O Programa Nacional Biblioteca da Escola - PNBE: da gestão ao leitor na educação infantil de Natal-RN

This study aims to investigate the process of implementation of Programa Nacional Biblioteca da Escola, PNBE, and the reader's training on Childhood Education level in Natal. The promotion of literary reading is the opportunity of inclusion in a world that is connected to citizenship, to human rights and social justice, because the reading is the way which gives meaning to the life and, therefore, it is a right for everybody. The study is characterized as a qualitative research with evaluative approach. The methodological procedure that constitutes this corpus took place in three stages: the first one was about the analysis of laws and documents of national public policies for the reading promotion; questionnaires were applied by Managing Committee - Natal/RN to CMEIs and the available websites from MEC that provide distribution of the acquis; in the second stage, we adopted the semi-structured interview as a methodological procedure elaborated with open questions that focus on the program management and to the acquis of PNBE; and in the third step we visited the 21 centers of childhood education in Natal for interviewing and to do the exploratory observation in places of reading. The Informant actors in this research are: the advisors of SME - Natal and FNDE, managers and teachers in Municipal Childhood Education Centers who totalize 30 informants. This theoretical and methodological framework follows the studies of Amarilha (1993; 1994; 2002; 2006; 2010; 2012), Bardin (2001), Bogdan; Biklen (1994), Castro (2007; 2008; 2012), Demo (2000; 2006; 2008), Fischer (2006), Moreira; Caleffe (2008), Paiva (2008; 2012), Secchi (2010; 2012), Soares (2003; 2008) and Zilberman (2001; 2003; 2008). The analysis indicates that decentralization strategy which is adopted in public management model will transfer responsibilities and assumption of the PNBE, exempting the actors to planning actions ensuring the efficiency and efficacy implementation on reading policy to national and municipal levels. The qualified acquis that is distributed by MEC reaches every Childhood Education center and does not depend on teacher's desire or it action, only a few of them know about it and they do not have information about the PNBE, neither receive specific training in order to articulate it to the practice of reading with children from Childhood Education. The reading project implemented by private education system in Natal overlaps the PNBE, making it invisible. The reading places that are available for that schooling stage are summarized to the reading corners. In some CMEI, books remain stored in boxes or they are locked in the closet, out of use to the teachers and students. Thus, care for the acquisition, selecting acquis, and a preoccupation to the supply of the reading and books for this education level are lost into volumes of closed boxes, teachers are jettisoned to this process and children do not have any enchantment to the reading or books. In this context, this paper draws attention to how much we should still investigate in order to understanding the perspectives, stresses and challenges from public policies for the reading promotion in our country. We hope that the research will help to improve the management model of the PNBE, ensuring the reading democratization and therefore the reader's training in early Childhood Education.

O Programa Nacional Biblioteca da Escola - PNBE: da gestão ao leitor na educação infantil de Natal-RN

