Segregation Preferences of Urban and Rural 16-year-olds in Northern Ireland

Sectarian violence in the Northern Ireland is often perceived to be mostly confined to cities. The aim of this paper is to explore statistically what factors contribute to segregation preferences among young people living in rural and urban areas, using the 2005–2009 Young Life and Times (YLT) survey – an annual attitudes survey of 16-year-olds. The findings show that religious and national identities are the strongest predictors of segregation preferences among 16-year-olds, regardless of where they live and what background they have. Those living in rural areas of Northern Ireland are more supportive of residential, workplace and educational segregation than those living in more urban areas. This research highlights the need for government policy to take rurality into account. Nevertheless, some variables significantly determine segregation preferences regardless of where respondents live, such as attendance of segregated schools, being female, or strength of national and religious identity. Consequently, policy initiatives should continue to address the effect of segregation, especially in relation to education, and future research exploring social class and gender is recommended. In conclusion, the perception of the violent ‘urban spaces’ and the ‘peaceful countryside’ has to be challenged.

Care and Management of Ancient Stone Monuments During Environmental Change

Ancient stone monuments (ASMs), such as standing stones and rock art panels, are powerful and iconic expressions of Britain’s rich prehistoric past that have major economic and tourism value. However, ASMs are under pressure due to increasing anthropogenic exposure and changing climatic conditions, which accelerate their rates of disrepair. Although scientific data exists on the integrity of stone monuments, most applies to “built” systems; therefore, additional work specific to ASMs in the countryside is needed to develop better-informed safeguarding strategies. Here, we use Neolithic and Bronze Age rock art panels across Northern England as a case study for delineating ASM management actions required to enhance monument preservation. The state of the rock art is described first, including factors that led to current conditions. Rock art management approaches then are described within the context of future environments, which models suggest to be more dynamic and locally variable. Finally, a Condition Assessment and Risk Evaluation (CARE) scheme is proposed to help prioritise interventions; an example of which is provided based on stone deterioration at Petra in Jordon. We conclude that more focused scientific and behavioural data, specific to deterioration mechanisms, are required for an ASM CARE scheme to be successful.

Condition Assessment and Preservation of Open-Air Rock Art Panels During Climate Change

Thousands of Neolithic and Bronze Age open-air rock art panels exist across the countryside in northern England. However, desecration, pollution, and other factors are threatening the survival of these iconic stone monuments. Evidence suggest that rates of panel deterioration may be increasing, although it is not clear whether this is due to local factors or wider environmental influences accelerated by environmental change. To examine this question, 18 rock art panels with varied art motifs were studied at two major panel locations at Lordenshaw and Weetwood Moor in Northumberland. A condition assessment
tool was used to first quantify the level of deterioration of each panel (called “staging”). Stage estimates then were compared statistically with 27 geochemical and physical descriptors of local environments, such as soil moisture, salinity, pH, lichen coverage, soil anions and cation levels, and panel orientation, slope, and standing height. In parallel, climate modelling was performed using UKCP09 to assess how projected climatic conditions (to 2099) might affect the environmental descriptors most correlated with elevated stone deterioration. Only two descriptors significantly correlated (P < 0.05) with increased stage: the standing height of the panel and the exchangeable cation content of the local soils, although moisture conditions also were potentially influential at some panels. Climate modelling predicts warming temperatures, more seasonally variable precipitation, and increased wind speeds, which hint stone deterioration could accelerate in the future due to increased physiochemical weathering. We recommend key panels be targeted for immediate management intervention, focusing on reducing wind exposures, improving site drainage, and potentially immobilizing soil salts.

Transgressing Contemporary Boundaries:The Narrator as True Custodian of Cultural Knowledge in Ulster Society

Historically in Gaelic culture, the bard was greatly valued and admired as an important and integral part of society. Travelled, schooled and specifically trained in their art, the bard helped ensure identity and reassurance for Gaelic families by grounding them both temporarily and spatially into their landscape. Entrusted with the duty and responsibility of recording place and event, the bards worked without writing and by transgressing man-made boundaries, travelled throughout the land weaving their histories into the very fabric of society.

