Journal of Human Dignity and Wellbeing - johdaw

Journal of Human Dignity and Wellbeing

SCIENTIFIC BOARD Petra Aczél, Irena Adamek, Edgar Balaguera, Carlos Fernando Dimeo Álvarez, Jacek Dworzecki, Ingrid Emmerová, Franz Feiner, Pavel Fobel, Daniela Fobelova, Andrzej Gofron, Jolana Hroncová, Valdonė Indrašienė, Cynthia S. Jacelon, Michal Kaplánek, Andrzej Kiepas, Jozef Kutarňa, Aleksandra Kuzior, Daniel Mato, Odeta Merfeldaitė, Beata Pituła, Małgorzata Przybysz-Zaremba, Jana Raclavská, Ivan Rusnak, Adam Stankowski, Renata Stefańska-Klar, Jadwiga Sucharzewska-Smith, Sławomir Sztobryn, Yesim Isil Ulman, Marek Wosiński, Ewa Wysocka

THE EDITORIAL STAFF Editor-in-Chief: Izabela Bieńkowska Associate Editor: Marek Bernacki Linguistic editors of the issue: Vincent Chesney Secretary of the fourth issue: Dorota Chłopek Statistical editor: Joanna Iwińska-Guzik

ISSN 2451-3520


No. 2(4)/2017

Models and perspectives for a more humane educational project

VOLUME EDITORS: Carlos Fernando Dimeo Álvarez

PUBLISHER: Faculty of Humanities, University of Bielsko-Biala University College of Social Sciences and Philologies, Silesian University of Technology Scriptum Publishing Company PUBLISHER ADDRESS: Katedra Pedagogiki Akademia Techniczno-Humanistyczna w Bielsku-Białej ul. Willowa 2, 43-309 Bielsko-Biała Polska e-mail: [email protected] www.johdaw.com © Copyright by Izabela Bieńkowska, 2017 Scriptum Publishing Company Typesetting: Wydawnictwo “scriptum” (www.wydawnictwoscriptum.pl) Cover design: Piotr Bieńkowski Circulation: 180 copies “Journal of Human Dignity and Wellbeing” is scientific, semi-annual and peer reviewed publication. Also available in electronic, open-access version.

Journal of Human Dignity and Wellbeing No. 2(4)/2017

Contents

Carlos Fernando Dimeo Álvarez Introduction______________________________________________________7

RESEARCH STUDIES AND ANALYSES Leila Bijos The Internalization of Higher Education in Brazil: A Critical Review_________13 Marcelo Hernández Santos Pedagogical equality: The radical version of socialist education in Mexico (1934–1938)_____________________________________________45 Carlos Fernando Dimeo Álvarez The task to be fulfilled: construction of learning / construction of knowledge___61 Chesla Ann Lenkaitis Mental and Visual Images: Bringing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition into Focus____81 Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska-Heim Audio Description of artworks in university – level teaching – problems issues___________________________________________________99 Shannon M. Hilliker Teacher candidate use of hyperlinks to support peer social interaction in an online course_______________________________________________111 Krzysztof Cichoń, Ewa Kubiak Hey! Teachers! Leave the students alone (with images)____________________125


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Contents

REPORTS Jesús Eloy Gutiérrez Book Review: “La educación o la utopía necesaria”, La educación encierra un tesoro (Eng. Learning: The treasure within: report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris, France: Unesco Publishing)________________143 Anna Wendorff Book Review: Audiodeskrypcja dzieł sztuki. Metody, problemy, przykłady (Eng. Audio description of works of art. Methods, problems, examples), by: Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska-Heim, Publishing House of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego_______________147 Notes about Authors_________________________________________________153


Introduction

The current (4 – 2017) edition of the JOHDAW scientific journal of the University of Bielsko-Biala have been dedicated to studying, how it is possible the development of an educational project that can be more humane, or in contrast with this proposition, at any case, if it would be possible that the models educative which respond to the needs of the people. Is this possible that the education represents the interests of the people and not the interests of bigger economies? This is a task of extreme complexity, and that nowadays education professionals must assume with, and in depth. Increasingly, teachers must understand the dimension of the challenge they have to go through. In the midst of a society that is rapidly escalating in the complex world surrounding technology, reflecting on the means and ways to build a more humane education requires that such reflection is done with “conscience” (Edgar Morin). Generally, the texts and works that we can read devote a lot of time to the didactic problem and very little to a modality that seems to move quickly away from the environment of the teachers. If the didactic analysis, as important of course as other teaching activities, is not accompanied by a deep philosophy, a critical thinking, education can hardly continue to be maintained as a solid structure in the midst of the world around it. The papers presented here have the essential characteristic of approaching this spectrum from very different perspectives. Seven works, we could say that divided into two mains parts. The first main part, three articles dedicated theoretical and historical papers about the higher education; a first one, the internationalization of higher education in Brazil


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Carlos Fernando Dimeo Álvarez

(Leila Bijos) study how “it is possible to respond to the challenges of globalization and provide positive innovations through teaching, research, and the insertion of talented young students” to the education. The second article, write by Marcelo Hernández Santos, claims the theme for a pedagogy of “equality”. This is in the context of a radical worldview implanted by the Mexican socialist education in specifically the period from 1934 to 1938. The third article for the first part is rather an intermediate that is articulated as a rotor axis between the first and third, is a paper of my own authorship that aims to address: what is the task of education in the context of the construction and learning, and what is the methods the construction of knowledge in higher education today; themes that are combined but do not come together. Also, are explored the links between the human and knowledge. The second part that specifically addresses the teaching practice in contexts that we can generally consider “adverse”, for which the teachers must make a human effort of great demand, but demonstrating that, nevertheless, with the systematization and the methodology They surpass. Again, we want to explore the advances in educational practices and the technologies used, both for teachers as well as students. In the second main part, we have four papers in connection with the specific problems of education practice. Problems that arise, for both inside and outside the classroom. In this vein the first paper is: “Mental and Visual Images: Bringing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition into Focus” write by Chesla Ann Lenkaitis. This study explores “the quantitatively investigates and the effectiveness of two vocabulary learning strategies, the keyword method and the visual support method”. Lenkaitis combine both methods and obtain results of your practices very deeps and reveals. But it is not only your object, in this main also can be identified that students will be in connection with partners and experiences exchanges, that will allow advances in the knowledge new educational practices. Immediately after, we have “Audio Description of artworks in university-level teaching — problems and issues”; write by Aneta Pawłowska and Julia Sowińska. This paper deals with the topic concerning Audio Description (AD). The aim of this work, to know what increase changes of visually impaired people to access important cultural heritage and thereby promoting social inclusion in the cultural area. The new possibilities that offer the new technologies help the people to be located in a quite more human society. The writers display the results obtained by means of instruments development structured by them. The third article “Teacher candidate use of hyperlinks to support peer social inter-

