Tener hambre de luz y devorar una estrella: la poesía de J.E. Eielson

The present Doctoral Thesis is framed within the study of the poetry of the great Peruvian artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson (April 13, 1924 – March 8, 2006). In general terms, it focuses on the symbols that articulate both his literary productions and his work in the field of visual arts. Throughout this project, I used the principles of the modern semiotics as well the myth criticism theory developed by Gilbert Durand in his work The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary as the basis. Following the assumption of considering Eielsońs work as an indivisible whole, in contrast to many studies that often attempted to analyse part of his creative work by privileging one medium over the others, I analyzed each symbol in all its forms, looked at its presence and relevance in his entire work and sought the archetypal level of each term. For this task, the works of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade provided valuable guidances. At the beginning of this study I present a short author's biography, in order to help to understand the circumstances under which his poems were composed. (Let us remember that most of his books were published many years after their conception). Throughout this chapter, I have carefully considered the Lima period, his relationship with his first mentor, the anthropologist and writer José María Arguedas who introduced him to the knowledge of the ancient civilizations of Peru, his link with the literary circles of Lima and his first acknowledgments: the National Poetry Award (1944) and the National Drama Award (1948)...

When the virtual influences reality. The conservation project of the toledo gate in ciudad real (Spain)

The Toledo Gate of Ciudad Real, Spain, constructed between the late 13th and early 14th centuries, is the last remaining portion of a once complete medieval city wall. It represents the long history of the city and constitutes its main heritage symbol, dividing the historic city centre from the later 19th and 20th century expansions. In October 2012, the Town Hall and the Montemadrid Foundation started the conservation works to preserve this important monument. The preliminary phase of this project included an in-depth series of scientific studies which were carried out by a multidisciplinary team focusing on archival research, historic investigations, archaeological excavations as well as material composition analysis and main treatment application tests. As a result of these studies a series of virtual 3D models were created to inform, discuss and study the monument. A first digital model permitted visualization of the gate in the 19th century and how the main entrance to the city was integrated as a fundamental part of the city walls. This virtual reconstruction also became an important part of the campaign to raise awareness among the citizens towards a monument that had remained in the shadows for the last century, isolated in a roundabout after the systematic demolition of the city walls in the late 19th century. Over the last three years and as a result of these archaeological and historic investigations and subsequent virtual models, surprisingly new and interesting data were brought to light thus permitting the establishment and corroboration of a new and updated hypothesis of the Toledo Gate that goes beyond the previous ideas. As a result of these studies a new architectural typology with construction techniques of has been suggested. This paper describes how the results of this continuous and interdisciplinary documentation process have benefitted from a computer graphic reconstruction of the gate. It highlights how virtual reconstruction can be a powerful tool for conservation decision making and awareness raising. Furthermore, the interesting results of the final reconstruction hypothesis convinced the technical team responsible for the conservation to alter some aspects of the final project physical interventions in order to focus on some of the features and conclusions discovered through the virtual model study.

Incidente em Antares e O cão e Os caluandas : Literatura brasileira e angolana na perspectiva da sátira menipeia

Esta pesquisa estuda Incidente em Antares, de Erico Veríssimo, e O cão e os caluandas, de Pepetela, na perspectiva da sátira menipeia. Para além da biografia dos autores, busca-se discutir as origens do gênero da menipeia, recuperando o seu mais importante representante - Luciano de Samósata. É, porém, sob a teoria de Mikhail Bakhtin que se analisam as obras dos escritores brasileiro e angolano. Quer-se verificar a presença de específicas características da sátira menipeia, as quais são o carnaval e o riso ritual, a paródia, a liberdade imaginativa, o fantástico e seus desdobramentos, as cenas excêntricas, os contrastes, a polifonia, a utilização de gêneros intercalados e a chamada publiscística atualizada. No último capítulo há uma observação sociológica das obras, o que permite pensá-las como um retrato das sociedades a que os autores se referem. ABSTRACT: This research studies Incidente em Antares, by Erico Veríssimo, and O cão e os caluandas, by Pepetela, in the perspective of the menippean sati.re. Besides de authors' biography, it tries to discuss the origin of the genre, recovering its most important representative - Luciano de Samosata. However, the search analyses the works of the Brazilian and Angolan writers upon the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. lt intends to verify the presence of the specific characteristics of the menippean satire, which are: carnival and the ritual Iaughting, parody, imaginative freedom, the fantastic and its unfolding, eccentric scenes, contrasts, polyphony, intercalary genres and the up-to-date publiscistic. ln the last chapter there is a sociologic observation concerning the works, which allow thinking about them as a portrait of the societies that the authors want to discuss.

