Search Results (9)

Objectives: Teachers’ intention understanding ability reflects their professional insight, which is the basis for effective classroom teaching activities. However, the cognitive process and brain mechanism of how teachers understand students’ action intention in class are still unclear. Methods: This study used event-related potential (ERP) technology to explore the cognitive neural differences in intention understanding ability among teachers with different levels of knowledge and experience. The experiment used the comic strips paradigm to examine the ability of expert and novice teachers to understand students’ normative and non-normative classroom actions under different text prompts (“how” and “why”). Results: The results revealed that in the late time window, expert teachers induced larger P300 and LPC amplitudes when they understood students’ classroom action intentions, while the N250 amplitudes induced by novice teachers in the early time window were significantly larger. In addition, for both types of teachers, when understanding the intentions behind students’ normative actions, the N250 amplitude was the most significant, while the P300 and LPC amplitudes were more significant for non-normative actions. Conclusions: This study found that teachers at varying professional development stages had different time processing processes in intention understanding ability, which supported teachers’ brain electrophysiological activities related to social ability. Full article

This research aims to promote diversity and inclusion among higher education students by examining the integration of technology into project-based learning (PBL) for English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher candidates. Based on a mixed-methods approach and convenience sampling (n = 84 participants), this study involved pre-service teachers who collaboratively employed several authoring tools to create 16 digital comic strips for teaching English. The focus of the project was on inclusivity, cultural diversity, and affective education. This study consisted of five stages corresponding to different critical thinking skills: comprehension, negotiation, creation, presentation, and evaluation. The instruments used for quantitative data included a pre/post-survey based on two validated scales. Qualitative data were gathered through class discussions and semi-structured interviews. The results, analyzed through SPSS and QDA Miner Lite, revealed that teacher candidates lacked prior experience using digital tools to create EFL-inclusive materials. However, the study also highlighted increased awareness of inclusive education and strong advocacy for the integration of transformative technology in teacher training programs. Full article

Background: Low awareness of BC and its associated risk factors causes delays in diagnosis and impacts survival. It is critical to communicate BC risk to patients in a format that they are easily able to understand. Our study aim was to develop easy-to-follow transmedia prototypes to communicate BC risk and evaluate user preferences, alongside exploring awareness of BC and its risk factors. Methods: Prototypes of transmedia tools for risk communication were developed with multidisciplinary input. A qualitative in-depth online interview study was undertaken using a pre-defined topic guide of BC patients (7), their relatives (6), the general public (6), and health professionals (6). Interviews were analyzed using a thematic approach. Findings: Most participants preferred pictographic representations (frequency format) of lifetime risk and risk factors and storytelling using short animations and comic strips (infographics) for communicating genetic risk and testing: “In a short time, they explained it very well, and I liked it”. Suggestions included minimizing technical terminology, decreasing the delivery speed, “two-way dialogue”, and using local “language for different locations”. There was low awareness of BC, with some understanding of age and hereditary risk factors but limited knowledge of reproductive factors. Interpretation: Our findings support use of multiple context-specific multimedia tools in communicating cancer risk in an easy-to-understand way. The preference for storytelling using animations and infographics is a novel finding and should be more widely explored. Full article

This article (visual essay) provides a glimpse of a field trip ventured by design students as part of a larger study of developing a localised version of design education for sustainability, focusing on the wants and needs of non-urban populations in vast Russian hinterlands. The central goal is to introduce would-be designers to the concepts of locally appropriate technology and sustainable/circular living by real-life examples and, eventually, teach them to recognise the sustainable potential of place-based technologies and practices of their making, using and maintaining. The primary data came from the trip to Pozhva, a village in Permskiy Krai, Russia, that gained popularity among DIY activists and users of off-road vehicles in Russia in the early 2000s because of its unique, community-centred manufacture of lightweight ATVs on low-pressure tires, nicknamed “jeeps”. This article presents the students’ journey in a comic strip portraying a composite character of technologies and their user-designers as experts in local conditions and (subconsciously) agents of circularity. The article closes with a discussion on the expedition’s discoveries and learning outcomes, correlating them with broader implications for design education. Full article

Bullying research among preschoolers and the early grades of primary school is still scarce. With the aid of a set of cartoons representing prototypical bullying scenes, we interview 120 schoolchildren (50% girls) from kindergarten to third grade (age range: 5.44–9.58) from three mainstream public schools located in the eastern Community of Madrid, in order to analyse their perceptions regarding this phenomenon. Results show that 94.2% (n = 113) of schoolchildren are able to recognize when a partner is victimized. Nevertheless, significant differences were found by grade (p = 0.017), with kindergarteners giving more responses classified as one-off aggressions. Most students (n = 102) empathize with the victims´ emotions and condemn the bullies’ behavior, regardless of their gender (p = 0.637) or grade (p = 0.578). A total of 53.9% (n = 64) of students think these bullying situations are partly caused by previous conflicts; girls are inclined to think this more often than boys (p = 0.003). Furthermore, 53.8% (n = 64) of the students would request help from their schoolteachers if they were bullied, with no statistically significant differences by gender (p = 0.254) or by grade (p = 0.133). These results serve as a rationale to develop bullying prevention programs from a very early school age to provide information regarding its causation and coping strategies, among others. Full article

This article examines remediated examples of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915). Eliot’s innovative dramatic monologue has sustained an enduring inter-media afterlife, mainly because visual artists generally capitalized on the poem’s residual Victorian painterly and semi-narrative qualities. Here I look at a wider range of visual forms from old and new media that, for both pedagogic and artistic purposes, remediate the poem’s ekphrastic, semi-narrative and modernist aesthetics: the comic strip, the animated film, the dramatic monologue film, the split-screen video poem and the photographic spatial montage. Together, they demonstrate the dialogic and multi-directional nature of remediation and articulate via inter-media strategies various literary properties and themes (e.g., character, setting, visual motifs, paralysis) of ‘Prufrock’. Full article

Relationships between religion and comics are generally unexplored in the academic literature. This article provides a brief history of Black religions in comic books, cartoons, animation, and newspaper strips, looking at African American Christianity, Islam, Africana (African diaspora) religions, and folk traditions such as Hoodoo and Conjure in the 20th century. Even though the treatment of Black religions in the comics was informed by stereotypical depictions of race and religion in United States (US) popular culture, African American comics creators contested these by offering alternatives in their treatment of Black religion themes. Full article

On the basis of a shared emphasis on time as well as space, this paper argues for introducing elements of comic art into cartography, specifically the mapped comic, with an illustrated strip literally plotted and placed in a 3D time geographic virtual world. This approach is situated within current initiatives regarding the relationship between cartography and art, given that comics are a type of sequential art. Two examples demonstrate that the approach succeeds as a way of representing the geometry of a story without compromising emotional content. Comic conventions neatly package narrative geography for visual deployment. An example demonstrating the expressiveness of comic art principles when applied to maps (maps as comics) is discussed. Full article

Personal health data is acquired, processed, stored, and accessed using a variety of different devices, applications, and services. These are often complex and highly connected. Therefore, use or misuse of the data is hard to detect for people, if they are not capable to understand the trace (i.e., the provenance) of that data. We present a visualization technique for personal health data provenance using comic strips. Each strip of the comic represents a certain activity, such as entering data using a smartphone application, storing or retrieving data on a cloud service, or generating a diagram from the data. The comic strips are generated automatically using recorded provenance graphs. The easy-to-understand comics enable all people to notice crucial points regarding their data such as, for example, privacy violations. Full article