A relação família-creche no programa Primeira Infância Completa

O tema central da presente dissertação está focalizado na relação família-creche. Este estudo possui, como objetivo principal, analisar como essa relação foi compreendida em três creches públicas cariocas que desenvolveram as atividades do programa Primeira Infância Completa (PIC). Tal programa fez parte das políticas públicas educacionais do município do Rio de Janeiro de 2009 a 2013. Foi direcionado a crianças de até 3 (três) anos de idade que não obtiveram matrícula regular nas creches. As atividades do PIC aconteciam aos sábados com crianças e, para as famílias, eram desenvolvidos os encontros da Escola de Pais. A pesquisa analisa os documentos oficiais (decretos, portarias, resoluções, relatórios, projetos, outras publicações internas) de criação e ampliação do programa, incluindo aqueles referentes às consultorias da UNESCO realizadas em 2012. Foi desenvolvido um levantamento bibliográfico sobre os temas família e a relação família-creche, nas bibliotecas eletrônicas SciELO e Google Acadêmico, com artigos publicados entre 2005 e 2014. A investigação empírica se deu no diálogo com alguns atores do programa, participantes das três creches municipais, totalizando 122 sujeitos, entre gestoras, professoras, agentes auxiliares de creche e familiares. As estratégias metodológicas utilizadas foram entrevistas, grupos focais e oficinas Os dados da segunda consultoria da UNESCO serviram de base para a construção das questões centrais desta pesquisa. Os resultados nos apontam que, para os sujeitos que participaram do programa, os propósitos do mesmo nem sempre foram claros. Embora tenha acontecido no espaço físico das creches (portanto, da Educação), com uma intenção intersetorial, seus objetivos tinham um forte cunho assistencial, caracterizando-o como uma modalidade alternativa de atividades para crianças e familiares. As famílias viam no programa o caminho para a conquista da vaga semanal para as suas crianças e, quando isso não acontecia, ficavam frustrados e deixavam de participar. O esforço das gestoras para a realização do programa foi sua marca de qualidade. A experiência do PIC deixou de legado para as instituições novas formas de pensar a proposta pedagógica e de lidar com as famílias, crianças e funcionários na jornada semanal

A representação da Educação Física na mídia televisiva

Esta pesquisa foca a imagem profissional do professor de educação física, considerando a notoriedade que essa profissão adquiriu na televisão ao longo dos últimos anos. O objetivo é explicitar alguns dos sentidos relacionados à abordagem da educação física presente no contexto de duas programações exibidas pela Rede Globo de televisão. A primeira foi retirada da décima oitava temporada da telenovela Malhação, e a segunda do quadro MEDIDA CERTA/ 90 DIAS PARA REPROGRAMAR O CORPO exibido pelo programa Fantástico no ano de 2011. A coleta dos dados ocorreu através do acesso ao site da emissora, que disponibiliza por um determinado tempo, os capítulos da telenovela, bem como as edições do quadro em foco. O método utilizado para nortear a análise do processo de produção dos sentidos foi o referencial teórico da Análise do Discurso segundo a perspectiva de Orlandi. Esse método nos permite percorrer trajetórias capazes de evidenciar sentidos explícitos e implícitos coexistentes no discurso. Assim foram trilhados caminhos específicos para compreensão de cada fenômeno, ou seja, para os dados retirados de Malhação lançamos mão da transcrição de diálogos, apresentação de cenas e consideração dos planos de câmera utilizados em sua produção. Para os dados provenientes do quadro MEDIDA CERTA, realizamos transcrição de falas e construímos categorias, que foram analisadas a partir de uma grade já existente, considerando o título, quem fala, o que é dito, o intermediário e as estratégias utilizadas para publicação do discurso. Quanto aos resultados, foi possível evidenciar que os sentidos relativos à educação física presentes na décima oitava temporada de Malhação foram inspirados basicamente no paradigma competitivo da área. Também foram conservados estereótipos ultrapassados acerca do profissional e da profissão, pois, os sentidos relativos ao professor de educação física idoso foram reduzidos à potencialização de características ligadas à desatualização. E no que confere aos resultados obtidos com a análise do segundo fenômeno, clarificamos que a educação física foi abordada com a utilização do discurso científico, a partir de estratégias pautadas no exemplo testado pelos jornalistas, e oferecidos aos telespectadores. A proposta presente no quadro MEDIDA CERTA colaborou para o entendimento de uma educação física baseada na perspectiva biológica, que se estabelece frente à imposição de um risco ao sujeito, se valorizando como fonte de salvação e encontrando-se fragmentada das questões sociais. As análises de ambos os fenômenos evidenciam significados que permeiam a educação física representada na mídia no atual momento histórico, propiciando também reflexões sobre alguns dos princípios que regem a elaboração de práticas corporais no âmbito da educação física.