Now no longer with us, we find ourselves without the distinguished chronicler to undertake this duty. Yet the responsibility of the Gaelic bard is one still shared by all artists today; to facilitate memory and identity, whether good or bad. Many Ulster writers, by happenstance and geography have found themselves located in a place of painful histories. An immediate difficulty for those local writers becomes manifest by being intrinsically implicated into those histories – whilst having first-hand knowledge and comprehension beyond that of the outsider, the local writer is automatically damned by association and relationship, thereby tarnishing their voice in comparison to the perceived impartiality of others.
Some writers however have successfully sought ways to escape this limitation and have worked in ways that can transgress the restrictions of prejudgement. John Hewitt, by purposely becoming a self-imposed tourist was able to distance himself to write impartially about the past, recognising that ’the place without its ghosts is a barren place.’1 In ‘The Colony’,2 tradition, peoples and mapping of the land are all narrated by Hewitt in a similar way to the Gaelic bardic topographic poems of Sean O'Dubhagain and Giolla Na Naomh O'Huidhrin3 in compiling a rich cultural atlas.

Similarly the Belfast poet and novelist Ciaran Carson also writes and records the city from an intermediary position; that of translator. Mediating between reader and aisling,4 Carson himself takes the reader on a journey into name, meaning, time and place, focusing primarily on the city of Belfast, familiar in name but impenetrable in depth to most.

Furthermore, this once-forgotten tradition to chronicle is now being continued by the new breed of Irish crime writers where the likes of Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty can, by way of the crime novel, accurately record contemporary society. Thus, ghost estates, listed buildings, archaeological digs, street and city have all provided setting and subject matter for recent novels. Moreover by choosing the ‘outsider from within’ as their chief protagonist, whether detective or criminal, each author is able to transgress the boundaries of prejudice and preconception that hinder genuine understanding and knowledge.

Looking in turn at the Gaelic bard, the twentieth century Ulster poet and the new breed of Irish crime writer, the authors will outline the real value of the narrator, by being able to act as cultural transgressor beyond the seeming and alleged as the true chronicler in society, and then with specific reference to city and countryside in Ireland, as a valuable custodian of knowledge in architecture and place.

Keywords
Architecture, Crime Fiction, Cultural Atlas, Place, Poetry.

1 From ‘The Bloody Brae’, a one act play written by John Hewitt in the 1930’s.
2 Hewitt, J. (1968) published in Collected Poems 1932-67. London:McGibbon & Kee.
3 Lengthy and detailed medieval Gaelic poems composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries first edited by John O'Donovan in 1862 for the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society in Dublin.
4 The aisling is the Irish song or poem genre when the poet is visited by their muse in a daydream or dream-vision state.

City Profile: Erbil

Erbil (Hawler in Kurdish), is the capital and the largest city of Iraqi Kurdistan. Having been continuously inhabited for about 6000 years, the city has recently been regarded by UNESCO World Heritage as one of the world’s oldest urban settlements. The city is witnessing remarkable urban growth and rapid spatial expansion compounded by a dramatic increase in population due to emigration from the countryside and rural areas over the last three decades. Following the changing geopolitical landscape of post-war Iraq, urban changes and socio-political transformation are largely driven by Erbil’s growing autonomous status as the capital of northern region of Kurdistan since 2003. This paper explores the layers of historical, spatial and social developments of the contemporary urban context of Kurdistan in general and of Erbil in particular as a reflection of the changing status of the city, as well as the polarization of Iraq and the emergence of neoliberal urbanism. The tension between the global and modern from one side and traditional and authentic from another is ever present and evident in everyday challenges in the planning of the city. In large part, Erbil’s built fabric embodies the dichotomy of identity and contests between its past and future, in which the present remains a transition between two disconnected realities.

Evolving national park models: The emergence of an economic imperative and its effect on the contested nature of the 'national' park concept in Northern Ireland.