This study aims to investigate the process of implementation of Programa Nacional Biblioteca da Escola, PNBE, and the reader's training on Childhood Education level in Natal. The promotion of literary reading is the opportunity of inclusion in a world that is connected to citizenship, to human rights and social justice, because the reading is the way which gives meaning to the life and, therefore, it is a right for everybody. The study is characterized as a qualitative research with evaluative approach. The methodological procedure that constitutes this corpus took place in three stages: the first one was about the analysis of laws and documents of national public policies for the reading promotion; questionnaires were applied by Managing Committee - Natal/RN to CMEIs and the available websites from MEC that provide distribution of the acquis; in the second stage, we adopted the semi-structured interview as a methodological procedure elaborated with open questions that focus on the program management and to the acquis of PNBE; and in the third step we visited the 21 centers of childhood education in Natal for interviewing and to do the exploratory observation in places of reading. The Informant actors in this research are: the advisors of SME - Natal and FNDE, managers and teachers in Municipal Childhood Education Centers who totalize 30 informants. This theoretical and methodological framework follows the studies of Amarilha (1993; 1994; 2002; 2006; 2010; 2012), Bardin (2001), Bogdan; Biklen (1994), Castro (2007; 2008; 2012), Demo (2000; 2006; 2008), Fischer (2006), Moreira; Caleffe (2008), Paiva (2008; 2012), Secchi (2010; 2012), Soares (2003; 2008) and Zilberman (2001; 2003; 2008). The analysis indicates that decentralization strategy which is adopted in public management model will transfer responsibilities and assumption of the PNBE, exempting the actors to planning actions ensuring the efficiency and efficacy implementation on reading policy to national and municipal levels. The qualified acquis that is distributed by MEC reaches every Childhood Education center and does not depend on teacher's desire or it action, only a few of them know about it and they do not have information about the PNBE, neither receive specific training in order to articulate it to the practice of reading with children from Childhood Education. The reading project implemented by private education system in Natal overlaps the PNBE, making it invisible. The reading places that are available for that schooling stage are summarized to the reading corners. In some CMEI, books remain stored in boxes or they are locked in the closet, out of use to the teachers and students. Thus, care for the acquisition, selecting acquis, and a preoccupation to the supply of the reading and books for this education level are lost into volumes of closed boxes, teachers are jettisoned to this process and children do not have any enchantment to the reading or books. In this context, this paper draws attention to how much we should still investigate in order to understanding the perspectives, stresses and challenges from public policies for the reading promotion in our country. We hope that the research will help to improve the management model of the PNBE, ensuring the reading democratization and therefore the reader's training in early Childhood Education.

Aspectos ecogenéticos y legislativos aplicados a la transgénesis de animales y alimentos

Bioethics ecology suggests the birth of a mentality which proposes, among other things: a human certain asceticism in relation to the environment around us, based on moderation; brutal renounce consumerism that is converted into primary need so most of the time is just superfluous. Social and economic developments affecting the existing globalization process in all areas of our existence. Ignorance conditions the quality of our relationship with the people and the environment. Parallel to this, the concept of social justice is not out of the problem of the environment. At present the environmental field has been filled by qualified professionals, resulting in a coprofesionalism, and an openness to the metadiscipline or shares from trades, knowledge and non-formal learning, which should make a concerted effort to be familiar with the delicate aimed at balancing the instability that is the Middle multidisciplinary environment and seem to be witnessing a passive object of global change. It is known as transgenesis process of transferring genes into an organism. Transgenesis is currently used to make transgenic plants and animals. Several methods of transgenesis as using gene guns or the use of virus or bacteria as vectors to transfer genes.

The state of the nations:current and future developments in technology enhanced learning

Right across Europe technology is playing a vital part in enhancing learning for an increasingly diverse population of learners. Learning is increasingly flexible, social and mobile and supported by high quality multi-media resources. Institutional VLEs are seeing a shift towards open source products and these core systems are supplemented by a range of social and collaborative learning tools based on web 2.0 technologies. Learners undertaking field studies and those in the workplace are coming to expect that these off-campus experiences will also be technology-rich whether supported by institutional or user-owned devices. As well as keeping European businesses competitive, learning is seen as a means of increasing social mobility and supporting an agenda of social justice. For a number of years the EUNIS E-Learning Task Force (ELTF) has conducted snapshot surveys of e-learning across member institutions, collected case studies of good practice in e-learning see (Hayes, et al., 2009) in references, supported a group looking at the future of e-learning, and showcased the best of innovation in its e-learning Award. Now for the first time the ELTF membership has come together to undertake an analysis of developments in the member states and to assess what this might mean for the future. The group applied the techniques of World Café conversation and Scenario Thinking to develop its thoughts. The analysis is unashamedly qualitative and draws on expertise from leading universities across eight of the EUNIS member states. What emerges is interesting in terms of the common trends in developments in all of the nations and similarities in hopes and concerns about the future development of learning.

