Changing teachers´ practices in regular schools enrolling children with visual impairment

The number of persons with visual impairment in Tanzania is estimated to over 1.6 million. About half a million of these persons are children aged 7-13. Only about 1% of these children are enrolled in schools. The special schools and units are too few and in most cases they are far away from the children’s homes. More and more regular schools are enrolling children with visual impairment, but the schools lack financial resources, tactile teaching materials and trained special education teachers. Children with visual impairment enrolled in regular schools seldom get enough support and often fail in examinations. The general aim of this study was to contribute to increased knowledge and understanding about how teachers can change their teaching practices and thus facilitate the learning of children with visual impairment included in regular classrooms as they participate in an action research project. The project was conducted in a primary school in a poor rural region with a high frequency of blindness and visual impairment. The school was poorly resourced and the average number of pupils per class was 90. The teachers who participated in the collaborative action research project were the 14 teachers who taught blind or visually impaired pupils in grades 4 and 6, in total 6 pupils. The action research project was conducted during a period of 6 months and was carried out in five cycles. The teachers were actively involved in all the project activities; identifying challenges, planning solutions, producing teaching materials, reflecting on outcomes, collaborating and evaluating. Empirical data was collected with questionnaires, interviews, observations and focus group discussions. The findings of the study show that the teachers managed to change their teaching practices through systematic reflection, analysis and collaboration. The teachers produced a variety of tactile teaching materials, which facilitated the learning of the pupils with visual impairment. The pupils learned better and felt more included in the regular classes. The teachers gained new knowledge and skills. They grew professionally and started to collaborate with each other. The study contributes to new knowledge of how collaborative action research can be conducted in the area of special education in a Tanzanian school context. The study has also relevance to the planning of school-based professional development programs and teacher education programs in Tanzania and in other low-income countries. The results also point at strategies which can promote inclusion of children with disabilities in regular schools.

The importance of package design to Japanese consumers: The role of visual and informational elements of package design in decision making

The importance of package design as a marketing tool is growing as the competition in retail environment increases. However, there is a lack of studies on how each element of package design affects consumer decisions in different countries. The objective of this thesis is to study the role of package design to Japanese consumers. The research was conducted through an experiment with a sample of 37 Japanese female participants. They were divided into two groups and were given different tasks: one group had to choose a chocolate for themselves, and the other for a group of friends. The participants were presented with 15 different Finnish chocolate boxes to choose from. The qualitative data was gathered through observation and semi-structured interviews. In addition, data from questionnaires was quantified and all the data was triangulated. The empirical results suggest that visual elements strongly affect the decision making of Japanese consumers. Image was the most important element which acted as both, a visual and an informational aspect in the experiment. Informational elements on the other hand have little effect, especially when the context is written in a foreign language. However, informational elements affected participants who were choosing chocolates for a group of friends. A unique finding was the importance of kawaii (cuteness) to Japanese consumers.

Trilling race : the political economy of racialised visual-aural encounters

This thesis investigates the matter of race in the context of Finnish language acquisition among adult migrants in Finland. Here matter denotes both the materiality of race and how race comes to matter. Drawing primarily on an auto/ethno/graphic account of learning the Finnish language as a participant in the Finnish for foreigners classes, this thesis problematises the ontology and epistemology of race, i.e., what race is, how it is known, and what an engagement with race entails. Taking cues from the bodily practices of learning the Finnish trill or the rolling r, this study proposes a notion of “trilling race” and argues for an onto-epistemological dis/continuity that marks race’s arrival. The notion of dis/continuity reworks the distinction between continuity and discontinuity, and asks about the how of the arrival of any identity, the where, and the when. In so doing, an analysis of “trilling race” engages with one of the major problematics that has exercised much critical attention, namely: how to read race differently. That is, to rethink the conundrum of the need to counter “representational weight” (Puar 2007, 191) of race on the one hand, and to account for the racialised lived realities on the other. The link between a study of the phenomenon of host country language acquisition and an examination of the question of race is not as obvious as it might seem. For example, what does the argument that the process of language learning is racialised actually imply? Does it mean that race, as a process of racialisation or an ongoing configuration of sets of power relations, exerts force from an outside on the otherwise neutral process of learning the host country language? Or does it mean that race, as an identity category, presents as among the analytical perspectives, along with gender and class for instance, of the phenomenon of host country language acquisition? With these questions in mind, and to foreground the examination of the question of race in the context of Finnish language acquisition among adult migrants, this thesis opens with a discussion of the art installation Finnexia by Lisa Erdman. Finnexia is a fictitious drug said to facilitate Finnish language learning through accelerating the cognitive learning process and reducing the anxiety of speaking the Finnish language. Not only does the Finnexia installation make visible the ways in which the lack of skill in Finnish is fgured as the threshold – a border that separates the inside from the outside – to integration, but also, and importantly, it raises questions about the nature of difference, and the process of differentiation that separates the individual from the social, fact from fiction, nature from culture. These puzzles animate much of the analysis in this dissertation. These concerns continue to be addressed in the rest of part one. Whereas chapter two offers a reconsideration of the ambiguities of ethnisme/ethnicity and race, chapter three dilates on the methodological implications of a conception of the dis/continuity of race. Part two focuses on the matter of race and examines the political economy of visual-aural encounters, whereas part three shifts the focus and rethinks the possibilities and limitations of transforming racialised and normative constraints. Taking up these particular problematics, this thesis as a whole argues that race trills itself: its identity/difference is simultaneously made possible and impossible.

Measuring Effectiveness of Marketing Message: The Role of Verbal, Visual and Brand Elements

The aim of this paper is to study the role of verbal, visual and brand elements while meas-uring effectiveness of marketing message. The thesis is written in the context of mobile gaming industry. The object of the study is marketing message. To achieve the aim, the main research question was formulated: How do the elements of marketing message, such as verbal, visual and brand, affect the consumer’s attitude toward the ad, emotional response and attention capture? The theory development chapter lays on three corner stones – analysis of previous litera-ture on marketing message and its elements, namely verbal, visual and brand; overview of literature on attitude formation and particularly attitude toward the ad. In addition, investiga-tion of key points of emotional response and attention capture literature finalizes the chap-ter. The empirical part consists of experiment, conducted with 27 participants. Experiment includes the self-report semantically anchored scale, measuring the attitude toward the ad, as well as autonomic measures – eye tracking (attention capture) and facial expressions (emotional response). The results of the experiment showed that the size of the brand element – the logo – has an effect on the attention capture and the overall attitude toward the ad. The bigger the logo, the more time people spend viewing it, and they realise the message is more educa-tional and factual. The measure related to the visual element – the visual complexity – in-creases the intensity of participant’s facial expression. While the measure of verbal ele-ment – the contrast between text and background colours – leads to a better attitude to-ward the ad. The higher the contrast between text and background, the more known the message appears to the viewer.

The oral history network in the Nordic and Baltic context

Teemanumero

Coarse Global Visual Localization of a Mobile Robot

Localization, which is the ability of a mobile robot to estimate its position within its environment, is a key capability for autonomous operation of any mobile robot. This thesis presents a system for indoor coarse and global localization of a mobile robot based on visual information. The system is based on image matching and uses SIFT features as natural landmarks. Features extracted from training images arestored in a database for use in localization later. During localization an image of the scene is captured using the on-board camera of the robot, features are extracted from the image and the best match is searched from the database. Feature matching is done using the k-d tree algorithm. Experimental results showed that localization accuracy increases with the number of training features used in the training database, while, on the other hand, increasing number of features tended to have a negative impact on the computational time. For some parts of the environment the error rate was relatively high due to a strong correlation of features taken from those places across the environment.