Lorsque l'imaginaire migratoire rencontre les réalités de la migration : parcours de migrants volontaires et qualifiés de l'Afrique de l'Ouest au Québec

Différentes réalités et contextes actuels mondiaux font en sorte que de plus en plus de gens envisagent la migration comme projet de vie. La présente recherche s’intéresse à l’imaginaire migratoire comme facteur de mobilité, mais également comme facteur de modulation des réactions et du regard qu’entretiendra le migrant en rapport avec son vécu migratoire. Ainsi, la réflexion s’amorce en Afrique de l’Ouest, tandis que de jeunes Africains instruits et qualifiés élaborent un projet de migration volontaire vers le Canada, plus précisément dans la région du Québec. C’est investi de leur désir de l’Ailleurs, des représentations de l’Occident, de leur besoin de se réaliser et de l’impossibilité qu’ils rencontrent à accéder à la vie professionnelle souhaitée en Afrique qu’ils migrent vers le Canada. Quoiqu’ils soient dotés d’une détermination et d’un optimisme considérable, la rencontre entre l’imaginé et le quotidien de la vie au Québec comme immigrant et comme émigrant n’est pas toujours facile. Elle viendra révéler la profondeur du rêve, des mythes et des ambitions; les failles intérieures individuelles, les valeurs et les ambivalences de chacun, mais surtout la capacité qu’aura l’individu à revoir son imaginaire, à effectuer la réappropriation de son expérience migratoire et à élaborer de nouveaux projets. L’écart vécu par le sujet entre l’imaginé et le rencontré nous questionnera sur ce que véhiculent les messages et les images en circulation sur le Canada et l’Occident. Aussi, il témoignera de la prédominance de la préparation factuelle et psychologique de l’individu pour anticiper et mieux accueillir les réalités du parcours migratoire.

In the mouth of the imagination : positioning children as co-researchers and co-artists to create a professional children's theatre production

In recent decades a number of Australian artists and teacher/artists have given serious attention to the creation of performance forms and performance engagement models that respect children’s intelligence, engage with themes of relevance, avoid the cliche´s of children’s theatre whilst connecting both sincerely and playfully with current understandings of the way in which young children develop and engage with the world. Historically a majority of performing arts companies touring Australian schools or companies seeking schools to view a performance in a dedicated performance venue engage with their audiences in what can be called a ‘drop-in drop-out’ model. A six-month practice-led research project (The Tashi Project) which challenged the tenets of the ‘drop-in drop-out’ model has been recently undertaken by Sandra Gattenhof and Mark Radvan in conjunction with early childhood students from three Brisbane primary school classrooms who were positioned as co-researchers and co-artists. The children, researchers and performers worked in a complimentary relationship in both the artistic process and the development of product.

Using the imagination : consumer evoking and thematizing of the fantastic imaginary

This article explores the process by which consumers evoke and thematize the fantastic imaginary when playing a fantasy-based trading card game. Interviews with 15 informants, all players of Magic: The Gathering, serve as data. The result is a new framework that reveals how the fantastic imaginary is evoked and thematized. A typology of thematizing strategies employed by consumers is also presented. Implications are discussed in relation to consumer research, imagination theory, literary theory of the evoked fantastic imaginary, and the imaginary in play.

Visuacy, imagination, and engagement

Australia’s National Review of Visual Education (DEEWR, 2009) asserts the primacy of visual language ability, or ‘visuacy” in problem-solving. This paper reports on a recent university/schools research project with ‘at risk’ middle school students in which visuacy was promoted as a primary medium for obtaining data relating to issues of immediate concern to the students. Using a students-as-researchers approach, the project investigated middle school students’ perspectives on school engagement and disengagement. In this project, novice researchers used a variety of data gathering methods including photography, video interviews and drawn images as well as more traditional verbal methods, such as interviews, and quantitative methods, such as questionnaires. Engaging student imagination was a key focus of the approach taken by the project, acknowledging that student participants may be reluctant to enter dialogue with teachers and researchers on matters to which they have previously had little input. Students who have previously been marginalized and prevented from contributing their voices to educational forums often have difficulty in adjusting to the novelty of collaborative research with adults (Rudduck, 2003) and may be uncertain of their own place in the relationship that defines teacher/student interactions. It is argued that the project’s promotion of visuacy, alongside more traditional literacies and numeracy in education research, helped to overcome these concerns, engaged the imaginations of the student researchers, and provided a medium for the expression of the voices of marginalised young people.