How well are Australian children doing in the first year of school : a demographic analysis

Background: The transition to school is a sensitive period for children in relation to school success. In the early school years, children need to develop positive attitudes to school and have experiences that promote academic, behavioural and social competence. When children begin school there are higher expectations of responsibility and independence and in the year one class, there are more explicit academic goals for literacy and numeracy and more formal instruction. Most importantly, children’s early attitudes to learning and learning styles have an impact on later educational outcomes. Method: Data were drawn from The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). LSAC is a cross-sequential cohort study funded by the Australian Government. In these analyses, Wave 2 (2006) data for 2499 children in the Kindergarten Cohort were used. Children, at Wave 2, were in the first year of formal school. They had a mean age of 6.9 years (SD= 0.26). Measures included a 6-item measure of Approaches to Learning (task persistence, independence) and the Academic Rating Scales for language and literacy and mathematical thinking. Teachers rated their relationships with children on the short form of the STRS. Results: Girls were rated by their teachers as doing better than boys on Language and literacy, Approaches to learning; and they had a better relationship with their teacher. Children from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island (ATSI) background were rated as doing less well on Language and Literacy and Mathematical thinking and on their Approaches to learning. Children from high Socio Economic Position families are doing better on teacher rated Language and Literacy, Mathematical thinking, Approaches to learning and they had a better relationship with their teacher. Conclusions: Findings highlight the importance of key demographic variables in understanding children’s early school success.

How well are Australian children doing in the first year of school?

Background: The transition to school is a sensitive period for children in relation to school success. In the early school years, children need to develop positive attitudes to school and have experiences that promote academic, behavioural and social competence. When children begin school there are higher expectations of responsibility and independence and in the year one class, there are more explicit academic goals for literacy and numeracy and more formal instruction. Most importantly, children’s early attitudes to learning and learning styles have an impact on later educational outcomes. Method: Data were drawn from The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). LSAC is a cross-sequential cohort study funded by the Australian Government. In these analyses, Wave 2 (2006) data for 2499 children in the Kindergarten Cohort were used. Children, at Wave 2, were in the first year of formal school. They had a mean age of 6.9 years (SD= 0.26). Measures included a 6-item measure of Approaches to Learning (task persistence, independence) and the Academic Rating Scales for language and literacy and mathematical thinking. Teachers rated their relationships with children on the short form of the STRS. Results: Girls were rated by their teachers as doing better than boys on Language and literacy, Approaches to learning; and they had a better relationship with their teacher. Children from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island (ATSI) background were rated as doing less well on Language and Literacy and Mathematical thinking and on their Approaches to learning. Children from high Socio Economic Position families are doing better on teacher rated Language and Literacy, Mathematical thinking, Approaches to learning and they had a better relationship with their teacher. Conclusions: Findings highlight the importance of key demographic variables in understanding children’s early school success.

Adventures in cyberformance

This thesis examines the new theatrical form of cyberformance (live performance by remote players using internet technologies) and contextualises it within the broader fields of networked performance, digital performance and theatre. Poststructuralist theories that contest the binary distinction between reality and representation provide the analytical foundation for the thesis. A critical reflexive methodological approach is undertaken in order to highlight three themes. First, the essential qualities and criteria of cyberformance are identified, and illustrated with examples from the early 1990s to the present day. Second, two cyberformance groups – the Plaintext Players and Avatar Body Collision – and UpStage, a purpose-built application for cyberformance, are examined in more detailed case studies. Third, the specifics of the cyberformance audience are explored and commonalities are identified between theatre and online culture. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that theatre and the internet have much to offer each other in this current global state of transition, and that cyberformance offers one means by which to facilitate the incorporation of new technologies into our lives.

Assessment for learning : a sociocultural approach

Assessment for Learning (AfL) is a title given to classroom evaluative practices that share the purpose of diagnosing and informing teachers and students about learning progress, during the learning process. These practices also have the potential to develop learner autonomy by increasing student motivation and mastery through developing the learner's capacity to monitor and plan his or her own learning progress. Yet teacher adoption of the practices is not a straightforward implementation of techniques within an existing classroom repertoire. Recent research highlights a more complex interrelationship between teacher and student beliefs, identities, and traditions of power within assessment and learning in classroom contexts. These often hidden relationships can add layers of complexity for teachers implementing assessment change, and may act as barriers that frustrate efforts to realise the AfL goal of learner autonomy. By interpreting AfL practices from a sociocultural perspective, the social and cultural contexts that influence classroom assessment can be better understood. In turn teachers can thus be better supported in adopting AfL practices within the complexities of the social, cultural and policy contexts of schooling.

