachers employ in broadening and deepening access to making. In this article, we investigate two high school teachers' approaches in implementing a novel eight-week, electronic textiles unit within the Exploring Computer Science curriculum, where students designed wearable electronic textile projects with microcontrollers, sensors, and LEDs. We share teachers' emergent practices in transforming their classrooms into makerspaces, including valuing student expertise and promoting connections in personalized work. We discuss the ways these practices succeeded in broadening access to making while deepening participation in computing and establishing home-school connections.     

The origin of universal shadow education: what the supplemental education phenomenon tells us about the postmodern institution of education

Prodigious growth in out-of-school, private educational activities meant to supplement formal schooling is observed worldwide. Why has shadow education expanded, and what does it mean for the future of education in postmodern society? Illustrated by the historical development and recent changes in the Japanese shadow education industry, it is suggested that shadow education follows the institutional logic of formal education. And as this logic has become more homogenized and expansive globally, so have the forms and goals of shadow education. Because of its focus on learning and achievement, which are central to formal education, it is predicted that shadow education will be increasingly incorporated into the broader culture of education.     

University surroundings and infrastructures that are accessible and inclusive for all: listening to students with disabilities

The main topic of this article is architectural barriers and infrastructures as identified by university students with disabilities. The data presented is part of a much wider research project, sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competition. A biographical-narrative methodology was used for this study. The results presented have been classified based on one of five barrier types: urban (barriers that are outside the actual university campus), transport (public transportation and personal vehicles), building (obstacles inside university buildings), environmental (those elements within the classroom, including furniture, excessive noise or inadequate temperatures) and communication (these are divided into signposting and barriers when accessing information). Lastly, a variety of questions are considered in the conclusions which indicate that universities still need a certain degree of adaptation and readjustment to really be accessible and inclusive, in keeping with the principles of universal design.     

‘Is he allowed to have a crush on you?’ interrupting adultism in fieldwork with youth*

ABSTRACT

Scholars have called for ethnographers to reveal the emotional and controversial aspects of fieldwork. Through analysis of our fieldwork with teens in the United States and Japan, this article documents how we, two adult researchers, attempted to address adultism—a pervasive system of oppression that deems young people inferior. We discuss three types of encounters which we believe reflect how adultism operated in our fieldwork and the challenges related to de-stabilising it. The encounters revealed specific patterns and manifestations of adultism including 1) how adults regulated young people’s identities, 2) our assumptions about what rapport and reciprocity with youth meant, and 3) the dilemmas of whether or not to deploy adult power to intervene in youth dynamics we found to be troublesome. This article suggests that adult researchers reflexively examine and document challenging and unsettling moments with youth in fieldwork in order to interrupt and unlearn adultist behaviours and beliefs.     

‘We dominate the basement!’: how Asian American girls construct a borderland community

This article, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, explores the ways in which eight Asian American immigrant high school girls construct a borderland community, which they call the ‘Basement Group,’ after the place where they gather at school. While the girls struggle with displacement in the borderlands, including isolation in their family homes and alienation in formal classes, they have sufficient creativity and improvisational skills to invent a borderland community where they can reject mainstream values and beliefs as well as affirm diversity and cultural hybridity. Examining the possibilities and constraints of youth-led space, this article reveals the otherwise unseen sense of belonging, desires, and capacities of these Asian American immigrant girls who navigate lives in-between multiple nation states, cultures, and traditions. The article illuminates the power and possibilities of youth-created spaces that reflect the strengths, assets, and possibilities that marginalized immigrant youth possess.     

How narratives move your mind: A corpus of shared-character stories for connecting emotional flow and interestingness

Creativity is considered a human characteristic; creative endeavors, including automatic story generation, have been a major challenge for artificial intelligences. To understand how humans create and evaluate stories, we (1) construct a story dataset and (2) analyze the relationship between emotions and story interestingness. Given that understanding how to move readers emotionally is a crucial creative technique, we focus on the role of emotions in evaluating reader satisfaction. Although conventional research has highlighted emotions read from a text, we hypothesize that readers’ emotions do not necessarily coincide with those of the characters. The story dataset created for this study describes situations surrounding two characters. Crowdsourced volunteers label stories with the emotions of the two characters and those of readers; we then empirically analyze the relationship between emotions and interestingness. The results show that a story’s score has a stronger relationship to the readers’ emotions than the characters’ emotions.