Young people, imagination and re-engagement in the middle years

This article reports on the first stage of a study that uses Young People as Researchers methodology to investigate the phenomenon of middle-year student disengagement. The study obtains student perspectives on the meanings of engagement and disengagement using a variety of innovative research methods. The first stage of the study focused on a two-day workshop giving students and teachers an overview of the project and providing training and experience in conducting research in their schools. The process employed by the study provides spaces and resources for critical thinking and encourages imaginative responses to the real life problems confronting the students and their peers and affecting their educational engagement. This article describes ways in which engagement is viewed both theoretically and through the empirical work of the student researchers, and how various applications of ‘disciplined imagination’ connect with methods of investigating and understanding engagement.

From 'sympathetic' to 'dialogic' imagination : cultural study in the foreign language classroom

This chapter reports on a critical literacy approach to developing intercultural competence in an EFL/ESL classroom: an approach which uses a form of 'connective analysis' between linguacultures leading to productive exploration of the interstices between cultures.

Is the world their oyster? The global imagination of pre-service teachers

This paper reports on a qualitative interview study with eleven pre-service primary teachers in Queensland about their career plans exploring whether and how a global imagination motivates this next generation of teachers. The study is framed within sociological theory of globalisation, with regard to the growing possibilities for international mobility for work purposes, and the new life circumstances which make this imaginable. Teaching as a profession has changed and teachers are no longer as entangled with specific systems or geographical locations anymore. International recruitment campaigns are shown to pursue these pre-service teachers during their university preparation. The analysis of the interview data reveals the kind of impact these possibilities make on how pre-service teachers imagine their career, and what other considerations enhance or limit their global imagination. The findings are used to reflect on the highly localised governance of pre-service teacher preparation and the limited state-bound imaginaries to which these pre-service teachers are unnecessarily confined in their preparation.

Imagination

Imagination is a capacity of internal visualization, concept creation and manipulation not directly dependent upon sensation. Imagination is associated with a range of phenomena: mental imagery, fancy, inventiveness, insight, counterfactual reasoning, pretence, simulation and conceivability.

Drawing on imagination : primary students' ideal learning environments

Research has established a close relationship between learning environments and learning outcomes (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria, 2008; Woolner, Hall, Higgins, McCaughey & Wall, 2007) yet little is known about how students in Australian schools imagine the ways that their learning environments could be improved to enhance their engagement with the processes and content of education and children are rarely consulted on the issue of school design (Rudduck & Flutter, 2004). Currently, school and classroom designers give attention to operational matters of efficiency and economy, so that architecture for children’s education is largely conceived in terms of adult and professional needs (Halpin, 2007). This results in the construction of educational spaces that impose traditional teaching and learning methods, reducing the possibilities of imaginative pedagogical relationships. Education authorities may encourage new, student-centred pedagogical styles, such as collaborative learning, team-teaching and peer tutoring, but the spaces where such innovations are occurring do not always provide the features necessary to implement these styles. Heeding the views of children could result in the creation of spaces where more imaginative pedagogical relationships and student-centred pedagogical styles can be implemented. In this article, a research project conducted with children in nine Queensland primary schools to investigate their ideas of the ideal ‘school’ is discussed. Overwhelmingly, the students’ work emphasised that learning should be fun and that learning environments should be eco-friendly places where their imaginations can be engaged and where they learn from and in touch with reality. The children’s imagined schools echo ideas that have been promoted over many decades by progressive educators such as John Dewey (1897, in Provenzo, 2006) (“experiential learning”), AS Neill (in Cassebaum, 2003) (Summerhill school) and Ivan Illich (1970) (“deschooling”), with a vast majority of students suggesting that, wherever possible, learning should take place away from classrooms and in environments that support direct, hands-on learning.

