Learning to live with the lack: pedagogy of the beguiled

An important aspect of globalisation/Americanisation is, prima facia, the global export of televisual products such as Sesame Street, Barney, etc. that are explicitly concerned with cultivating elementary forms of organisational life. Thus, it is surprising that organization studies has been virtually silent on childhood and pedagogy. This lacuna needs filling especially because the development of a post-national, cosmopolitan society problematises existing pedagogical models. In this paper we argue that cosmopolitanism requires a pedagogy that is centred on the Lack and the mythic figure of the Trickster. We explore this through an analysis of children’s stories, including Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children, Sesame Street and Dr Seuss.

Dynamic Programming Approaches for Estimating and Applying Large-scale Discrete Choice Models

People go through their life making all kinds of decisions, and some of these decisions affect their demand for transportation, for example, their choices of where to live and where to work, how and when to travel and which route to take. Transport related choices are typically time dependent and characterized by large number of alternatives that can be spatially correlated. This thesis deals with models that can be used to analyze and predict discrete choices in large-scale networks. The proposed models and methods are highly relevant for, but not limited to, transport applications. We model decisions as sequences of choices within the dynamic discrete choice framework, also known as parametric Markov decision processes. Such models are known to be difficult to estimate and to apply to make predictions because dynamic programming problems need to be solved in order to compute choice probabilities. In this thesis we show that it is possible to explore the network structure and the flexibility of dynamic programming so that the dynamic discrete choice modeling approach is not only useful to model time dependent choices, but also makes it easier to model large-scale static choices. The thesis consists of seven articles containing a number of models and methods for estimating, applying and testing large-scale discrete choice models. In the following we group the contributions under three themes: route choice modeling, large-scale multivariate extreme value (MEV) model estimation and nonlinear optimization algorithms. Five articles are related to route choice modeling. We propose different dynamic discrete choice models that allow paths to be correlated based on the MEV and mixed logit models. The resulting route choice models become expensive to estimate and we deal with this challenge by proposing innovative methods that allow to reduce the estimation cost. For example, we propose a decomposition method that not only opens up for possibility of mixing, but also speeds up the estimation for simple logit models, which has implications also for traffic simulation. Moreover, we compare the utility maximization and regret minimization decision rules, and we propose a misspecification test for logit-based route choice models. The second theme is related to the estimation of static discrete choice models with large choice sets. We establish that a class of MEV models can be reformulated as dynamic discrete choice models on the networks of correlation structures. These dynamic models can then be estimated quickly using dynamic programming techniques and an efficient nonlinear optimization algorithm. Finally, the third theme focuses on structured quasi-Newton techniques for estimating discrete choice models by maximum likelihood. We examine and adapt switching methods that can be easily integrated into usual optimization algorithms (line search and trust region) to accelerate the estimation process. The proposed dynamic discrete choice models and estimation methods can be used in various discrete choice applications. In the area of big data analytics, models that can deal with large choice sets and sequential choices are important. Our research can therefore be of interest in various demand analysis applications (predictive analytics) or can be integrated with optimization models (prescriptive analytics). Furthermore, our studies indicate the potential of dynamic programming techniques in this context, even for static models, which opens up a variety of future research directions.

On the Current Mismatch of English Education in China and Its Possible Improvement in Pedagogy for Chinese College non-English Majors

By reviewing the current mismatch of English education in China,the paper argues the content of English curriculum and instruction in China need guide students to learn the difference between Chinese and English,examine Chinese learners’ English that are incorporated with typical Chinese language characteristics.

Towards an Ecological Pedagogy: Body Movement for Ecological Consciousness

This paper examines the moving body as a vehicle for raising ecological consciousness. Due to the modern over-preoccupation with the pursuit of rational aims, human interactions with the surrounding environment increasingly lack conscious awareness. Consequently, in the modern world people tend to lack an ecological consciousness. Nevertheless, the human body is a rich reservoir of ecological significance. From birth, humans are woven into tremendous interconnection with the world. However, humans thrive when their sensitivity to the physical world exists in harmony with their ability to pursue their rational aims. It is the combination of these characteristics that enables humans to survive in capricious surroundings and prosper in a wide array of contexts. Today, the human species faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens to collapse the reciprocality of the ecological bonds bolstering the prosperity of all worldly beings. This paper proposes that it is no longer a rational strategy for people to remain inattentive to their embodied ecological resonance, and that the moving body is an adequate pedagogical site for raising ecological consciousness. Ritualized body movements derived from Chinese traditional cultivation systems such as Taijiquan could orient practitioners to reestablish a perceptual intimacy with the larger cosmic world, thereby raising their ecological consciousness.

Operationalising Intercultural Competence for Translation Pedagogy

This article discusses intercultural competence in the context of translator training. It looks at the way this competence is incorporated and defined in the overall translation competence models, moving on to introduce two models that focus on intercultural competence in particular and serve to operationalize the concept for pedagogical purposes. Making this competence more explicit in translator training is considered vital: in the light of results gained from a survey into the current pedagogical practice (PICT 2012), translator trainers’ and translation students’ understanding of the nature and extent of (inter)cultural training do not match. This calls for re-evaluation of teaching practice which, in turn, presupposes a detailed, comprehensive account of the various dimensions of intercultural competence a translator is to possess. This article discusses these dimensions and provides exemplary scenarios on how to address them in translator training.

Making meaningful connections: Using insights from social pedagogy in statutory child and family social work practice

Reports into incidents of child death and serious injury have highlighted consistently concern about the capacity of social workers to communicate skilfully with children. Drawing on data collected as part of an Economic and Social Research Council funded UK-wide research project exploring social workers’ communicative practices with children, this paper explores how approaches informed by social pedagogy can assist social workers in connecting and communicating children. The qualitative research included data generated from 82 observations of social workers’ everyday encounters with children. Social pedagogical concepts of ‘haltung’ (attitude), ‘head, heart and hands’ and ‘the common third’ are outlined as potentially helpful approaches for facilitating the intimacies of inter-personal connections and enhancing social workers’ capacity to establish and sustain meaningful communication and relationships with children in the face of austere social, political and organisational contexts.

A green perspective on Structured parallel programming

Structured parallel programming, and in particular programming models using the algorithmic skeleton or parallel design pattern concepts, are increasingly considered to be the only viable means of supporting effective development of scalable and efficient parallel programs. Structured parallel programming models have been assessed in a number of works in the context of performance. In this paper we consider how the use of structured parallel programming models allows knowledge of the parallel patterns present to be harnessed to address both performance and energy consumption. We consider different features of structured parallel programming that may be leveraged to impact the performance/energy trade-off and we discuss a preliminary set of experiments validating our claims.

Political participation as public pedagogy : The Educational Situation in Young People´s Political Conversations in Social Media

In this article we argue that young people’s political participation in the social media can be considered ‘public pedagogy’. The argument builds on a previous empirical analysis of a Swedish net community called Black Heart. Theoretically, the article is based on a particular notion of public pedagogy, education and Hannah Arendt’s expressive agonism. The political participation that takes place in the net community builds up an educational situation that involves central characteristics: communication, community building, a strong content focus and content production, argumentation and rule following. These characteristics pave the way for young people’s public voicing, experiencing, preferences and political interests that guide their everyday political life and learning – a phenomenon that we understand as a form of public pedagogy.