Search Results (10)

In the past hundred years, three pontiffs have written apostolic letters to commemorate anniversaries relating to Dante: in 1921, Benedict XV marked the sixth centenary of the death of the great poet; in 1965, Paul VI judged it opportune to write on the occasion of the seventh centenary of his birth; and in 2021, Pope Francis added his voice to the numerous others wishing to honour the memory of the supreme Florentine poet on the seventh centenary of his death. Each letter is a product of its time: one hundred years ago, the Pope—still confined within the Vatican and refusing to recognise the Kingdom of Italy due to the Roman Question—addressed his text “to the beloved sons, professors and pupils of literary institutes and centres of higher learning within the Catholic world”; Paul VI, in full accord with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and its vision of a Church seeking collaboration with the world, addressed his writing to Dante scholars more broadly, and within the same letter, together with other academic authorities, established the Chair of Dante Studies at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan; Pope Francis today, in his outward-facing style of evangelisation, challenges everyone to (re)read Dante, whose teaching remains relevant seven hundred years after his death. Despite the differing political contexts and ecclesial agendas, Benedict XV, Paul VI, and Pope Francis are united on one point: Dante is a Christian poet—critical of the Church, certainly, but loyal to his faith and desirous of a religious institution that is more serious and less corrupt. This brief study presents the homage which the Church, today, seven centuries later, renders to this Poet—now widely recognised as a passionate witness of an arduous and active faith, in pursuit of justice and freedom. Full article

Background/Objectives: Sentence stress as part of linguistic prosody plays an important role for verbal communication. It emphasizes particularly important words in a phrase and is reflected by acoustic cues such as the voice fundamental frequency. However, visual cues, especially facial movements, are also important for sentence stress perception. Since cochlear implant (CI) recipients are limited in their use of acoustic prosody cues, the question arises as to what extent they are able to exploit visual features. Methods: Virtual characters were used to provide highly realistic but controllable stimuli for investigating sentence stress in groups of experienced CI recipients and typical-hearing (TH) peers. In addition to the proportion of correctly identified stressed words, task load was assessed via reaction times (RTs) and task-evoked pupil dilation (TEPD), and visual attention was estimated via eye tracking. Experiment 1 considered congruent combinations of auditory and visual cues, while Experiment 2 presented incongruent stimuli. Results: In Experiment 1, CI users and TH participants performed similarly in the congruent audiovisual condition, while the former were better at using visual cues. RTs were generally faster in the AV condition, whereas TEPD revealed a more detailed picture, with TH subjects showing greater pupil dilation in the visual condition. The incongruent stimuli in Experiment 2 showed that modality use varied individually among CI recipients, while TH participants relied primarily on auditory cues. Conclusions: Visual cues are generally useful for perceiving sentence stress. As a group, CI users are better at using facial cues than their TH peers. However, CI users show individual differences in the reliability of the various cues. Full article

In 2022, the authors of this paper were awarded with three years’ government funding to support seventy-five English schools and Further Education colleges with the running of their own Action Research for inclusion and special educational needs projects (ISEND). Based on the funder’s interest in the identification and scaling-up of the evidence-base for SEND practice, this reflective account analyzes the evidence-base drawn upon and created by the Action Researchers for ISEND and the efficacy of the approach. Adopting an interpretivist, qualitative approach to content analysis, this paper analyzes data from the first seven completed Action Research for ISEND projects. Aligned with Dewey’s scientific model of reflection, analysis shows the Action Researchers for ISEND draw upon a complex synthesis of contextualized understanding, broadened horizons (including collaborative working and study), deepened and/or reshaped understandings, and data analysis to form their theorizations of praxis. Bearing no relation to evidence-based practice, the Action Researchers for ISEND adopt a constructivist ontology towards the inclusion of children with SEND, which challenges positivistic paradigms of “what works” in SEND and embeds a praxis of democracy which frequently includes the voices of learners with disabilities in decision making processes. Full article