Two Thai teachers' perceptions of cooperative learning

Over the past decade, the need for educational reform in Thailand has become increasingly apparent. The strong tradition of teacher-directed instruction has been the major teaching and learning style in Thai education. Recent policy changes have focused on expanding education opportunities, the implementation of compulsory education and also on more student-centered pedagogies (Carter, 2006). A suggested way of bringing about the changes necessary to improve the standard of education in primary schools and retention rates is to incorporate cooperative learning into Thai primary school classrooms. The action research in this study proceeded in four stages. There were pre-implementation interviews of teachers, teacher preparation, implementation of program, and post-implementation evaluation. This study focused on the two Thai teachers' perceptions about the benefits of cooperative learning and the roles of the teachers in cooperative learning classroom. The study found that the two teachers had constructed different levels of perceptions about the benefits of cooperative learning and the roles of the teacher. These findings indicated that Thai teachers who are relatively inexperienced, lacking in confidence and with little or no experience with group work strategies such as peer tutoring need alternative, less intense professional development programs conducted over a period of a semester than the professional development program implemented in this study. In addition to being conducted over a longer period of time, the findings also indicate that alternative teacher professional programs need to provide additional workshops to improve their understanding of cooperative learning and the teachers' roles.

The impact of usability on clinician acceptance of a health information system

The two longitudinal case studies that make up this dissertation sought to explain and predict the relationship between usability and clinician acceptance of a health information system. The overall aim of the research study was to determine what role usability plays in the acceptance or rejection of systems used by clinicians in a healthcare context. The focus was on the end users (the clinicians) rather than the views of the system designers and managers responsible for implementation and the clients of the clinicians. A mixed methods approach was adopted that drew on both qualitative and quantitative research methods. This study followed the implementation of a community health information system from early beginnings to its established practice. Users were drawn from different health service departments with distinctly different organisational cultures and attitudes to information and communication technology used in this context. This study provided evidence that a usability analysis in this context would not necessarily be valid when the users have prior reservations on acceptance. Investigation was made on the initial training and post-implementation support together with a study on the nature of the clinicians to determine factors that may influence their attitude. This research identified that acceptance of a system is not necessarily a measure of its quality, capability and usability, is influenced by the user’s attitude which is determined by outside factors, and the nature and quality of training. The need to recognise the limitations of the current methodologies for analysing usability and acceptance was explored to lay the foundations for further research.

The new wave : a Brisbane perspective : La Boite Theatre Company's distinctive contribution

In 1967 Brisbane Repertory Theatre made a decision that was to change the city's cultural landscape in a significant and lasting way. Faced with crippling theatre rental costs, Brisbane Rep. found a realistic solution by converting one of its properties - an old Queenslander - into a unique theatre space. The theatre-in-the box that emerged, aptly called La Boite, opened on 23 June 1967 with a production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. This experimental space excited the imagination of a new, younger audience not previously interested in Brisbane Rep's essentially conservative fare. It attracted a new group of directors and actors keen to be part of a changing repertoire that embraced more radical, non-mainstream productions, some of which were of Australian plays. The decade after 1967 was a period of change and development unprecedented in La Boite's history. Since then the company has sustained and grown its commitment to Australian plays and the commissioning of new works. To what extent was this most significance moment in La Boite's transformational journey influenced by southern 'new waves' of change? With the benefit of hindsight, it is now time for a re-consideration of Brisbane's distinctive contribution to the New Wave.