Diálogos sobre a prática: Um estudo com base em Theodor Adorno

A presente pesquisa tem como objeto de estudo os conceitos referentes à palavra prática, valorizados no campo da formação de professores, presentes em algumas obras acadêmicas da década de 80, que tiveram forte influência sobre a formação do sujeito pesquisador enquanto aluno do curso Normal e de Pedagogia; e nos resultados atuais de estudos e pesquisas relacionadas ao ensinar e ao aprender, presentes nos anais de 2010 do Encontro Nacional de Didática e Prática de Ensino (ENDIPE). Tem como objetivo investigar as aplicações conceituais referente à palavra prática no campo da formação de professores a luz dos princípios filosóficos de Theodor Adorno, que utiliza como instrumentos de análise a Autorreflexão e a Dialética não objetivada na contradição, categorias de cunho metodológico desta dissertação, a partir das seguintes questões: Quais são as aplicações conceituais referentes à palavra prática valorizadas no campo da formação de professores?; Estas aplicações conceituais se caracterizam, segundo ADORNO, como práticas autorrefletidas? Contudo, esta é uma pesquisa exploratória de cunho conceitual realizada a partir de produções acadêmicas (livros e resultados de pesquisas) nos dois períodos acima citados, com base nos princípios filosóficos da dialética em ADORNO, destacando a essência conceitual referente a prática e suas aplicações valorizadas no campo da formação de professores.

Identidades na Roda: diálogos com a Capoeira Angola e com as narrativas de suas/seus praticantes

Este trabalho tem como proposta pensar os processos identitários da afrodiáspora, a partir dos diálogos com a Capoeira Angola e as narrativas de suas/seus praticantes. Apresentamos a Capoeira Angola como prática cultural de matriz africana, significada por um processo histórico de luta e resistência das populações negras na diáspora. Procuramos discutir quais identidades são reivindicadas, tecidas e enunciadas nessa prática, com especial atenção às identidades angoleiras, às identidades negras e ao pertencimento etnicorracial enunciado por suas/seus praticantes. O processo histórico de escravização das populações negras no Brasil resultou na discriminação racial de mulheres e homens negras/os e na visibilização estereotipada das suas práticas e epistemologias, produzindo diferenciações hierárquicas. A cultura como enunciação e diferença permite através do ato enunciativo, a produção de novos sentidos e significados para as populações negras, que ressignificam suas identidades e tensionam às lógicas e racionalidades hegemônicas. As identidades são compreendidas como processos de identificação, permitidos pelo dinamismo da cultura e pelas práticas discursivas. O agenciamento coletivo reivindica outras identificações, de modo que o ato enunciativo pode produzir novos sentidos para às significações atribuídas às populações negras, sendo a linguagem um importante mecanismo de circulação da palavra e o indicador mais sensível de transformações sociais.

Effects of the user model on simulation-based learning of dialogue strategies

Over the past decade, a variety of user models have been proposed for user simulation-based reinforcement-learning of dialogue strategies. However, the strategies learned with these models are rarely evaluated in actual user trials and it remains unclear how the choice of user model affects the quality of the learned strategy. In particular, the degree to which strategies learned with a user model generalise to real user populations has not be investigated. This paper presents a series of experiments that qualitatively and quantitatively examine the effect of the user model on the learned strategy. Our results show that the performance and characteristics of the strategy are in fact highly dependent on the user model. Furthermore, a policy trained with a poor user model may appear to perform well when tested with the same model, but fail when tested with a more sophisticated user model. This raises significant doubts about the current practice of learning and evaluating strategies with the same user model. The paper further investigates a new technique for testing and comparing strategies directly on real human-machine dialogues, thereby avoiding any evaluation bias introduced by the user model. © 2005 IEEE.

On-line policy optimisation of spoken dialogue systems via live interaction with human subjects

Statistical dialogue models have required a large number of dialogues to optimise the dialogue policy, relying on the use of a simulated user. This results in a mismatch between training and live conditions, and significant development costs for the simulator thereby mitigating many of the claimed benefits of such models. Recent work on Gaussian process reinforcement learning, has shown that learning can be substantially accelerated. This paper reports on an experiment to learn a policy for a real-world task directly from human interaction using rewards provided by users. It shows that a usable policy can be learnt in just a few hundred dialogues without needing a user simulator and, using a learning strategy that reduces the risk of taking bad actions. The paper also investigates adaptation behaviour when the system continues learning for several thousand dialogues and highlights the need for robustness to noisy rewards. © 2011 IEEE.