National park models have evolved in tandem with the emergence of a multifunctional countryside. Sustainable development has been added to the traditional twin aims of conservation and recreation. This is typified by recent national park designations, such as the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. A proposed Mournes national park in Northern Ireland has evolved a stage further with a model of national park to deliver national economic goals envisaged by government. This seeks to commodify the natural landscape. This paper compares Cairngorm and Mourne stakeholders’ views on the principal features of both models: park aims, management structures and planning functions. While Cairngorm stakeholders were largely positive from the outset, the model of national park introduced is not without criticism. Conversely, Mourne stakeholders have adopted an anti-national park stance. Nevertheless, the model of national park proposed possessing a strong economic imperative, an absence of the Sandford Principle as a means to manage likely conflicts, and lacking any planning powers in its own right, may still be insufficient to bring about widespread support for a Mourne national park. Such a model is also likely to accelerate the degradation of the Mourne landscape. Competing national identities (British and Irish) provide an additional dimension to the national park debate in Northern Ireland. Deep ideological cleavages are capable of derailing the introduction of a national park irrespective of the model proposed. In Northern Ireland the national park debate is not only about reconciling environmental and economic interests but also political and ethno-national differences.

Silicon, the silver bullet for mitigating biotic and abiotic stress, and improving grain quality, in rice?

Adequate silicon fertilization greatly boosts rice yield and mitigates biotic and abiotic stress, and improves grain quality through lowering the content of cadmium and inorganic arsenic. This review on silicon dynamics in rice considers recent advances in our understanding of the role of silicon in rice, and the challenges of maintaining adequate silicon fertility within rice paddy systems. Silicon is increasingly considered as an element required for optimal plant performance, particularly in rice. Plants can survive with very low silicon under laboratory/glasshouse conditions, but this is highly artificial and, thus, silicon can be considered as essential for proper plant function in its environment. Silicon is incorporated into structural components of rice cell walls were it increases cell and tissue rigidity in the plant. Structural silicon provides physical protection to plants against microbial infection and insect attack as well as reducing the quality of the tissue to the predating organisms. The abiotic benefits are due to silicon's effect on overall organ strength. This helps protect against lodging, drought stress, high temperature (through efficient maintenance of transpiration), and photosynthesis by protecting against high UV. Furthermore, silicon also protects the plant from saline stress and against a range of toxic metal stresses (arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, nickel and zinc). Added to this, silicon application decreases grain concentrations of various human carcinogens, in particular arsenic, antimony and cadmium. As rice is efficient at stripping bioavailable silicon from the soil, recycling of silicon rich rice straw biomass or addition of inorganic silicon fertilizer, primarily obtained from iron and steel slag, needs careful management. Silicon in the soil may be lost if the silicon-cycle, traditionally achieved via composting of rice straw and returning it to the land, is being broken. As composting of rice straw and incorporation of composted or non-composted straw back to land are resource intensive activities, these activities are declining due to population shifts from the countryside to cities. Processes that accelerate rice straw composting, therefore, need to be identified to aid more efficient use of this resource. In addition, rice genetics may help address declining available silicon in paddy soils: for example by selecting for characteristics during breeding that lead to an increased ability of roots to access recalcitrant silicon sources from soil and/or via selection for traits that aid the maintenance of a high silicon status in shoots. Recent advances in understanding the genetic regulation of silicon uptake and transport by rice plants will aid these goals.

Navigating the Borderlands: Brian McGilloway as Contemporary Cartographer of the Liminal in the Ulster Landscape

Set in the borderlands between Letterkenny and Derry-Londonderry, a landscape scarred by geological fold, river and cartographer’s pen, the Ulster crime novelist Brian McGilloway chronicles the hopes and fears of a contemporary society unable to escape a complicated history, redolent and entwined with the voices of its ‘ghosts of its past.’ Through his choice of chief protagonist, An Garda Síochána officer Benedict Devlin, McGilloway turns detective to critically investigate the both the seemingly straightforward and the unseen dwelling in the rural Ulster landscape. Following in the footsteps of Nordic and Tartan Noir in making commentary on current societ,y McGilloway recognises the importance of the past in trying to reach an understanding of the present. His critique however goes beyond criminal behaviour motivated primarily by politics or religion, allowing a deeper and more meaningful diagnosis of the ‘state of the nation’. Place, name and event become especially important in contextualising the liminality of McGilloway’s real rural border settings. In doing so, McGilloway continues in the rich tradition of Ulster poet such as Heaney, MacNiece, Muldoon and Hewitt in trying to rationalise the man-made amidst the elemental in the land of both the ‘Planter & The Gael.’ History, language, tradition and the sacral are all instruments of investigation in helping McGilloway present a revealing pathology and atlas of our times to his readers. Turning literary investigator, the author contends that there is much to learn from this physiography, not just for the borderlands region, but for the wider countryside and society beyond. Keywords Cultural Atlas, Crime Fiction, Place, Poetry, Rural.