INTRODUCTION

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action in an online course”. by Shannon M. Hilliker; the paper analyzes master’s programs to prepare teachers for the new educational environment. This studies and programs, curriculum, must be rigorous in order to train effective teachers to support the construction of learning in our pre-K-12 public schools. The author explains: “The teacher education courses and full programs have moved online to not only reach a more diverse population but offer convenience to those that wish to become educators”, in this sense the article proposes how the new technical possibilities and technologized develop knowledge. And finally, “Hey! Teachers! Leave the students alone” write by Krzysztof Cichoń and Ewa Kubiak exposes advances in the use visual material, and panels-montages found in the Mnemosyne Atlas. In the text are specified, how during a didactic process, concerning with the students of art history, could be highly beneficial for the learning and individual development. Contextualizing all these works we aim to focus on the challenge of analyzing from different points of view how we should face an educational project that implies a new humanistic conception of education. That pedagogical process that uses technology, the means, the resources within its reach and is capable of transforming them for the benefit of society and the fellowship that must be lived in societies. Finally, in that order of ideas we have two book reviews. The first one by Jesús Eloy Gutiérrez with regard to the “report” coordinated by Jacques Delors and in which the French author would have taken stock of the challenges in which the educational project for the 21st century is immersed. Anna Wendorff ’s review focuses instead on the didactic function of the audio description and its advantages presented in the book by Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska-Heim. With great fortune we can to affirm that we have in our hands a very special number dedicated to various areas of knowledge and education, projecting towards what in this century is the educational project that must be assumed as a fundamental question if the “human” is involved. It is necessary to understand that to speak of “the human” is not solely and exclusively a mere entelechy that circulates in the middle of a practical reasoning, or a categorical imperative (to use the definition of Kant) in which a society, otherwise commercialized, tries to “set in motion” an idea that in no way seems necessary. That is why we must ask ourselves the question of whether it is possible to build an education that really points to the sources of a human sense, knowledge and knowledge not for the achievement of success in terms of use value and exchange value,


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but in the sense of aiming at the development of a “positive pedagogy” that of course is debated between knowledge and knowledge, but also linked to a more human conception of it, an education that forms in peace and solidarity, in communication and in establishing the link with the other, an education that creates a society of friends and not a society of enemies.


RESEARCH STUDIES AND ANALYSES


Leila Bijos

The Internalization of Higher Education in Brazil: A Critical Review Abstract: This paper analyzes the internalization of higher education in Brazil in a wide context of South-South and North-South context. This kind of cooperation includes specific activities, mainly research partnerships, projects and programs involving the transference, generation and dissemination of technical knowledge, successful experiences and training of human resources. This paper focuses on a case study methodology having the Catholic University of Brasilia (UCB) as a contemporary model for professional training. UCB was chosen as one renowned higher education institution which is embracing the endeavor of sending scholars and alumni abroad preparing them to assume high level posts in the Brazilian government. With this objective it is possible to respond to the challenges of globalization and provide positive innovations through teaching, research, and the admittance of talented young students in renowned universities in Europe, East and South Asia, as well as in Latin America. In a macro context, the Brazilian government is supporting targeted investments in science and higher education and efforts to strengthen Brazil’s research capacity and the net working opportunities. Public and private universities are marking a new era in the internationalization of higher education in the country, as a driving force for global training for their graduates. Keywords: International Education Cooperation; South and North-South Research Partnerships; Latin American Higher Education Policy, Brazil development policy.


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Introduction Analyzing the international dimension of higher education in Brazil is a challenge. A great priority is to picture the goals for the next decades, the process, the national trends, issues and opportunities for internalization within specific neighboring countries. Brazil’s greatest development challenge today is to stabilize its political, economic and social problems. Its main goals are the opening of national markets, the suppression of commercial barriers between its partners, the integration of productive financial markets, and the application of scientific technical knowledge, aiming at social inclusion. The elaboration of a national project should be accomplished by all ministries, linking economic development to social justice. This trend may be reversible in this new millennium if the government develops effective policies and is willing to implement them to eradicate poverty and inequality. To make this happen, it is necessary, conscious efforts to ensure an equitable resources distribution to promote public politics, increasing cooperation between public power and the university. The engagement of the university in the process of economic development implies the production and reproduction of knowledge, anchored on humanist and universalist values. Democracy should be paved through citizenship respect and values, highly qualified universities, aiming at the transformation patterns of a city, region and a country (Trindade, 2001, p. 27). The elements of international dimension are evolving in Latin America due to its cultural, linguistic, political and economic characteristics of the region, which is part of mutual collaborations between the countries. How does the national and international cooperation/development agenda influence the types of international higher education/research collaborations being implemented? The analysis of Brazil implies considerable characteristics and perspectives in comparison with Latin American countries due language and cultural specificities due to the Portuguese colonization. Notwithstanding, it shows a subregional cooperation with Mercosur, with emphasis on internationalization programs with Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Brazil is aware of its importance as a regional player and has made continuous efforts on strengthening the internationalization process both on research cooperation as well as on the exchange of scholars and students (Hans De Wit, et. al., xiii, 2005). Cultural relations contribute to show the Spanish and Portuguese inher-

THE INTERNALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRAZIL…

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itance, in music, dance, food and values. These relations have expanded due to advanced communication, technological services and the mobility of persons. Brazil saw the need to adapt to the new international reality and seek a more relevant role in the international scenario using soft power relationships (Nye, 2003). These actions have been carried out in the government of Jânio Quadros/João Goulart (1961–1964) and that of Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979) in terms of cooperation with Germany, France, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands (Oliveira, 2005). Notwithstanding emphasis was put on foreign trade (Jaguaribe, 2009), and only the most prominent public universities were able to sign official cooperation agreements. Public universities were able to work in the execution of the project for institutional strengthening of Mozambican Drug Regulatory Authority, executed by Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency and the Mozambican Ministry of Health; the educational process in East Timor, and bilingual courses of Spanish and Portuguese language and literature in South America, with members of Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela) (Baldauf and Kaplan, 2014).

The Brazilian Educational Challenges in the 21st Century This chapter discusses how UCB has started to consolidate courses and collaborate over time to achieve significant knowledge transfer (in both directions) scholars and students, through increased research productivity and scope, and contributed to the strengthening of the participating institutions, influencing the direction of education and society. The internationalization of higher education at the Catholic University of Brasilia can be considered as an aspect of the country’s foreign policy. President Dilma Rousseff ’s on her second term assignment (2015–2018) launched a national plan called Brazil Country Educator (Brasil Patria Educadora) aiming at prioritizing education as the main objective of the country. In her words: “We are saying that education will be the priority of priorities, but we must look at all government actions, a trainer sense, a citizen practice, a commitment to ethics and republican sentiment” (Official discourse at the Senate, 01.01.2015). This statement assures the government commitment with the educational process and on research cooperation, particularly through policy, funding, programs, and regulatory frameworks.