Uncertainty management for on-line optimisation of a POMDP-based large-scale spoken dialogue system

The optimization of dialogue policies using reinforcement learning (RL) is now an accepted part of the state of the art in spoken dialogue systems (SDS). Yet, it is still the case that the commonly used training algorithms for SDS require a large number of dialogues and hence most systems still rely on artificial data generated by a user simulator. Optimization is therefore performed off-line before releasing the system to real users. Gaussian Processes (GP) for RL have recently been applied to dialogue systems. One advantage of GP is that they compute an explicit measure of uncertainty in the value function estimates computed during learning. In this paper, a class of novel learning strategies is described which use uncertainty to control exploration on-line. Comparisons between several exploration schemes show that significant improvements to learning speed can be obtained and that rapid and safe online optimisation is possible, even on a complex task. Copyright © 2011 ISCA.

Policy optimisation of POMDP-based dialogue systems without state space compression

The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) has been proposed as a dialogue model that enables automatic improvement of the dialogue policy and robustness to speech understanding errors. It requires, however, a large number of dialogues to train the dialogue policy. Gaussian processes (GP) have recently been applied to POMDP dialogue management optimisation showing an ability to substantially increase the speed of learning. Here, we investigate this further using the Bayesian Update of Dialogue State dialogue manager. We show that it is possible to apply Gaussian processes directly to the belief state, removing the need for a parametric policy representation. In addition, the resulting policy learns significantly faster while maintaining operational performance. © 2012 IEEE.

On-line policy optimisation of Bayesian spoken dialogue systems via human interaction

A partially observable Markov decision process has been proposed as a dialogue model that enables robustness to speech recognition errors and automatic policy optimisation using reinforcement learning (RL). However, conventional RL algorithms require a very large number of dialogues, necessitating a user simulator. Recently, Gaussian processes have been shown to substantially speed up the optimisation, making it possible to learn directly from interaction with human users. However, early studies have been limited to very low dimensional spaces and the learning has exhibited convergence problems. Here we investigate learning from human interaction using the Bayesian Update of Dialogue State system. This dynamic Bayesian network based system has an optimisation space covering more than one hundred features, allowing a wide range of behaviours to be learned. Using an improved policy model and a more robust reward function, we show that stable learning can be achieved that significantly outperforms a simulator trained policy. © 2013 IEEE.

Re-defining the Dream on the American Stage

Forsyth, Alison, 'Re-defining the Dream on the American Stage', In: 'American Dreams: Dialogues in US Studies', Ricardo Miguez (ed), (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp.207-233, 2007 RAE2008

Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in Blogosphere

We present a thorough characterization of the access patterns in blogspace -- a fast-growing constituent of the content available through the Internet -- which comprises a rich interconnected web of blog postings and comments by an increasingly prominent user community that collectively define what has become known as the blogosphere. Our characterization of over 35 million read, write, and administrative requests spanning a 28-day period is done from three different blogosphere perspectives. The server view characterizes the aggregate access patterns of all users to all blogs; the user view characterizes how individual users interact with blogosphere objects (blogs); the object view characterizes how individual blogs are accessed. Our findings support two important conclusions. First, we show that the nature of interactions between users and objects is fundamentally different in blogspace than that observed in traditional web content. Access to objects in blogspace could be conceived as part of an interaction between an author and its readership. As we show in our work, such interactions range from one-to-many "broadcast-type" and many-to-one "registration-type" communication between an author and its readers, to multi-way, iterative "parlor-type" dialogues among members of an interest group. This more-interactive nature of the blogosphere leads to interesting traffic and communication patterns, which are different from those observed in traditional web content. Second, we identify and characterize novel features of the blogosphere workload, and we investigate the similarities and differences between typical web server workloads and blogosphere server workloads. Given the increasing share of blogspace traffic, understanding such differences is important for capacity planning and traffic engineering purposes, for example.