Protestantism, Spectacle, Motherhood and Vice: Dublin's New Pleasure Gardens

In 1748, Bartholomew Mosse, a curious combination of surgeon, obstetrician and entertainment impresario, established a pleasure garden on the northern fringes of Dublin. Ostensibly designed to fund the construction of a maternity hospital to be located adjacently, Mosse’s New Pleasure Gardens became one of the premier leisure resorts in Dublin. This was to have a profound effect on the city’s urban form. Within a few years the gardens became an epicentre of speculative development as the upper classes jostled to build their houses in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the creation nearby of Sackville Mall, a wide and generous strolling ground, established a whole section of the city dedicated to haute spectacle, display and leisure. Like other pleasure gardens in the British Isles, Mosse’s venture introduced new, commodified forms of entertainment. In the colonial context of eighteenth-century Ireland, however, ‘a land only recently won and insecurely held’ (Foster, 1988) by the Protestant Anglo-Irish settler class, the production of culture and spectacle was perhaps more significant than elsewhere. Indeed, the form of Mosse’s gardens echoed the private city gardens of a key figure in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, while the hospital itself was constructed in a style of a Palladian country house, symbol of colonial presence in the countryside. However, like other pleasure gardens, the mix of music and alcohol, the heterogeneous crowd culled from across social and gender boundaries, and a landscape punctuated with secluded corners, meant that it also acquired a dubious reputation as a haunt of louche and illicit behaviours. The curious juxtaposition between a maternity hospital and pleasure garden, therefore, begins to assume other, hitherto hidden complexities. These are borne out by a closer examination of the architecture of the hospital, the shape of its landscape and the records of its patrons and patients.

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

In his essay, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma proposes that architecture cannot and should not be understood as object alone but instead always as series of networks and connections, relationships within space and through form. Some of these relationships are tangible, others are invisible. Stan Allen and James Corner have also called for an architecture that is more performative and operative – ‘less concerned with what buildings look like and more concerned with what they do’ – as means of effecting a more intimate and promiscuous relationship between infrastructure, urbanism and buildings. According to Allen this expanding filed offers a reclamation of some of the areas ceded by architecture following disciplinary specialization:

‘Territory, communication and speed are properly infrastructural problems and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at the very large scale’.

The motorway may not look like it – partly because we are no longer accustomed to think about it as such – but it is a site for and of architecture, a territory where architecture can be critical and active. If the limits of the discipline have narrowed, then one of the functions of a school of architecture must be an attempt occupy those areas of the built environment where architecture is no longer, or has yet to reach. If this is a project about reclamation of a landscape, it is also a challenge to some of the boundaries that surround architecture and often confine it, as Kuma suggests, to the appreciation of isolated objects.

M:NI 2014-15
We tend to think of the motorway as a thing or an object, something that has a singular function. Historically this is how it has been seen, with engineers designing bridges and embankments and suchlike with zeal … These objects like the M3 Urban Motorway, Belfast’s own Westway, are beautiful of course, but they have caused considerable damage to the city they were inflicted upon.

Actually, it’s the fact that we have seen the motorway as a solid object that has caused this problem. The motorway actually is a fluid and dynamic thing, and it should be seen as such: in fact it’s not an organ at all but actually tissue – something that connects rather than is. Once we start to see the motorway as tissue, it opens up new propositions about what the motorway is, is used for and does. This new dynamic and connective view unlocks the stasis of the motorway as edifice, and allows adaptation to happen: adaptation to old contexts that were ignored by the planners, and adaptation to new contexts that have arisen because of or in spite of our best efforts.