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The Brazilian government objectives are summed up in three political, economic and cultural fields. Culturally because the most important goal for internationalization of the higher education is to extend the values and principles of the Brazilian national culture in a scope of world community. This cultural diplomacy means a world without borders and it represents the huge transformations that have occurred over time in a world that is more and more capitalist and globalized. Politically and economically, international higher education is the main source of both short-term and long-term income in different countries, especially developing ones (Bijos, 2001; Knight, 2005; Ortiz, 1994). Close attention should be put to the dynamics of internalization from bottom-up (institutional) approach to top-down (national/sectoral) approach, examining the changes and relationship between the two levels, and how it mobilizes the society. Young people do not want to be left behind in terms of access to education, technology and job opportunities. Knight (2005) argues that “the world of higher education and the world in which higher education plays a significant role are changing, for many reasons” (p. 1). This scenario clearly emphasizes the process of internalization expressed by globalization and its corollary, the need to re-structure the existing production areas, liberalization and competitive insertion in the market, as well as gender relations in the country (Miura, 2009). Latin America has had a relevant transformative environment in the last two decades, through cross border activities, which include international exchanges and partnerships, international development projects, exchange of scholars, as well as new commercial trade relations. International development cooperation is used in Latin America to refer to institutional capacity building, human resource development, and academic mobility (Knight, 2005, p. 4). It shows a dynamic environment in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, which reflects throughout the other nations. Instead of pursuing unilateral prerogatives, Brazilian foreign policy has tended to emphasize regional integration, first through the Southern Common Market (Mercado Comum do Sul, Mercosur) and now through the Union of South American Nations (USAN). Brazil is also committed to cooperation with other Portuguese speaking nations through joint-collaborations with the rest of the Lusophone world, in several domains which include military cooperation, financial aid, and cultural exchange.


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The Brazilian authorities have faced and are still facing a national policy of economics adjustment in 2016. Brazil is aware of its importance in the world as a global player and is investing in cultural diplomacy. Cultural relations are actions inserted in the practical reality of every internationalist, diplomat or political scientist. These relations have expanded, and the specialist can contemplate an extensive range of themes that show the need for adjustment, organization and interaction with the world, by means of a constant demand for economic and cultural exchange. Brazil saw the need to adapt to the new international reality and seek a more relevant role in the international scenario using soft power relationships. Thus, it became necessary even more the establishment of a counterpoint of poverty elimination and one of its faces is the insertion into educational programs as the recent “Science without Borders”. As a special strategy, the mobility program proposed by the Brazilian government envisages “to launch the seeds of what could revolutionize the R&D system, the Brazilian students and researchers will be exposed to an environment of high competitiveness and entrepreneurship” (CNPq/CAPES, 2015). The main characteristics of its excellence are “the best students and researchers will undertake research in the best and most relevant Universities around the World” (CNPq/CAPES, 2015). Besides that, the program is already focused in areas of strong industrial interest, which will ensure that award-holders will have strong chances of employment both in industry and in academia. The Program “Science without Borders” has opened opportunities to key institutions around the world to help the Brazilian government to setting up genuine and competitive teams. This is considered a landmark for the Brazilian higher education institutions to motivate the young students to apply for overseas programs. Institutional links started to be re-stablished between key institutions, which were reinforced through official missions from foreign delegations going to Brazil1. This institutional development context will benefit undergraduate and graduate students over the next years, in a second phase, with the goal of sup-

1

Funded primarily by the Brazilian Government, the SwB scholarship program was launched in July 2011. The program aims to send 101,000 Brazilian students to study internationally in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects by 2015. The Government of Brazil is funding 75,000 scholarships and a further 26,000 are being funded by the private sector. CAPES/CNPq. Accessed at: http://www.canadainternational. gc.ca/brazil-bresil/study-etudie/swb-ssf.aspx?lang=en, July 10, 2015.


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porting a further 100,000 scholarships for study abroad for Brazilian university students. Considered as remarkable foreign effort, it is noted that during the whole period of the last decades it has been an increasing trend towards the insertion of the middle class into university, both at the federal level as well as in private universities. Brazil is experiencing fast changes through the reshaping of technology and the reorganization of labor, leisure, knowledge and other different aspects of contemporary life, from culture to the economy (Marcovitch, 2001, p. 9). The bulk of its 3 billion reais (US$1.36 billion) phase one budget has been supported by public funds, with roughly a quarter contributed by the private sector. Host institutions are found in 43 countries, including Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and Spain. However, the following countries have received the largest share of CsF students to date: United States (26,300); United Kingdom (9,500); Canada (7,000); France (6,400); Germany (5,900). These statistical data show that 52% of CsF scholarships have already been awarded for mathematics, science, agricultural and engineering fields (Science without Borders (CsF), 4 July 2014). In sum, the program aims at promoting the consolidation and expansion of science, technology and innovation in Brazil by means of international exchange and mobility. The strategy envisioned aims to (a) increase the presence of students, scientists and industry personnel from Brazil in international institutions of excellence, negotiating the extension of support from the private sector for the payment of the fees involved or the exemption of these fees with universities or local governments, (b) encourage young talents and highly qualified researchers from abroad to work with local investigators in joint projects, contributing to the capacitation of human resources and promoting the return of Brazilian scientists working overseas, and (c) induce the internationalization of universities and research centers in Brazil by encouraging the establishment of international partnerships and a meaningful review of their internal procedures in order to make the interaction with foreign partners feasible (Science without Borders (CsF), 4 July 2014). National and international cooperation/development agenda should influence the types of international higher education/research collaborations being implemented and has to be an effective changing process and “a holistic view of management at the institutional level” (Soderqvist, 2002, p. 29), including so medium class students, who need admission into professional training and uni-


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versity courses, diminishing the sharper distinction between rich and poor. In this context, some main social programs were just being accomplished into the Brazilian national agenda. Emphasis is put on Dilma Rousseff ’s administration (2011–2015), who followed Lula’s foreign policy (2003–2006), aiming at gradually mobilizing and changing the entire infra-structure of the professional qualification system that existed in Brazil since the colonization period, starting social programs to grant small cash to families to maintain their children at school to prepare a new generation of skilled workers, named Family Allowance (Bolsa Familia). Nowadays the program has spread up in the whole territory throughout towns and cities, and contemporary students can apply for educational financing funding (FIES)2 for undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as scholarships abroad in a context of North-South cooperation with American, European and Asian universities, especially in Japan and South Korea, which will be detailed in a context of agreements with UCB. The following topic explains the purpose of internationalization, the expected benefits or outcomes, and especially the values that underpin it and why the Catholic University of Brasilia has adopted North-South Cooperation focused on education as an important target.

North-South Cooperation North-South cooperation between Brazil and OECD countries is consolidating Brazil’s global profile, strengthening its capacity, with the flow technology, economy and knowledge (Knight, 2005, p. 11; Wachter, 2003). The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was created on 20 December 1960, with 20 countries signed the Convention. Since then 14 more countries have become members of the Organization, and Brazil even not being a member of OECD has diplomatic relations with almost all countries, specifically France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States. Its main actors, stakeholders and beneficiaries were important since the 60’s, increasing mobility of the students and scholars. The dynamic relationship with developed countries was viewed 2

Fundo de Financiamento Estudantil (Educational Financing Funding) (FIES) is a program launched by the Ministry of Education to finance College Studies for Brazilian students enrolled in paid private institutions. Access at: http://sisfiesportal.mec.gov.br/fies.html, December 07, 2015.