Adolescence is a time of significant change which is experienced differently across sociocultural contexts. Understanding drivers of food practice in adolescence is vital as these impact future health outcomes and can drive health inequality. This study investigates drivers of food choice in predominantly British–Asian, Muslim adolescents living in a deprived urban area of England. It identifies dominant drivers of food choice and their impact on health and wellbeing, and explores how Muslim adolescents from a low socioeconomic, British–Asian group understand and action autonomy in their food practices. PhotoVoice, a focussed ethnographical methodology where participants reflect on lived experience, was used to address the study aim. Participants (n = 21) were secondary school pupils aged 14–15 years, recruited from a school situated in an area of deprivation. Four overarching themes were developed from the qualitative data framework analysis: (1) food preference and other determinants of food choice; (2) concept, understanding and importance of health; (3) developing autonomy, skills, and independence; and (4) role of community, friends, and family in food practices. The adolescents were developing autonomy in relation to their food practices, whilst navigating a complex web of factors which were, in part, determined by their social class location and demographics. Participants understood the constituents of healthy eating. However, there was a perceived “effort” of being healthy, including additional time for preparing healthier food and sacrificing taste preferences. Parents, friends, and schools highly influence food choices, with adolescents preferring a broad palate of takeaway and convenience foods and would prefer to eat less of these “unhealthy” options than eat healthily. Full article

As globalisation changes the sociocultural architecture of urban areas, adolescents increasingly interact with different sets of values and worldviews, which can be a potential cause of conflict and anxiety. To date, there is little empirical research on how adolescents perceive and experience social cohesion in a superdiverse metropolitan context such as the Brussels Capital Region. In this study, we elaborate on the relationship between social cohesion and ethnic diversity, using controversial topics as instruments to examine the erosion of social cohesion. To expose these processes, 34 in-depth interviews were conducted with pupils from Dutch-speaking secondary schools in Brussels. Through thematic analysis, the data revealed four overarching themes of controversies: Brussels, religion/philosophy, ethnicity/national belonging and political horizon, epitomising a paradox of conflict and consensus. Notably, during the interviews, the adolescents reported a climate shaped by actions of ‘silencing’, ‘avoiding’ and ‘voicing’ when discussing controversies in a heterogeneous classroom context. This analysis of adolescents’ perceptions of social cohesion hence corroborates the premise that conflict is not the opposite of cohesiveness, but rather an integral part of a pluralistic society. Full article

Migration across the OECD this decade is reflected in increasingly diverse societies. Although migration into Ireland remains relatively low, increasing pupil diversity is evident in the physical, pedagogical, curricular, and socio-relational aspects of schooling. While the intensity of such changes are evident in teacher pedagogy, children’s social worlds, and classroom/school dynamics, most notable is the lack of policy development to support school practices. Drawing on two in-depth case studies, this paper aims to foreground minority ethnic children/young people’s voice(s) as they negotiate the complexity of identity (re)formation and belonging in school. It explores whether mis/recognition impacts teacher pedagogical practices through ability grouping, and minority ethnic children’s navigation of social spaces within/between the classroom. Using a children’s rights lens, this paper interrogates whether minority ethnic children’s right to education preparing them “for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace (and) tolerance” (Article 29 (1), UNCRC, 1989) is being realised. Findings indicate the need to foreground minority ethnic children’s voices and rights to ensure how they “do”/”feel” learning is in their best interests and affords them equal opportunities in their school lives. Full article

This paper reports on the findings of two studies concerned with pupils’ motivational and emotional responses to pedagogies of affect in physical education in Scottish secondary schools. Pedagogies of affect explicitly focus on learning in the affective domain, or what is known in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) as ‘personal qualities’. Personal qualities include motivation, confidence and self-esteem, determination and resilience, responsibility and leadership, respect and tolerance, and communication. In one study, led by Teraoka, the researchers explored the ways in which pupils responded, through focus group interviews based on Self-Determination Theory, to teachers who claimed to value and be committed to teaching explicitly for affective learning outcomes. In another study, led by Lamb, the researchers investigated the impact of an activist intervention on girls’ experiences of physical education, through their conversations in focus group discussions. Both studies reveal that pupils responded favorably, both in motivation and emotion, to pedagogies of affect in physical education, and that these responses offer a promising basis for future developments. Full article