Realism and national identity in 'Y Tu Mamá También': an audience perspective

When referring to cinema and its emancipatory potential, realism, like Plato’s pharmakon, has signified both illness and cure, poison and medicine. On the one hand, realism is regarded as the main feature of so-called classical cinema, inherently conservative and thoroughly ideological, its main raison d’être being to reify and make a particular version of the status quo believable and to pass it out as ‘reality’ (Burch, 1990; MacCabe, 1974). On the other, realism has also been interpreted as a quest for truth and social justice, as in the positivist ethos that informs documentary (Zavattini, 1953). Even in the latter sense, however, the extent to which realism has served colonizing ends when used to investigate the ‘truth’ of the Other has also been noted, rendering the form profoundly suspicious (Chow, 2007, p. 150). For realism has been a Western form of representation, one that can be traced back to the invention of perspective in painting and that peaked with the secular worldview brought about by the Enlightenment. And like realism, the nation state too is a product of the Enlightenment, nationalism being, as it were, a secular replacement for the religious - that is enchanted or fantastic - worldview. In this way, realism, cinema and nation are inextricably linked, and equally strained under the current decline of the Enlightenment paradigm. This chapter looks at Y tu Mamá También by Alfonso Cuarón (2001), a highly successful road movie with documentary features, to explore the ways in which realism, cinema and nation interact with each other in the present conditions of ‘globalization’ as experienced in Mexico. The chapter compares and contrasts various interpretations of the role of realism in this film put forward by critics and scholars and other discourses about it circulating in the media with actual ways of audience engagement with it.

Unnatural History: Ecological Temporality in Post-1945 American Literature

While environmental literary criticism has traditionally focused its attention on the textual representation of specific places, recent ecocritical scholarship has expanded this focus to consider the treatment of time in environmental literature and culture. As environmental scholars, activists, scientists, and artists have noted, one of the major difficulties in grasping the reality and implications of climate change is a limited temporal imagination. In other words, the ability to comprehend and integrate different shapes, scales, and speeds of history is a precondition for ecologically sustainable and socially equitable responses to climate change.

My project examines the role that literary works might play in helping to create such an expanded sense of history. As I show how American writers after 1945 have treated the representation of time and history in relation to environmental questions, I distinguish between two textual subfields of environmental temporality. The first, which I argue is characteristic of mainstream environmentalism, is disjunctive, with abrupt environmental changes separating the past and the present. This subfield contains many canonical works of postwar American environmental writing, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. From treatises on the ancient ecological histories of particular sites to meditations on the speed of climate change, these works evince a preoccupation with environmental time that has not been acknowledged within the spatially oriented field of environmental criticism. However, by positing radical breaks between environmental pasts and environmental futures, they ultimately enervate the political charge of history and elide the human dimensions of environmental change, in terms both of environmental injustice and of possible social responses.

By contrast, the second subfield, which I argue is characteristic of environmental justice, is continuous, showing how historical patterns persist even across social and ecological transformations. I trace this version of environmental thought through a multicultural corpus of novels consisting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Some of these novels do not document specific instances of environmental degradation or environmental injustice and, as a result, have not been critically interpreted as relevant for environmental analysis; others are more explicit in their discussion of environmental issues and are recognized as part of the canon of American environmental literature. However, I demonstrate that, across all of these texts, counterhegemonic understandings of history inform resistance to environmental degradation and exploitation. These texts show that environmental problems cannot be fully understood, nor environmental futures addressed, without recognizing the way that social histories of inequality and environmental histories of extraction continue to structure politics and ecology in the present.

Ultimately, then, the project offers three conclusions. First, it suggests that the second version of environmental temporality holds more value than the first for environmental cultural studies, in that it more compellingly and accurately represents the social implications of environmental issues. Second, it shows that “environmental literature” is most usefully understood not as the literature that explicitly treats environmental issues, but rather as the literature that helps to produce the sense of time that contemporary environmental crises require. Third, it shows how literary works can not only illuminate the relationship between American ideas about nature and social justice, but also operate as a specifically literary form of eco-political activism.