CD73 and CD29 concurrently mediate the mechanically induced decrease of migratory capacity of mesenchymal stromal cells

The assumption that mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC)-based therapies are capable of augmenting physiological regeneration processes has fostered intensive basic and clinical research activities. However, to achieve sustained therapeutic success in vivo, not only the biological, but also the mechanical microenvironment of MSCs during these regeneration processes needs to be taken into account. This is especially important for e.g., bone fracture repair, since MSCs present at the fracture site undergo significant biomechanical stimulation. This study has therefore investigated cellular characteristics and the functional behaviour of MSCs in response to mechanical loading. Our results demonstrated a reduced expression of MSC surface markers CD73 (ecto-5’-nucleotidase) and CD29 (integrin β1) after loading. On the functional level, loading led to a reduced migration of MSCs. Both effects persisted for a week after the removal of the loading stimulus. Specifi c inhibition of CD73/CD29 demonstrated their substrate dependent involvement in MSC migration after loading. These results were supported by scanning electron microscopy images and phalloidin staining of actin fi laments displaying less cell spreading, lamellipodia formation and actin accumulations. Moreover, focal adhesion kinase and Src-family kinases were identified as candidate downstream targets of CD73/CD29 that might contribute to the mechanically induced decrease in MSC migration. These results suggest that MSC migration is controlled by CD73 CD29, which in turn are regulated by mechanical stimulation of cells. We therefore speculate that MSCs migrate into the fracture site, become mechanically entrapped, and thereby accumulate to fulfil their regenerative functions.

Inciting the social imagination to realising the dream : An unfolding story of reform in a low-socioeconomic school

This paper presentation addresses design-based research that became a catalyst for social change among a disadvantaged school community. The aim of the longitudinal research was to protoype an evidence-based model for whole school digital and print literacy pedagogy renewal among students from low socioeconomic, Indigenous, and migrant backgrounds. Applying Anthony Gidden’s principle of the “duality of structure”, the paper presentation interprets how the collective agency of researchers and the school community began to transform the structural properties of the institution in a two-way dynamism, so that the structural properties of the school were not outside of individual action, but were implicated in its reproduction and transformation.

Imagination for re-engagement from the margins of education

For marginalised secondary school students, mainstream education may no longer appear to be an inviting place. While proposed solutions to problems of disengagement and marginalisation appear to concentrate on finding ways to coerce students back to mainstream education through, for example, ‘learning or earning’ legislation, this article suggests that more effective solutions may be found by engaging with the students in the margins that they occupy. Following discussion of key influences on student disengagement and a theory of imaginations, a ‘students-as-researchers’ (SaR) model of working with young people is discussed to demonstrate that, through the scaffolded application of active imagination, it is possible for such students to identify and create their own connections to the mainstream. The SaR model is illustrated through reference to groups of disaffected high school students who participated in an action research project to investigate apparent low aspiration for tertiary education among their peers at schools serving low-income communities in Queensland, Australia.

Review : "A criminological imagination : essays on justice, punishment and discourse by Part Carlen"

There are four contributors to this review symposium. David Brown's review focuses on the questions of abolitionism that cut across much of Carlen's scholarship on punishment and prisons. Kerry Carrington's review attempts to articulate Pat Carlen's contributions to feminism, critque and crimnology, a selection of which is republished in the third scetion 'A criminological imgination'. Kelly Hannah-Moffat's review provides a succint but broad ranging analysis of Carlen's contributions to knowledge, politics and penal reform. Jo Phoenix takes Carlen's contributions to women, crim and scoial control as her main source of inspiration from this large body of work to review.