Using multimodal signals to solve the problem of emotion recognition is one of the emerging trends in affective computing. Several studies have utilized state of the art deep learning methods and combined physiological signals, such as the electrocardiogram (EEG), electroencephalogram (ECG), skin temperature, along with facial expressions, voice, posture to name a few, in order to classify emotions. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent the third generation of neural networks and employ biologically plausible models of neurons. SNNs have been shown to handle Spatio-temporal data, which is essentially the nature of the data encountered in emotion recognition problem, in an efficient manner. In this work, for the first time, we propose the application of SNNs in order to solve the emotion recognition problem with the multimodal dataset. Specifically, we use the NeuCube framework, which employs an evolving SNN architecture to classify emotional valence and evaluate the performance of our approach on the MAHNOB-HCI dataset. The multimodal data used in our work consists of facial expressions along with physiological signals such as ECG, skin temperature, skin conductance, respiration signal, mouth length, and pupil size. We perform classification under the Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) cross-validation mode. Our results show that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 73.15% for classifying binary valence when applying feature-level fusion, which is comparable to other deep learning methods. We achieve this accuracy even without using EEG, which other deep learning methods have relied on to achieve this level of accuracy. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the SNN can be successfully used for solving the emotion recognition problem with multimodal data and also provide directions for future research utilizing SNN for Affective computing. In addition to the good accuracy, the SNN recognition system is requires incrementally trainable on new data in an adaptive way. It only one pass training, which makes it suitable for practical and on-line applications. These features are not manifested in other methods for this problem. Full article

This study evaluated ratings of vocal strain and perceived listening effort by normal hearing participants while listening to speech samples produced by talkers with adductor spasmodic dysphonia (AdSD). In addition, objective listening effort was measured through concurrent pupillometry to determine whether listening to disordered voices changed arousal as a result of emotional state or cognitive load. Recordings of the second sentence of the “Rainbow Passage” produced by talkers with varying degrees of AdSD served as speech stimuli. Twenty naïve young adult listeners perceptually evaluated these stimuli on the dimensions of vocal strain and listening effort using two separate visual analogue scales. While making the auditory-perceptual judgments, listeners’ pupil characteristics were objectively measured in synchrony with the presentation of each voice stimulus. Data analyses revealed moderate-to-high inter- and intra-rater reliability. A significant positive correlation was found between the ratings of vocal strain and listening effort. In addition, listeners displayed greater peak pupil dilation (PPD) when listening to more strained and effortful voice samples. Findings from this study suggest that when combined with an auditory-perceptual task, non-volitional physiologic changes in pupil response may serve as an indicator of listening and cognitive effort or arousal. Full article

In order to improve the learning conditions and health of schoolchildren, the Pulse for Learning and Health [PuLH] program in Sweden has introduced additional mandatory moderate to vigorous physical activity [MVPA] that lasts for 30 min three times a week. The PE teachers used a child-centered coaching approach to support all pupils. The aim of this study was to explore pupils’ perception and experience of PuLH that has been implemented in primary and middle schools in Sweden. We have taken into account children’s rights perspectives and adopted an exploratory and interpretive approach. In total, 73 pupils (34 girls, 39 boys, grades 4–9) were recruited through purposive sampling. 13 focus group interviews (n = 71) and individual interviews (n = 2) were carried out. All interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in three major themes: ‘promotes academic performance and a learning school environment’, ‘promotes health and well-being’, and ‘individual and structural barriers’. From children’s perspective, the results highlight the importance of teachers and principals taking into account the interests and needs of all pupils, to have a well-planned MVPA intervention and to deal with issues regarding body ideals. Full article