Resistance : re-imagining innovation in higher education teaching and learning

The call to innovate is ubiquitous across the Australian educational policy context. The claims of innovative practices and environments that occur frequently in university mission statements, strategic plans and marketing literature suggest that this exhortation to innovate appears to have been taken up enthusiastically by the university sector. Throughout the history of universities, a range of reported deficiencies of higher education have worked to produce a notion of crisis. At present, it would seem that innovation is positioned as the solution to the notion of crisis. This thesis is an inquiry into how the insistence on innovation works to both enable and constrain teaching and learning practices in Australian universities. Alongside the interplay between innovation and crisis is the link between resistance and innovation, a link which remains largely unproblematized in the scholarly literature. This thesis works to locate and unsettle understandings of a relationship between innovation and Australian higher education. The aim of this inquiry is to generate new understandings of what counts as innovation within this context and how innovation is enacted. The thesis draws on a number of postmodernist theorists, whose works have informed firstly the research method, and then the analysis and findings. Firstly, there is an assumption that power is capillary and works through discourse to enact power relations which shape certain truths (Foucault, 1990). Secondly, this research scrutinised language practices which frame the capacity for individuals to act, alongside the language practices which encourage an individual to adopt certain attitudes and actions as one’s own (Foucault, 1988). Thirdly, innovation talk is read in this thesis as an example of needs talk, that is, as a medium through which what is considered domestic, political or economic is made and contested (Fraser, 1989). Fourthly, relationships between and within discourses were identified and analysed beyond cause and effect descriptions, and more productively considered to be in a constant state of becoming (Deleuze, 1987). Finally, the use of ironic research methods assisted in producing alternate configurations of innovation talk which are useful and new (Rorty, 1989). The theoretical assumptions which underpin this thesis inform a document analysis methodology, used to examine how certain texts work to shape the ways in which innovation is constructed. The data consisted of three Federal higher education funding policies selected on the rationale that these documents, as opposed to state or locally based policy and legislation, represent the only shared policy context for all Australian universities. The analysis first provided a modernist reading of the three documents, and this was followed by postmodernist readings of these same policy documents. The modernist reading worked to locate and describe the current truths about innovation. The historical context in which the policy was produced as well as the textual features of the document itself were important to this reading. In the first modernist reading, the binaries involved in producing proper and improper notions of innovation were described and analysed. In the process of the modernist analysis and the subsequent location of binary organisation, a number of conceptual collisions were identified, and these sites of struggle were revisited, through the application of a postmodernist reading. By applying the theories of Rorty (1989) and Fraser (1989) it became possible to not treat these sites as contradictory and requiring resolution, but rather as spaces in which binary tensions are necessary and productive. This postmodernist reading constructed new spaces for refusing and resisting dominant discourses of innovation which value only certain kinds of teaching and learning practices. By exploring a number of ironic language practices found within the policies, this thesis proposes an alternative way of thinking about what counts as innovation and how it happens. The new readings of innovation made possible through the work of this thesis were in response to a suite of enduring, inter-related questions – what counts as innovation?, who or what supports innovation?, how does innovation occur?, and who are the innovators?. The truths presented in response to these questions were treated as the language practices which constitute a dominant discourse of innovation talk. The collisions that occur within these truths were the contested sites which were of most interest for the analysis. The thesis concludes by presenting a theoretical blueprint which works to shift the boundaries of what counts as innovation and how it happens in a manner which is productive, inclusive and powerful. This blueprint forms the foundation upon which a number of recommendations are made for both my own professional practice and broader contexts. In keeping with the conceptual tone of this study, these recommendations are a suite of new questions which focus attention on the boundaries of innovation talk as an attempt to re-configure what is valued about teaching and learning at university.

A grounded theory study of technology appropriation in anaesthesia

The human-technology nexus is a strong focus of Information Systems (IS) research; however, very few studies have explored this phenomenon in anaesthesia. Anaesthesia has a long history of adoption of technological artifacts, ranging from early apparatus to present-day information systems such as electronic monitoring and pulse oximetry. This prevalence of technology in modern anaesthesia and the rich human-technology relationship provides a fertile empirical setting for IS research. This study employed a grounded theory approach that began with a broad initial guiding question and, through simultaneous data collection and analysis, uncovered a core category of technology appropriation. This emergent basic social process captures a central activity of anaesthestists and is supported by three major concepts: knowledge-directed medicine, complementary artifacts and culture of anaesthesia. The outcomes of this study are: (1) a substantive theory that integrates the aforementioned concepts and pertains to the research setting of anaesthesia and (2) a formal theory, which further develops the core category of appropriation from anaesthesia-specific to a broader, more general perspective. These outcomes fulfill the objective of a grounded theory study, being the formation of theory that describes and explains observed patterns in the empirical field. In generalizing the notion of appropriation, the formal theory is developed using the theories of Karl Marx. This Marxian model of technology appropriation is a three-tiered theoretical lens that examines appropriation behaviours at a highly abstract level, connecting the stages of natural, species and social being to the transition of a technology-as-artifact to a technology-in-use via the processes of perception, orientation and realization. The contributions of this research are two-fold: (1) the substantive model contributes to practice by providing a model that describes and explains the human-technology nexus in anaesthesia, and thereby offers potential predictive capabilities for designers and administrators to optimize future appropriations of new anaesthetic technological artifacts; and (2) the formal model contributes to research by drawing attention to the philosophical foundations of appropriation in the work of Marx, and subsequently expanding the current understanding of contemporary IS theories of adoption and appropriation.