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as a key environmental factor to show the country’s foreign policy, as well as its adherence to OECD’s instruments, integration into OECD statistical reporting and information systems, sector specific peer reviews, and on inclusive growth, together with China, India, Indonesia and South Africa, aiming at strengthening improvements in the education and skills of labor force (OECD 2015). Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General (2015), emphasizes that “the current difficult economic context underlines the need to boost productivity and competitiveness. To achieve sustainable and inclusive growth, Brazil will need to implement a comprehensive reform agenda to address infrastructure bottlenecks, streamline the tax system, enhance its participation in global value chains, and strengthen improvements in the education and skills of the labor force”. Besides that, the country should reinforce the innovation capacity and reduce regulatory complexity, as well as work on its ambitious reform agenda to boost productivity and competitiveness. The Co-operation Agreement signed between Brazil and OECD in 2015 will bring extensive and mutually beneficial results in international exchanges and partnerships, cross-border activities, aiming at the promotion of North-South cooperation through the multiplication of bilateral, regional and multilateral contacts, as a constructivism ideal of working together, maximizing the interests of the community (Rocha, 2002; Slaughter, 2011).

The Relevance of Fostering Educational Cooperation On analyzing the concept of international cooperation, in general, and North-South — South-South cooperation, this study will focus on the methodology used to collect data and include both present and historical information, documents, publication research, and how interviews have been conducted. Besides emphasizing the macro context, this chapter intents to highlight the selection of UCB, as the main object of this research for its teaching and research excellence.

Research and Knowledge Production: Methodology As the study case focuses on the Catholic University of Brasilia, it is important to highlight that Brasilia has only two universities: the University of Brasilia (UnB), which is a public institution and the Catholic University of Brasilia (UCB), which is a private institution.


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Upon analyzing the global context of cooperation in the last decades, the Catholic University of Brasilia was selected as a study case of contemporary model for professional training. UCB is a renowned higher education institution (with more than 22,000 students) which is embracing the endeavor of sending scholars and alumni abroad, preparing them for new professional capabilities in a globalized scenario. Strengthening its educational system is the foundation of the changes that must be made to ensure social justice and is inserted into UCB heritage foundation. UCB founding fathers had education as the pillar of the transformation of the society, and the country as Educational processes had to embrace the less favored members of the society, who should be inserted into high level patterns of training, research and extension to enjoy the benefits of economic, scientific and technological development. Education defines the beginning of the new millennium and that to a large extent determines a nation’s capacity to ensure the long-term well-being of its population. UCB was founded in 1972 by Maristas, Lassalistas, Salesianos, Estigmatinos and Salesianas priests/nuns, who consolidated an educational consortium named UBEC — União Brasiliense de Educação e Cultura (Brazilian Union of Education and Culture), designed to be a higher educational reference in the country, aiming at systemically integrating theoretical teaching, research and field activities. Its mission envisages working with the civil society in a solidarity level aiming at the integral development of human beings and the society, through the interlinked accomplishment of knowledge and communion, having as its basic pillars quality, ethic Christian values in the pursuit of truth. In 1974 it was recognized as Human Sciences Catholic Faculty (Faculdade Católica de Ciências Humanas (FCCH). Aware of the importance of infusing international content to the curriculums, evaluating and upgrading its programs, preparing the students to achieve a position in a world community, relevant universities abroad were contacted and international memoranda of agreement started to be signed, and academics were sent abroad for training and research in a North-South cooperation context. The University constitutes a contemporary scientific and technological repository, with professors holding accredited PhDs, who are constantly collaborating with renowned institutions in Latin America, as the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Chile), quoted as the first one in the region, due to the high impact of its research productivity in in-


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ternationally recognized scientific journals (Exame, 2015), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro — PUC Rio (Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro – PUC-Rio); Pontifical Catholic University Santa Maria de los Buenos Aires in Argentina (Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina Santa Maria de los Buenos Aires — UCA); Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile); Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Peru); Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo — PUC SP (Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo — PUC-SP); Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul); Catholic University of North, Chile (Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile); Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná — PUC PR (Pontificia Universidade Católica do Paraná — PUC PR), among others. The above mentioned collaboration is in close tune with the Brazilian policies and programs for the current internationalization process. UCB is placing greater priority on the international dimension of higher education to be internationally recognized, and to show its teaching and research excellence, advanced curriculum, its commitment to maintain a scholar institution where all come together for the common purpose of learning. Graduate studies offered by UCB are considered to be the most developed in the country, leveling to the most renowned universities in Latin America (Student Guide, 2015; Exame, 2016). The institutions of higher education should not minimize the production and distribution of knowledge (Hans De Wit et. al., 2005). Miura emphasizes this “traditional model of cooperation, in some cases, not symmetrical — meaning the absorption of knowledge from the North countries — which dominated the Brazilian academy especially in the 30’s and 60’s (2009, p. 1). This past concept has been replaced by a more dynamic global issue with contemporary challenges that cannot be addressed only focusing on North countries, but internationally targeting global problems, as interdisciplinary collaboration, solving problems related to poverty, violence, crime, health, and environment. The institutions work together, with government departments, intergovernmental agencies, public or private stakeholders, non-governmental organizations, articulating its programs, policies, strategies, which are used as one of the policy instruments or, more generally, as one of the ways policy is actually translated into action, as referred by (Hans De Wit et. al., 2005).


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The internationalization of higher education is defined by Knight (2004) and emphasis is put on “the given multipolarity and interdependence, internationalism is now key to any country’s scientific, technological and economic competitiveness” (p. 2), as a pillar for university reforms. It was the launching of university reforms based on administrative efficiency, departmental structure, and the indivisible triad of teaching, research and extension (Laus and Morosini, 2005, p. 112). UCB adopted internationalization as one of its advocacy priorities for the next twenty years, collaborating with a wide range of partners. UCB was one of the first and most dynamic institutions in Brazil to implement a program of higher education, research and development programming for internationalization, collaboration and research productivity, being the reason for the selection as an illustrative case study. UCB is among the nine religious universities created in the 1960’s (Oliven, 2002), consolidating an urban-industrial society in Brazil, the foundation of Brasilia as the new capital of the country, which boosted the opening of the job market in public and private sectors (Laus and Morosini, 2005, p. 112).

South-South Cooperation: Africa, Latin America and Caribbean Countries Emphasis should be put to Brazil’s cooperation with the South as a proactive stance on the creation of an international order that is fair and representative of the interests of developing countries, having Africa as an example (Leite, 2011). The South-South cooperation was fostered aiming at economic, social, environmental and political development (Santos and Cerqueira, 2015), not only with African countries but with Latin America and Caribbean countries, envisaging to promote better integration with neighboring countries, with increased interactions in commercial, economic, social and cultural areas (UNOSSC, 2014). The integration of teaching and learning process is complemented by extracurricular activities, in situ visits to marginal communities, local cultural and ethnic community groups as afrodescendants people, quilombolas, isolated fishermen, women and elderly victims of domestic violence, abandonment, providing social assistance, mini-courses, and other capacity-building initiatives. Projects and services are offered as part of development aid projects with private and public stakeholders, with academic linkages abroad (cross-border),


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or full programs abroad as the ones listed below, in a context of North-South International Collaboration between UCB and several higher educational institutions.