'Lines of flight': digital musical instruments, inclusive music bands, meaningful engagement in music-making and learning

In this study I examine the development of three inclusive music bands in Cork city. Derived from Jellison’s research on inclusive music education, inclusive music bands involve students with disabilities coming together with typically developing peers to make and learn music that is meaningful (Jellison, 2012). As part of this study, I established three inclusive music bands to address the lack of inclusive music making and learning experiences in Cork city. Each of these bands evolved and adapted in order to be socio-culturally relevant within formal and informal settings: Circles (community education band), Till 4 (secondary school band) and Mish Mash (third level and community band). I integrated Digital Musical Instruments into the three bands, in order to ensure access to music making and learning for band members with profound physical disabilities. Digital Musical Instruments are electronic music devices that facilitate active music making with minimal movement. This is the first study in Ireland to examine the experiences of inclusive music making and learning using Digital Musical Instruments. I propose that the integration of Digital Musical Instruments into inclusive music bands has the potential to further the equality and social justice agenda in music education in Ireland. In this study, I employed qualitative research methodology, incorporating participatory action research methodology and case study design. In this thesis I reveal the experiences of being involved in an inclusive music band in Cork city. I particularly focus on examining whether the use of this technology enhances meaningful music making and learning experiences for members with disabilities within inclusive environments. To both inform and understand the person centered and adaptable nature of these inclusive bands, I draw theoretical insights from Sen’s Capabilities Approach and Deleuze and Guatarri’s Rhizome Theory. Supported by descriptive narrative from research participants and an indepth examination of literature, I discover the optimum conditions and associated challenges of inclusive music practice in Cork city.

From Where Do We Teach? Potential Positions in Public Education

This thesis is a conceptual examination of the positions from which we teach in public education. As it is philosophical in nature, it takes no qualitative or quantitative data. It offers a review of selected relevant literature and an analysis of personal and professional experience, with the intent to pose critical questions about teaching and learning. The framework of this thesis represents the following contentions: First, from its inception, public schooling served capital by preparing skilled labour for emerging industrial markets. This history is the hegemonic shadow that hangs over public education today. Second, movements toward the standardization of funding, curriculum, and evaluation support the further commodification of public schooling. The “accountability” that standardization offers, the “back to basics” that it aims for, is counter to the potential that public education might critically inform citizens and seek social justice. Third, movements toward the privatization of public schooling under the guise of “choice” and “mobility”, brought on by manufactured crisis, serve only to widen socio-economic inequities as capitalist neoliberal interests seek profit in both the product of public schools and in schooling itself. If we recognize and understand the power of public education to inform vast numbers of citizens who will, in turn, either maintain or reform society, we must ask: What do we want public education to be? What are the effects of continuing down historically conventional and increasingly standardized paths? What do progressive pedagogies offer? How might teachers destandardize their pedagogy and pursue equitable opportunities for marginalized students? How might students name themselves and their world, that they might play a part in its reimagining? For whom do we teach, and under what conditions? From where do we teach, and why? For educators to ask these questions, and to employ what they discover, will necessitate taking substantial risks. It will necessitate taking a stand and cannot be done alone. Teachers must seek out the collaboration of their students. They must offer students the time and the space to find their own voices, to create their own selves, and to envision previously uncharted paths on which we might walk together.