Motorways as tissue are more than just infrastructures: they are landscapes. These landscapes can be seen as surfaces on which flows take place, not only of cars, buses and lorries, but also of the globalized goods carried and the lifestyles and mobilities enabled. Here the infinite speed of urban change of thought transcends the declared speed limit [70 mph] of the motorway, in that a consignment of bananas can cause soil erosion in Equador, or the delivery of a new iphone can unlock connections and ideas the world over.

So what is this new landscape to be like? It may be a parallax-shifting, cognitive looking glass; a drone scape of energy transformation; a collective farm, or maybe part of a hospital. But what’s for sure, is that it is never fixed nor static: it pulses like a heartbeat through that most bland of landscapes, the countryside. It transmits forces like a Caribbean hurricane creating surf on an Atlantic Storm Beach: alien forces that mutate and re-form these places screaming into new, unclear and unintended futures.

And this future is clear: the future is urban. In this small rural country, motorways as tissue have made the whole of it: countryside, mountain, sea and town, into one singular, homogenous and hyper-connected, generic city.

Goodbye, place. Hello, surface!

MNI: Motorway Notation Network

In his essay, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma proposes that architecture cannot and should not be understood as object alone but instead always as series of networks and connections, relationships within space and through form. Some of these relationships are tangible, others are invisible. Stan Allen and James Corner have also called for an architecture that is more performative and operative – ‘less concerned with what buildings look like and more concerned with what they do’ – as means of effecting a more intimate and promiscuous relationship between infrastructure, urbanism and buildings. According to Allen this expanding filed offers a reclamation of some of the areas ceded by architecture following disciplinary specialization:

‘Territory, communication and speed are properly infrastructural problems and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at the very large scale’.

The motorway may not look like it – partly because we are no longer accustomed to think about it as such – but it is a site for and of architecture, a territory where architecture can be critical and active. If the limits of the discipline have narrowed, then one of the functions of a school of architecture must be an attempt occupy those areas of the built environment where architecture is no longer, or has yet to reach. If this is a project about reclamation of a landscape, it is also a challenge to some of the boundaries that surround architecture and often confine it, as Kuma suggests, to the appreciation of isolated objects.

M:NI 2014-15
We tend to think of the motorway as a thing or an object, something that has a singular function. Historically this is how it has been seen, with engineers designing bridges and embankments and suchlike with zeal … These objects like the M3 Urban Motorway, Belfast’s own Westway, are beautiful of course, but they have caused considerable damage to the city they were inflicted upon.

Actually, it’s the fact that we have seen the motorway as a solid object that has caused this problem. The motorway actually is a fluid and dynamic thing, and it should be seen as such: in fact it’s not an organ at all but actually tissue – something that connects rather than is. Once we start to see the motorway as tissue, it opens up new propositions about what the motorway is, is used for and does. This new dynamic and connective view unlocks the stasis of the motorway as edifice, and allows adaptation to happen: adaptation to old contexts that were ignored by the planners, and adaptation to new contexts that have arisen because of or in spite of our best efforts.

Motorways as tissue are more than just infrastructures: they are landscapes. These landscapes can be seen as surfaces on which flows take place, not only of cars, buses and lorries, but also of the globalized goods carried and the lifestyles and mobilities enabled. Here the infinite speed of urban change of thought transcends the declared speed limit [70 mph] of the motorway, in that a consignment of bananas can cause soil erosion in Equador, or the delivery of a new iphone can unlock connections and ideas the world over.

So what is this new landscape to be like? It may be a parallax-shifting, cognitive looking glass; a drone scape of energy transformation; a collective farm, or maybe part of a hospital. But what’s for sure, is that it is never fixed nor static: it pulses like a heartbeat through that most bland of landscapes, the countryside. It transmits forces like a Caribbean hurricane creating surf on an Atlantic Storm Beach: alien forces that mutate and re-form these places screaming into new, unclear and unintended futures.

And this future is clear: the future is urban. In this small rural country, motorways as tissue have made the whole of it: countryside, mountain, sea and town, into one singular, homogenous and hyper-connected, generic city.

Goodbye, place. Hello, surface!