UCB North-South International Collaboration Agreements This section discusses the ongoing process of international partnerships in a context of North-South collaboration the UCB has been implementing along the years, following the Brazilian main policies, to rank its higher educational institutions as the best in Latin America. The analysis reviews the most important UCB North-South international collaboration agreements. Challenges are posed to enhance education with experiential learning options or international exchange. Flexible degree programs will open up a world of possibilities, with different majors and a huge variety in the selection of minors and course groupings across faculties.

USA St. John’s University, New York

On November 11, 1998, a protocol of intentions was signed between St. John’s University, New York and UCB aiming at promoting cooperation, cultural and scientific exchange between the institutions, in the areas of liberal arts, business, law, and education. To implement the Protocol. As a result of this collaboration, a series of working programs and activities were developed both in Brazil and in New York, with an active and intense involvement of graduate students, scholars and inter-cultural experts, based on financial resources obtained from government and private sources. That was a start-up in international cooperation. UCB had the firm purpose of involving its professors in research as a core activity than only maintaining them in teaching activities. Teaching is heavily dependent on the central governments, and parameters for the accreditation of courses are strictly evaluated by the Ministry of Education, which only recently accepted the inclusion of international activities in undergraduate curricula (Laus and Morosini, 2005, p. 116). Internships were provided, research programs, and full programs in New York. International conferences and seminars were scheduled, with visiting researchers and scholars coming to UCB and being involved into academic


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activities on campus. Courses and training offered in the 1990’s were recognized by the Brazilian government, as a dynamic way to foster collaboration and research productivity. The international cooperation with St. John’s University, opening doors to new contacts, joint curriculum development, research, e-learning platforms, and a diversification of new international universities were added to the institutional agenda.

Canada Canadian universities and colleges have also approached UCB for partnership. Principals and Deans travelled to Brazil to introduce their universities and propose institutional agreements aiming the exchange of scholars and students. Several faculties were invited to meet the Canadian representatives under the auspices of the Canadian Embassy in Brasilia. Since 2005, the School of Education has been working actively with the Canadian universities in a consortium of universities named CALDO: University of Calgary, University of Alberta, University of Laval, Dalhousie University, University of Ottawa, Queens University, University of Saskatchewan, Western University, and University of Waterloo. The students who receive financing from the Brazilian government are introduced to 160 research centers, 85 institutes, and 6,000 renowned professors in charge of more than 500 research projects in Canada. CALDO is a leader in financing researches, and has more than 1 billion dollars from the private sector, and 20% of all governmental resources funds. Additionally, the Consortium has already signed more than 1,500 agreements with universities in all world and 13,000 international students (in 140,000 foreign students). This is a unique Consortium in Canada, with a wide scope and oriented to students and higher education institutions3. Besides those, activities and exchange of professors and students have been established with Universities of Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and Ontario. The Law Program signed in 2006 an agreement with Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the exchange of scholars has been launched, but the exchange of students has not yet occurred. During the month of June 2015, we participated of a Lusophone Conference at SMU, sharing knowledge 3

Science without Borders. Access at: http://www.cienciasemfronteiras.gov.br/web/csf/caldo, 27 July 2015.


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with a group of Brazilian professors, who lectured and exposed their project researches, and experience as visiting scholars in Canada. We attended an official meeting of the Lusophone Studies Association (LSA), and were accepted as a Member of the Academic Board, of this important research association, involving developing engagement with the network of currently visiting professors in Canada and with a large number of former scholars interested in discussing and sharing their views, their experience in different Canadian universities, facilitating events and projects to consolidate and strengthen the network. New projects have already been identified in Canada to foster the next partnerships and development cooperation with the Schulich School of Law, and the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. Both programs are considered as the best in their area in Nova Scotia. The foreseen agreements will bring new joint research projects, training and teaching in dual degrees and exchange of scholars and students. These exchanges will also lead to transfer of ideas into local economies in Brazil and in Canada.

The Republic of China — Taiwan Fu Jen Catholic University of Taipei, R.O.C.

A MOU with the Fu Jen Catholic University of Taipei, was signed by UCB’s principal, and on attending a one-month graduate course at the Fu Hsing Kang Academy on National Development, in January 2003, at the invitation of Ministry for Foreign Affairs, this researcher personally contacted the university, scheduled an official visit, met some professors in Taipei, and invited them to revitalize the signed agreement to exchange faculty and researchers for the purpose of teaching, study and academic research. Additional contacts were made and a new agreement was signed with the National Opening University of Taipei, with the exchange of scholars.

Other University Agreements On evaluating the internationalization of UCB, an important remark comes to the fore, since the process had already started, Principal Father Décio Batista Teixeira continually motivated his professors to get involved, applying for sandwich master’s programs and doctorate courses at the University of Co-


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imbra, University of Porto, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Salamanca (Liguori; Bijos; Barenco, 2003). The University of Coimbra, Portugal was a key contact for the Law Program, as an example of institutional diversification. The Faculty of Law has been at the forefront of the political, ideological and economic events that formed the history of Portugal and prepared a background of the consciousness of its citizens over the past two centuries. Due to its excellence high education standards, which are guaranteed by the quality of the faculty teaching staff, as well as personalized teaching and supervised study in a combination of tradition and innovation, the Catholic University of Brasilia signed an agreement opened to scholars and graduates. The importance of the agreement was translated into a dynamic exchange of specialists coming to Brasilia as visiting professors, interacting with the Brazilian legal specialists, in summer courses, in Criminal Law, Public International Law and European Organizations, Constitutional Law. These exchange courses, and international conferences were held in partnership with the two institutions, with more than twelve scholars lecturing in those events, as well as in a substantive number of articles published in European indexed scientific journals in the period 1999–2016. This international cooperation/development agenda, has provided a bridge to advancing knowledge as a result of collaboration. In five years UCB had provided financial resources for more than ten scholars attending Doctorate courses either at the University of Coimbra, Porto, Complutense de Madrid, Salamanca, and University of la Coruña, Spain. Scholars were also benefitted with additional financial resources from the Brazilian government. Presently actions are very active at the Law Program sending undergraduate students for a one-year course in those universities, besides some short programs at University of Salamanca, in the area of European Community Law and Juridical Spanish Course, as intensive programs, during forty-five days, with internal visits and lectures. Interviews have been done with Professor Júlio Edstron who is coordinating these programs and have taken more than forty-five lawyers to these exchange training. On their return to Brazil, the knowledge is fundamental for the achievement of higher degrees as public servants, or on applying for a Public Prosecutor Office at the federal level (Ministério Público da União) and state level. The exchange of professors is under way and several scholars are constantly going to the UCB for international lecturers, either from Portugal or from Spain.