Radical Ambition: A Portrait of the Toronto New Left, 1958-1985

This thesis examines the rise and decline of the New Left in Toronto from 1958 to 1985. It argues that New Leftism — whose three leading ideals were self-management, national liberation, and community — arose as much from the Old Left as it did from the peace movement. In contrast to earlier readings that interpret the New Left narrowly — essentially, as the combined forces of the white student and peace movements evident mainly on university campuses — this thesis documents the extent to which New Leftism, interpreted as a political formation, provided a framework for a diversity of radical social movements, especially feminism, Black Power, gay liberation, resistance to the capitalist redevelopment of the city, and transnational solidarity. It also questions a declensionist narrative that adopts a “decadal” approach to the radicalism of the sixties, according to which 1970 spelled the end of “60s” radicalism. Quite the contrary, this thesis argues: in Toronto, it would be truer to say that 1970s were “the sixties,” in that only in this later decade did many New Left movements attain their full maturity. New Leftists successfully challenged a host of institutions, sometimes with permanent effects. The educational system was transformed. Cultural institutions and practices were revolutionized. Questions of race and gender, once peripheral to the left, were made central to it. Democratic community institutions became far more powerful. A token of the strength and durability of the New Left in Toronto was the extent to which it remained the bête noir of a series of other radical groups upholding the model of the vanguard communist party — which challenged the New Leftists’ prominence but many members of which often wound up agreeing with their positions. It was only in the early 1980s, with the ascent of a new right, that Toronto’s New Left unmistakably entered a period of decline. Yet, even then, many of its key themes were picked up by fast-growing anarchist and socialist feminist currents. Far from constituting a minor phenomenon, Toronto’s New Left, one of the largest movements for social justice in Canadian history, bequeathed to its progressive successors an imposing legacy of struggle and cultural achievements. It is the purpose of this thesis to evaluate, both critically and sympathetically, the extent to which the New Left attained its radical ambition.

Pushed to the Edge: Inclusion and Behaviour Support in Schools

While debates rage about educational inequality and the best way to tackle attainment gaps, a pervasive form of inschool segregation is going largely unremarked upon. Internal behaviour support units have become common fixtures in British schools. Young people may be removed from mainstream classrooms for weeks, months or even years to undergo rehabilitative programmes that incur little monitoring or oversight. This original book is the first to provide a detailed insight into the politics and practices of internal school exclusion, highlighted through the experiences of the young people attending the units. Ambitious in its scope, it draws on intensive ethnographic research with pupils, their teachers and parents to address broad questions around social justice, equal opportunities and institutional racism. It will appeal to students, researchers and practitioners in education, social policy, sociology and beyond.

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Los números cuentan. Sub-representación de la obra artística de mujeres creadoras en museos y centros de arte contemporáneos

Este artículo cuantifica la presencia de obra artística de mujeres artistas en 21 museos y centros de arte contemporáneo españoles. Los resultados constatan una nítida sub-representación de la obra exhibida, por debajo del 20 por ciento. ¿Por qué sucede esto?, ¿diferencial potencial artístico de mujeres y hombres?, ¿superioridad masculina?, ¿discriminación? o ¿un sistema de arte con sesgo androcéntrico? En estas páginas se discute sobre la presencia de varios factores para explicar la brecha de género y se reclama, de las administraciones públicas y las instituciones de gestión cultural, el cumplimiento de la Ley para la Igualdad para garantizar la paridad.

Challenges and barriers in primary school education: The experiences of Traveller children and young people in Northern Ireland

Exclusion, discrimination and widespread disadvantage are issues common to the Traveller community. Children from the Traveller community are often seen as the most at risk within the education system in respect of attendance, attainment and bullying. In this article, we consider the views of Traveller children and parents with respect to primary level education in Northern Ireland and assess the level of support that exists to help Traveller children within the education system. The findings from the research are discussed with reference to institutional discrimination and the varying experiences of children and their families, including an identification of positive attitudes to education contrary to typical stereotypes.

Human Rights, Local Plights: The Implications of Rights Discourses in the Struggle over Arab-Palestinian Bedouin Land in Israel

A widely diffused, engaged approach understands human rights as an opportunity to enhance moral progress. Less visible has a critical realm of research that reveals the often ambiguous social life of human rights discourses. This article draws on a specific case study from the intricate issue of how activism for Arab-Palestinian Bedouin citizens in Southern Israel engages with the global human rights discourse. It follows the implications of mobilization, focusing on events related to a campaign against house demolitions in informal,unrecognised settlements. The case shows how human rights discourses tend to silence the agency of political subjects, victimizing and patronizing those who seek emancipation. The ethnographic insights emphasize the role of a range of carnivalesque and spontaneous acts ofresistance, which subvert the patronizing implications of the human rights language.