Psicomotricidade e resiliência em crianças brasileiras e portuguesas: um estudo comparativo para a melhoria no ensino-aprendizagem

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo avaliar a eficácia da aplicação de um programa que visa o desenvolvimento psicomotor e a resiliência em crianças brasileiras (de classes desfavorecidas) e portuguesas (meio rural). Foram implementados 3 estudos: no primeiro, exploratório, foi realizado um programa de intervenção na área da resiliência com 76 crianças portuguesas e 151 crianças brasileiras com idades entre os 3 e os 5 anos de idade, divididas em Grupo Experimental (submetido ao programa de intervenção Strong Start Pré- K, da Universidade do Oregon, adaptado às realidades portuguesa e brasileira) e Grupo Controlo (sem intervenção),avaliadas pelo questionário WeBeST (Well-Being Screening Tool) antes e depois da intervenção. O segundo estudo realizado numa ONG brasileira pretende avaliar o efeito da psicomotricidade e foi dividido em duas fases: fase A, que contou 32 crianças brasileiras de 5 anos de idade, que frequentam a Instituição em período integral e 28 crianças que frequentam em meio período. Na fase B foi aplicado um programa de intervenção (nas 28 crianças da fase A) para se avaliar o efeito dessa intervenção. O instrumento de avaliação utilizado na área foi o Inventário Portage, adaptado e operacionalizado para a população brasileira, que consta de 580 itens divididos em seis áreas (Autocuidados, Cognição, Desenvolvimento Motor, Estimulação Infantil, Linguagem e Socialização). O terceiro estudo avaliou apenas nas crianças de 5 anos, os efeitos da resiliência e psicomotricidade nas 28 crianças brasileiras da fase A e B (do estudo 2) e em 35 crianças portuguesas (do estudo 1). Pudemos constatar no primeiro estudo que quer as crianças portuguesas, quer as brasileiras submetidas ao programa de intervenção na área da resiliência obtiveram melhores resultados que as não submetidas ao mesmo programa. Quanto aos resultados obtidos na fase A do segundo estudo na área da psicomotricidade, as crianças da ONG brasileira, que frequentavam o período integral obtiveram melhores resultados que as não requentavam. Já na fase B, estas ao serem submetidas ao programa de intervenção específico, obtiveram resultados significativos, o que sugere que o Programa de intervenção foi eficaz, quer para as crianças que o tiveram anteriormente no período integral, quer para as que foram submetidas a ele na fase posterior. No último estudo, as crianças brasileiras apresentaram melhores resultados que as portuguesas. Não foi possível fazer um estudo comparativo entre Portugal e Brasil, relativamente à área da psicomotricidade, visto que na realidade portuguesa, desde os anos 70 é obrigatória na educação pré-escolar a psicomotricidade. São referidas algumas implicações psicopedagógicas resultantes deste tipo de intervenção, perspetivando a melhoria da qualidade de ensino e aprendizagem e o desenvolvimento de personalidades resilientes das crianças.