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University of London; and University of Canterbury, the United Kingdom The importance of partnerships, networks, the coordination of international conferences, as well as the growth in the number of articles published in international indexed scientific journals have been evaluated by CAPES and incorporated by the Ministry of Education, which motivate the academic institution to look for new programs and sign international agreements of reciprocity or equivalence. These efforts have resulted in signed MOUs with the University of London, the Canterbury University, in UK, as well as with the prestigious Chevening Scholarship Program. Some students of International Relations have been selected to study in UK for a year, and receive special attention from the British Embassy in Brazil, accompanying their career, and following-up their insertion in the formal sector of the economy. Most of the students on returning to Brazil share their expertise to the Brazilian government, United Nations specialized agencies, diplomatic representations, as well as Non-Governmental Agencies. The Psychology Program has achieved considered partnerships with European universities. Since 2012 the program has advanced significantly in its internationalization process, with exchanges of teachers and students from four other countries (USA, France, Germany and England). Scholars from the permanent staff have been participating in the international debate through the development of research projects, teaching courses, participating in symposiums, conferences and other scientific events. Continuing this process, in 2015, the Psychology Program received the final acceptance in relation to the special issue of the International Journal of Migration Health and Social Care, not yet published, which is dedicated to the works of Brazilian researchers on migration and mental health in Brazil, including also other partners in the international NGO - Equity for Children. Part of this work is the result of the survey entitled “Immigrant Religiosity: Symptom or Health? Research with mental health professionals”, coordinated by Prof. Marta Helena de Freitas. Emphasis should be put to exchanges with the University of Porto, which resulted in several integrated works. In addition, a post-doctoral teacher Maria Alexina Ribeiro had the opportunity of spending 2015 at the University of Porto. Additionally, Professor Claudia Cristina Fukuda has also been accepted for a post-doctoral stage during 2016, as a result of a joint project, approved by Universal CNPq Notice, as well as in the establishment of mutual cooperation


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agreement between UCB and CEPESE – Population Studies Center, Economy and Society (Porto, Portugal). In the short term the program foresees the expansion of partnerships with European and South American universities, and medium and long term, the expansion of cooperation with Central American and African countries. In this sense, in 2015, was continued this process with Latin America through the proposed partnership with the University of Del Salvador (Universidad del Salvador) – (USAL) in Buenos Aires, as an egress of the UCB program, Gabriel Arthur Marra, was hired as a teacher in this institution after the completion of his doctorate. The presence of an egress in the teaching staff of a Latin American HEI potentiates the expansion efforts of partnerships with neighboring countries.

Francophone International Cooperation Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

In a University that is heavily regulated by several religious orders, most actions are centralized, and the process of internationalization becomes the result of the actions of professors that go abroad, meet partners, strengthen friendship, as in the case of Belgium, and the MOU signed with the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). This international agreement/development provided the opportunity of fostering the exchange of five additional professors and five graduate students, as well as two administrative staff members, in the areas of teaching, research and culture. It was a very dynamic cooperation, but it stopped within two years, due to lack of financial support. University of Sorbonne — Paris I

In response to the priorities of the government, a concerted effort was effectively to strengthen the development cooperation with French institutions and scholars, especially at the Law Program, whose professors participate as members of research associations, and have been inserted into joint projects, publications and post-doctorate programs, at the University of Sorbonne — Paris I, Lyon, Montpellier, Nancy, and Strasbourg. In Strasbourg, the Summer Programme in International Public Law attracts a great number of scholars. Additionally, the Institute of Political Science in Grenoble (Institut des Études Politiques (IEP) — Sciences PO Grenoble), motivates a great number of Inter-


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national Relations students, who aims at entering at the Diplomatic career at Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Asian Partnerships Japan

Strategic alliances can be seen both as a driving rationale and as a means or instrument of internationalization. The international mobility of students and academics, as well as collaborative research and education initiatives, were seen as productive ways to develop closer geopolitical ties and economic relationships, specifically concerning the Genomics Graduate Program of UCB. The Dean of the Program signed a consortium agreement with five countries’ representatives, to train professionals to work with DNA and genomes, especially through the application of bioinformatics. Besides UCB, a joint research was established with the University of Brasilia (UnB), the Brazilian Research Agency on Agriculture (EMBRAPA), Ministry of Agriculture, CNPq, and biotechnology research centers in the Center-West of Brazil to increase plant adaptation to low P levels in acid soils concerning maize and sorghum (Alves et al., 2001). Academic and biogenetics specialists were contacted in Japan, in a bilateral development agreement. Japanese experts have been sent to Brazil to analyze the savanna soil, and adapt it to soya plantation. The development of new international and regional trade agreements (Knight 2002; Sauve 2002) in Biotechnology were signed with the universities of Tsukuba, Nagoya, Sofia, and Tokyo. It was an attempt to export soya to Japan, as well as to produce new beans and maize species, especially at the endeavor of the Biotechnology Dean, who got the approval of jointly projects implemented under the auspices of EMBRAPA, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Agriculture, and CNPq, indicating an extraordinary geographical movement of more than fifty professors and students in exchange plans, fostering advanced research in agriculture in Brazil. The Biotechnology program has been evaluated as an excellence course in the area. It really made students ready for the global market as emphasized by Arkadani et. al. (2011, p. 1693). Collaboration was strengthened through the exchange of professors and students, as well as joint courses at the Catholic University, and also through joint research papers published in renowned journals.


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Travelling and studying in Asia is a challenge for Brazilian citizens, due to language difficulties, various cultures, and the philosophical spirit of Buddhism, Islamism, and Xintoism, which requires a multi-cultural harmony. However, recent contacts were also made with ASEAN countries (Thailand, Philippines, East Timor, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar), and conferences were organized aiming at sharing information about the countries and the possibility of academic cooperation. Distance education through new media may provide a suitable alternative; it may also mean the final commodification of teaching, submitted to market conditions, as emphasized by Marcovitch (2001, p. 11). In this context, UCB has launched a series of long distance courses for under-graduate students in Tokyo, Nagoya, Hamamatsu, and Kyoto, to benefit the “Nippo” Brazilian students; as well as some specialization courses in the areas of Administration, Foreign Trade, and Accountability with great success, benefitting more than 400 students. On working as a research professor at the Tsukuba University, under the Japan Foundation Program, analyzing the ethnic and social discrimination of “Nippo” Brazilian workers in Japan (2010), the author had the opportunity of interviewing Brazilian students and laborers in several regions of Japan, evaluating the benefits of the Catholic University distance courses in their professional careers. Upon the successful results of those long distance courses, new countries were benefitted with this technological strategy, in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador in South America, and in Mozambique, Africa. Administrative reports show that more than 1,600 students have attended and concluded the courses. Presently, the University is mature enough to adapt its courses to a new generation of students looking for the insertion into the formal economic system. Emphasis is put to the Law Program that is offering disciplines in English, French and Spanish, to prepare students for top level careers as civil servants in Brazil or in the international labor market. South Korea

The Embassy of South Korea has approached UCB to offer the possibility of sending undergraduate students for an exchange program. The students were selected for a three week program, granted to 45 students all over the world. It was a peculiar extraordinary experience for the Brazilian students to travel to Korea, visiting the Hansung University, in Seoul, being acquainted


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with the language, cultural values and history. Some additional academic exchanges have already been processed in the last ten years, and the students return motivated to apply for graduate and doctorate courses in that country, being also hired by the international agencies due to their high level educational and professional profile. Funding allocation and distribution for the university is very uneven throughout the world. Marcovitch questions, “How can the university convince the nation to fund its activities at levels appropriate to conduct basic research and teaching and to provide the community with the social and scientific knowledge needed for a better society?” (Marcovitch, 2001, p. 11). Brazil is funding fellowships, scientific visits through CAPES, CNPq and State Research Foundation of Distrito Federal (Fundação de Apoio a Pesquisa no Distrito Federal (FAPDF), so that professors can share their researches and attend international conferences abroad, besides funding jointly research projects and activities. Professors are encouraged to associate to research groups abroad and share social analysis comparing countries diversities and bringing back to Brazil relevant aspects for the Brazilian authorities in the development of the specified area, with solutions for social inclusion, science and technology, new methodologies, environmental management, among others. The following section describes UCB South-South Cooperation in a historical context.