States of play: Irish childhoods, race and belonging

This thesis explores the meaning-making practices of migrant and non-migrant children in relation to identities, race, belonging and childhood itself in their everyday lives and in the context of ‘normalizing’ discourses and spaces in Ireland. The relational, spatial and institutional contexts of children’s worlds are examined in the arenas of school, home, family, peer groups and consumer culture. The research develops a situated account of children’s complex subject positions, belongings and exclusions, as negotiated within discursive constructs, emerging in the ‘in-between’ spaces explored with other children and with adults. As a peripheral EU area both geographically and economically, Ireland has traditionally been a country of net emigration. This situation changed briefly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, sparking broad debate on Ireland’s perceived ‘new’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity arising from the arrival of migrant people both from within and beyond the EU as workers and as asylum seekers, and drawing attention to issues of race, identity, equality and integration in Irish society. Based in a West of Ireland town where migrant children and children of migrants comprise very small minorities in classroom settings, this research engages with a particular demographic of children who have started primary school since these changes have occurred. It seeks to represent the complexities of the processes which constitute children’s subjectivities, and which also produce and reproduce race and childhood itself in this context. The role of local, national and global spaces, relational networks and discursive currents as they are experienced and negotiated by children are explored, and the significance of embodied, sensory and affective processes are integrated into the analysis. Notions of the functions and rhetorics of play and playfulness (Sutton-Smith 1997) form a central thread that runs throughout the thesis, where play is both a feature of children’s cultural worlds and a site of resistance or ‘thinking otherwise’. The study seeks to examine how children actively participate in (re)producing definitions of both childhood and race arising in local, national and global spaces, demonstrating that while contestations of the boundaries of childhood discourses are contingently successful, race tends to be strongly reiterated, clinging to bodies and places and compromising belonging. In addition, it explores how children access belongings through agentic and imaginative practices with regard to peer and family relationships, particularly highlighting constructions of home, while also illustrating practices of excluding children positioned as unintelligible, including the role of silences in such situations. Finally, drawing on teachers’ understandings and on children’s playful micro-level negotiations of race, the study argues that assumptions of childhood innocence contribute to justifying depoliticised discourses of race in the early primary school years, and also tend to silence children’s own dialogues with this issue. Central throughout the thesis is an emphasis on the productive potentials of children’s marginal positioning in processes of transgressing definitional boundaries, including the generation of post-race conceptualisations that revealed the borders of race as performative and fluid. It suggests that interrupting exclusionary raced identities in Irish primary schools requires engagement with children’s world-making practices and the multiple resources that inform their lives.

Challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of depression in autism spectrum disorders across the lifespan.

Diagnosis and treatment of comorbid neuropsychiatric illness is often a secondary focus of treatment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), given that substantial impairment may be caused by core symptoms of ASD itself. However, psychiatric comorbidities, including depressive disorders, are common and frequently result in additional functional impairment, treatment costs, and burden on caregivers. Clinicians may struggle to appropriately diagnose depression in ASD due to communication deficits, atypical presentation of depression in ASD, and lack of standardized diagnostic tools. Specific risk and resilience factors for depression in ASD across the lifespan, including level of functioning, age, family history, and coping style, have been suggested, but require further study. Treatment with medications or psychotherapy may be beneficial, though more research is required to establish guidelines for management of symptoms. This review will describe typical presentations of depression in individuals with ASD, review current information on the prevalence, assessment, and treatment of comorbid depression in individuals with ASD, and identify important research gaps.

Socrates and Plato on asking ‘what is x?’

The Socratic elenchus is a method of philosophical enquiry attributed by Plato, in his dialogues, to his teacher Socrates. It is a method that uses a dialectic technique of questioning and answering to try to discover the truth of the issue under investigation. For Plato’s Socrates, the fundamental question for human beings is that of how to live, thus the enquiries he initiates concern our understanding of what it is to act ethically. In order to begin to enquire into how to act in a virtuous manner, however, Socrates claimed that we must first know what virtue is. We must, that is, first understand the meaning of virtue before we can consider its application it to any particular kind of action; we must first be able to answer the question “what is x?” before considering whether a particular action or kind of action is an instance of x. This requirement leads to what is known as the ‘Socratic Paradox’: if we have to first establish what x means before we confirm or discount cases of it, then how can our enquiry ever commence; how can we begin in asking questions about x if we don’t yet know what x is? Philosophy has continued to grapple with the Socratic paradox since Plato’s formulation of it. This presentation will explain how the paradox is produced out of the elenchus and consider the ways in which Wittgenstein’s account of family resemblance sheds new light upon this age-old issue. [From the Author]

Ethics in the workplace

The right to request flexible working has been introduced into the UK employment laws against a background of post-fordist work practices, which already allow for employer rather than employee flexibility. This paper posits the idea that for the individual employee to benefit from these new rights what is required is the situation of dialogues within the workplace that take place in an ethical frame that recognises the employee as an individual.