Differences between Art and Design Education—or Differences in Conceptions of Creativity?

The principles and techniques of design education have begun to influence art education in the United States, but their effect so far has been modest, primarily because of a gaping divide in beliefs about creativity and how to stimulate it. With K–12 art education on the chopping block of a culture awash with budget cuts and testing fever, this is a particularly a significant time to examine these disparate conceptions. The argument here is that the division that exists today between pre‐K–12 art education and design education in the United States is not justified and ignores historical perspective. After describing and comparing the two approaches, we examine how conceptions of creativity in the visual arts may have led to this artificial separation of similar disciplines. Because educators in many countries grapple with defining and implementing creative art education curricula, this article will consider international perspectives that offer insights for American art educators.     

The vocational ID – connecting life design counselling and personality systems interaction theory

ABSTRACT

We introduce the Vocational ID that integrates linguistic and visual representations of a career counselling client’s self. Based upon findings from the Life Design paradigm [Savickas, M. L., Nota, L., Rossier, J., Dauwalder, J.-P., Duarte, M. E., Guichard, J.,?…?van Vianen, A. E. M. (2009). Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the twenty-first century. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75(3), 239–250. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2009.04.004] and the Personality Systems Interaction theory [Kuhl, J. (2000b). The volitional basis of personality systems interaction theory: Applications in learning and treatment contexts. International Journal of Educational Research, 33(7–8), 665–703. doi:10.1016/S0883-0355(00)00045-8], the Vocational ID facilitates working on clients' vocational identity. In this article, we present the theoretical framework, its practical applications, and a case study.     

Bilingual Children’s Narrative Comprehension: Do Pauses during Retelling Buy Time for Understanding?

Abstract

This study extended research on bilingual children’s narrative comprehension to text processing during retelling. A cross- and monolinguistic design allowed for the investigation of the association of various aspects of narrative comprehension with two types of pause occurring during oral retelling of a story heard in one language and retold in a second or in the same language. A sample of 95 bilingual (L1 German/L2 English) fourth-graders participated in the experiment. Comprehension was predominantly accomplished during listening, as children with L1 input outperformed children with L2 input, but they did not benefit from L1 in retelling. Children’s comprehension performance and corresponding pause patterns suggested that the duration of filled pauses dedicated to gist formation indicated efficiency of comprehension: The duration decreased with increasing comprehension. The findings allowed the conclusion that longer pauses during retelling did not buy time for comprehension.     

Formal assessment of reliability specifications in embedded cyber-physical systems

Reliability has become an integral component of the design intent of embedded cyber-physical systems. Safety-critical embedded systems are designed with specific reliability targets, and design practices include the appropriate allocation of both spatial and temporal redundancies in the implementation to meet such requirements. With increasing complexity of such systems and considering the large number of components in such systems, redundancy allocation requires a formal scientific basis. In this work, we profess the analysis of the redundancy requirement upfront with the objective of making it an integral part of the specification. The underlying problem is one of synthesizing a formal specification with built-in redundancy artifacts, from the formal properties of the error-free system, the error probabilities of the control components, and the reliability target. We believe that upfront formal analysis of redundancy requirements is important in budgeting the resource requirements from a cost versus reliability perspective. Several case-studies from the automotive domain highlight the efficacy of our proposal.     

Understanding the context of suicide in master's level counselling programmes in Australia

The purpose of this study was to understand the context of suicide in master's level counselling courses in Australia. The sample comprised courses accredited by the Australian Counselling Association (ACA) and the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA). A mixed methods content analysis was used to identify the explicitness of suicide in these courses and identify themes that emerged during the analysis. The sample consisted of 405 units of study contained in 26 courses. Suicide was explicit in 23 units in 17 courses. Suicide content was overshadowed by cultural diversity, ethics, morality and philosophy, research and self-awareness, which was explicit in all 26 courses.