UCB South-South Cooperation China

In what concerns to China, some professors, researchers and students have enjoyed the fruitful experience at the Jinan University, the Popular Republic of China, the National University of Taipei, Taiwan. More than five professors of the Catholic University of Brasilia, from different courses, have been invited to one-month course in Taipei, and to stay there for one year as Visiting Scholars. As a result of this experience, international conferences with the participating of Chinese lecturers have been held, at the Master’s Degree in Law, International Relations and Political Science courses. Important jointly publications have already been published by professors of the Master’s Degree in Law, especially Professor Wilson Almeida, who is a Visiting Professor at the National University of Taipei, working extensively on research productivity about China. I have


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also been invited to attend a course on National Development at Fu Hsing Kang Academy, Peitou, Taipei, staying a month interacting with scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean, resulting in publications about China and final dissertations at the Master’s Degree in Law. Some students have already been granted with fellowships in the Republic of China — Taiwan, and on organizing bilateral cooperation missions. During the month of July 2016, my student Patricia Caldas and I participated of the XXV National Congress on Law at the University of Brasilia, lecturing about “Brazil and China: a brief analysis of a synergistic partnership”. The paper reviews the historical events that have marked and still mark the Sino-Brazilian relations. It highlights the development of diplomatic and trade relations between Brazil and China, focusing also on the influence of globalization for the strengthening of international relations. In this analysis the authors analyzed the theoretical perspectives and their contributions in the last twenty years, as well as contemporary data and information from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidential Palace. The analysis shows an important accomplishment in terms of research productivity. India

In India, an exotic and mysterious country, the University of Hyderabad is one main contact. A signed MOU has allowed some professors to exchange knowledge with Professor Reka Pande, the Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies, on social and political conditions of women in the country, as well as analyzing trafficking of persons, who lectured in Brasilia, met professors from the Faculty of Psychology and Gerontology, who later on submitted their papers to a Women’s Congress in Hyderabad in 2014 sharing their Brazilian experience and assimilating the Indian’s visions and expectations.

Latin American and the Caribbean Countries Cuba

According to Professor De Liguori, the Principal Father Décio Batista Teixeira, Professor Romualdo Degásperi, Vice-Rector, Professor Debora Nanquini, Dean of the Education Program, and advisers were invited to visit universities in Cuba in 19994. As a result of official visits some agreements were signed 4

The information presented comes from personal interviews with key UCB faculty and staff.


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with Universidad de Ciego de Avila (UNICA), on March 17, 1999. The protocol intended to work on Environmental Technologies, Hydrological Resources and Environmental Education, for Graduate Students. Research projects between the two institutions were implemented aiming at the management of water, the use and preservation of hydrographical river basins, limnology, with the exchange of professors, the organization of joint seminars, publications, and the involvement of social communities. In what concerns the management of water research productivity has shown a great quantity of papers between Brazilian scholars and Cuban specialists highlighting the construction of large reservoirs in South American, and especially in Brazil which has intensified in the last fifty years. Built up as hydroelectricity production, these artificial ecosystems now serve purposes as water storage for public use, fisheries and aquaculture; recreation; tourism and irrigation. These artificial ecosystems were also built up in a bilateral cooperation with the purpose of enhancing the regional development. The collaboration includes the preservation of hydrographical river basins in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru (south bank); Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, French Guiana, Guiana, Surinam (north bank), totaling 12 hydrographic regions that have a sound climate cooperation, without any conflicts (National Water Agency - ANA, 2012). The specialists on management of water, hydrological resources and environment education, established joint collaboration and research productivity in limnology with specific analysis on the major impediments to the integration of lentic ecosystems in Brazil and Cuba (Tundisi; Scheuenstuhl, 2011). The scholars started using new data sources on the distribution of lakes, ponds, and impoundments, aiming at enhancing spatial resolution, and new analytical approaches to provide new estimates of the Brazilian abundance of surface-water bodies. Researches were conducted both in Brazil and in Cuba, with the participation of graduate students, which proved to be very important in the internalization, collaboration and research productivity. Additional MOUs were signed with Universidad de La Habana (June 1999), aiming at joint research in the environmental area, economic studies, human health, computer, medicine, biotechnology and food, as well as with Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverria (ISPJAE), in La Habana (1999); the University of Matanzas “Camilo Cienfuegos” (UMCC), in the area of biochemical engineering, biotechnology, the quality of water, environmental education and tourism. The internationalization of curriculum provided


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a means with UCB professors and students to develop their international skills and attitudes, practicing Spanish, learning new agricultural and environmental techniques. In this context, at least ten professors and some forty students were benefitted, besides the exchange of visiting Cuban scholars, who were in charge of coordinating courses to undergraduate students in Accountability, Economics, Administration, Environmental Protection, and Agricultural Techniques. Some political and bureaucratic problems interrupted the cooperation two years later. South American Agreements: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela

In South America, UCB has also signed an agreement with the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, benefitting Law students interested in regional integration, the actions of the Parliament of Mercosur (Parlasur, 2015) concerning new strategies for policy with the neighbor countries, on migration, drugs, human rights and co-development policies. One specific example was with Universidad Mayor de San Simón (UMSS), Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the area of management of water, environment, health, nuclear medicine. Emphasis should be put on the management of water, once the priority in the bilateral relations Brazil — Bolivia comprises energy cooperation. Brazil grants geostrategic importance to its relations with Bolivia, as it is a country with which it shares its longest border (3,423 km) and the presence in both the Amazon and the Plata Basins, where is the destiny of professors and graduate students in the area of environment. Important joint courses and research papers have been conducted in the last two decades between the two universities, consolidated by the Brazilian Roboré Agreement, which was signed in 1958, aiming at the building of a gas pipeline in 1972 (Foreign Affairs, 2016). In the 1980’s Brazil and Bolivia strengthened its Agreement on Cooperation and Industrial Complementation, allowing Brazil to purchase natural gas and set up projects in the area of water management, which benefitted the exchange of academic scholars. This collaboration created new opportunities for the economic insertion of Bolivia in Mercosur, highlighting its importance in terms of cultural, social, and political environment. Presently, graduate students and advisers have been analyzing the political and economic scenario in the countries which are the official members of Mercosur: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela. Missions and field