Comunidades de prática online e a construção de competências para o ensino ativo

O presente estudo foi realizado no âmbito da formação continuada de professores através das interações numa Comunidade de Prática online (CoP online). Nas CoPs ocorrem a partiha de dúvidas e problemas comuns ao trabalho dos docentes. Quando as interações são mediadas por computadores, sejam estas síncronas ou assíncronas, ultrapassam as barreiras de espaço e tempo, se adequando ao cotidiano dos professores, invariavelmente tomado por múltiplas atividades. Nesta investigação delineamos os seguintes objetivos: i) Construir uma CoP online ancorada no software social Facebook, como espaço virtual de interação entre os participantes; ii) Comprender as interações através duma CoP online como etapa na construção de competências; iii) Criar e desenvolver um programa de formações presenciais e online com vistas à desenvover as competências de Questionamento e Argumentação; e, iv) Avaliar os impactos da formação através da CoP online no desenvolvimento das competências do Questionamento e da Argumentação enquanto estratégia de promoção do ensino ativo. Como estratégia, optamos em promover as interações através do Facebook por não ocasionar custos aos participantes e por atender ao modelo de presença virtual já existente. Participaram das interações professores em exercício da Autarquia do Ensino Superior de Garanhuns (AESGA), situada no interior de Pernambuco, Brasil. As interações decorreram no período de Abril de 2012 até Março de 2013, numa comunidade fechada, de livre adesão através de convite. Para solidificar a aprendizagem através da CoP online promovemos dois ciclos de formação, um presencial e um online. Em ambas as intervenções visamos o desenvolvimento das competências do Questionamento e da Argumentação por entendermos que estas são competências instrumentais para o desenvolvimento do Pensamento Crítico e da reflexão essenciais ao docente na revisão constante de suas práticas. Nas sessões online, realizadas com o apoio do Skype e concretizadas no software ArguQuest para dinamizar atividades práticas no desenvolvimento das competências do Questionamento e da Argumentação do professor, oportunizando a este a construção coletiva de estratégias alternativas de ensino e de aprendizagem, fundamentadas no ensino ativo. O estudo foi realizado através dum estudo de caso único, alicerçado no paradigma naturalista e de abordagem qualitativa. Os dados de cariz numérico fundamentaram as análises qualitativas, promovendo também a triangulação dos dados. As interações entre os professores foram analisadas através do modelo IAM (Interaction Analysis Model) proposto por Gunawardena, Lowe e Anderson (1997), que tem como objetivo determinar se o conhecimento foi cosntruído através das interações e qual o grau de mudança do entendimento decorrente das interações. Para verificar esta construção do conhecimento analisamos os excertos de episódios interativos com apoio do software de análise qualitativa WebQDA (Neri de Souza, Costa & Neri de Souza, 2012). A análise das situações de aprendizagem planejadas e desenvolvidas demonstraram que as TIC, nomeadamente os softwares sociais, podem ser aplicados com eficiência no desenvolvimento de competências dos professores em exercício, apresentando-se como alternativa para a promoção da formação continuada de docentes. Em relação ao desenvolvimento das competências do Questionamento e da Argumentação, percebemos que os docentes foram sensibilizados para trabalhar com uma metodologia interativa, promovendo um ambiente favorável à aprendizagem ativa. Através da aplicação adaptada do modelo de construção de conhecimento preconizado no ArguQuest, foi possível acompanhar a prática do docente junto aos seus alunos, ampliando o seu repertório didático, e, sobretudo, implantando uma forma de aprender fundamentada na construção compartilhada de Questionamentos e Argumentos.

O feminino na obra de Uanhenga Xitu

Interessa-nos para este artigo perscrutar as representações da vida social em narrativas do escritor angolano Uanhenga Xitu, mormente no que diz respeito à personagem feminina e ao papel da mulher nas sociedades tradicionais angolanas. Nas narrativas cujas ações se passam no interior de Angola, as representações sociais da mulher revelam um modus vivendi diferenciado daquele experimentado por mulheres que migram para a capital, Luanda, espaço em que a noção de vida comunitária, tão significativa nas sociedades tradicionais, perde seu significado. Os trabalhos lá executados, por exemplo, serão em favor do colono, como os dos empregados domésticos, e não para a coletividade. Já nos espaços interiores, mais distantes da mão pesada do colonizador, as representações da vida social dos angolanos são mais expressivas e essa diferenciação revela que a migração do campo para a cidade, no caso de um país dominado pela colonização, metaforiza o abandono de um tipo de (con)vivência social em favor de outro. Como a política colonial portuguesa foi assimilacionista, essa migração será sinônimo de busca de adesão ao modus vivendi do outro, muitas vezes para sofrer menos os efeitos da dominação. Para essa discussão, não é por livre escolha que se tratará das personagens femininas na obra de Xitu, posto que as mulheres em seus textos ganham vez e voz para a expressão do proprium angolano, como se o autor as quisesse homenagear em sinal do reconhecimento de sua importância na construção e preservação da memória, que é capaz de criar laços identitários entre as milenares gerações passadas e as futuras, como esboçaremos (Esta reflexão teve origem no estudo desenvolvido no doutoramento, intitulado Entre dois contares: o espaço da tradição na escrita de Uanhenga Xitu, defendida em 1996 na FFLCH-USP, e orientada pela Dra. Maria Aparecida Santilli, falecida em março de 2008).