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researches have been scheduled to these countries, articles and dissertations have been prepared, and published. Argentina for years has been the primary destiny of researchers in South America, for the excellence of its institutions, and the scope of jointly projects. Notwithstanding, the country has also been analyzed by the political contentious with the British Government and the Falkland Islands, motivating scientific visits and researches. A MOU was also signed with Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), in Ecuador, its Principal Father Romero visited UCB (2010), lectured in an international seminar organized by the International Relations course, and invited faculty members and students to visit the university. Initially, three missions were organized and it resulted in financing subsidies for both professors as well as undergraduate students. Researches were underway and an official mission scheduled to Brasilia, so that professors and students could continue the previous contacts established in Loja. The academic cooperation benefitted more than fifty academics and students, enriching their curricula with an extraordinary experience of South-South Cooperation, in a rich and multicultural country as Ecuador. On the other hand, Venezuela has been on the fore due to contemporary political, economic and social scenario of the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. Visits have been scheduled and research institutions were contacted, professors were interviewed to subsidy Master’s thesis of in Law. Institutions as Asociación Venezolana para el Avance de la Ciencia — ASOVAC, Universidad Central de Venezuela (Central University of Venezuela), Universidad Simón Bolívar, Universidad Andrés Bello and Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana have been visited. Additionally, during the second semester of 2014, more than fifty students’ members of Mercosur universities attended an international conference organized by the International Relations course, which resulted in jointly researches, published articles, and final monographs, with the enrichment of scientific and technological knowledge, as stated by the Brazilian government. Several students of the Master’s Degree in Law are analyzing Venezuela during the government of Hugo Chávez and the transition to Nicolás Maduro, presenting their papers in a collaborative way in different universities in Caracas, which has resulted in research collaboration. Denis Cavalcante, for instance, under my advice, analyzed the consequences of Venezuela’s foreign and domestic policies


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during President Hugo Chávez, with in situ visits. The institutional visits were relevant for the partnerships between the universities, aiming at new future cooperation in a near future.

Conclusions The experiences from the cases analyzed in this chapter are important to pave some new steps in terms of advanced collaboration between the Catholic University of Brasilia and higher educational institutions abroad. It is relevant to acknowledge the task of internalization with different countries, educational systems, research institutions and providers should be characterized by values, priorities, and actions that provide new opportunities for scholars and students aiming at strengthening the international dimension of higher education. Effectively, internationalization means a great variety of activities, to provide collaboration, research productivity, institutional linkages and networks, the development of joint projects, new partners, which include academic standards, cultural diversity, as well as student and staff development. The international scenario for this cooperation is integrated into the teaching, the learning, service functions, of course challenges are posed due to the differences in language, curriculum and academic programs, and geographical distances. Notwithstanding, the purpose of these frameworks is to insert the institution in a dynamic intercultural dimension in higher education. Alternative policies to advance collaboration should come from the country’s goals and priorities, both domestically and internationally, including education, foreign affairs, science technology, culture, and trade. In summary, governmental institutions should work together with academic research centers offering new opportunities, strategic alliances, new forms of intra- and interregional higher education programs, especially mobility initiatives. As main conclusions, it is important to highlight that the internationalization of higher education is an important path in a globalized era. Schools should be revitalized and the curriculum inserted into an advanced training concept, to fit the standard levels of higher educational institutions in developed countries in the OECD countries, the United States of America, Asia, South America and the Caribbean countries. The achievement of this main objective will qualify Brazil as a unique international leader in Latin America, of being both a “developing nation” that seeks to benefit from the experience of others and as an “assistance providing”


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nation that seeks to share its own experience with other developing countries that may be able to benefit in turn. To achieve this objective, the government needs to suppress the high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality in the country. Aiming at strengthening its democratic institutions, Brazil should count with dynamic partnerships in a context of North-South and South-South Cooperation, through economic, political, and educational institutions. Brazil has to step forward and consolidate reforms in education, income tax, health, social security, eliminating corruption and promoting accountability. Through solid democratic foundations the country will be able to attract foreign investors and consolidate its policies and programs targeted to the internationalization process. An updated national and international cooperation/ development agenda will influence the types of international higher education/ research collaborations being implemented in the country. Education should be understood as the most effective way to stimulate the cultural awareness of the individual, starting by recognizing the ways to strengthen scientific and technological knowledge. This driving force for national development will modify institutions and bring them in line with progress in a contemporary world in order to provide global training for their graduates, and those that try to add value to the product they offer in the higher educational market (Laus & Morosini, 2005, p. 111). A regular integrated system of information must be created and maintained to store and deliver data concerning the internalization of each program in all Brazilian institutions of higher. The national and international community must be aware of the importance of the actions (international mobility, joint research, foreign visiting professors, events, publications), as well as release the university policies between the high level administration and its units. All memoranda of understanding should be formally approved to avoid any weakness in the process. All universities are facing a new scenario of interdisciplinary programs opening its doors to foreign scholars and students. Keeping this as a core project for the Catholic University of Brasilia and for Brazil, it will reduce inequalities; insert citizens in the formal sector of the economy, offering better living conditions for the population, especially for a new vibrant young generation. Focusing on the Catholic University of Brasilia, all faculties are being opened to international experiences. As main example, the Faculty of Biotechnology, Education, Psychology (Master’s and Doctorate programs), and


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the School of Humanities. Emphasis is put on the Law Program that has been awarded with five evaluation grades by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and its coordination agency (CAPES)5. To maintain a 5 grade or award a higher level, each course must focus on the exchanging of professors in foreign institutions (post-doctorate), increasing the number of joint projects and high quality international publications. When the programs are highly evaluated, the internationalization should be consolidated, in a virtuous circle: international insertion (publications), which will receive the national and international recognition; the exchange of knowledge will have a bigger and important balance between Brazilian and foreign researchers. CAPES maintain the grade and improve it accordingly, as well as offering financing resources for the improvement of internationalization actions. In summary, these are values, norms and established criteria established by CAPES, which represents an upgrade of the programs and has a normal continuity. New perspectives show an increased demand for international education that results in student mobility, which depend on governmental policies, consolidation of new providers, professional associations and international conglomerates. Conventional higher education institutions will have to use faceto-face and virtual modes, besides commercial international technologies and innovation, which may cause a great impact in delivering education to students either in Brazil or South America countries, through twinning, franchising, articulation, validation and joint or double degree arrangements. Traditional internalization will be replaced by new initiatives, study-abroad experiences, curriculum enrichment and especially strategic alliances of the higher education institution.

5

CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) is a Foundation within the Ministry of Education in Brazil whose central purpose is to coordinate efforts to improve the quality of Brazil’s faculty and staff in higher education through grant programs. CAPES is particularly concerned with the training of Doctoral candidates, Pre-doctoral short-term researchers, and Post-doctoral Scholars.


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References: Book sources Air, L., (2006), The Internationalization of higher education: Motivations and realities 1992. The NEA Almance of Higher Education. American Association of Community Colleges & Association of Community College Trustees, Building the global community: Joint statement on the role of community colleges in international education. Alves, V. M. C., Parentoni, S. N., Vasconcellos, C. A., Bahia Filho, A. F. C., Pitta, G. V. E. & Schafertt, R. E., (2001), Mechanisms of phosphorus efficiency in maize. In: W. J. Horst et al. (eds.), Plant Nutrition, Food Security and Sustainability of Agro-System, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Arkadani, F. B., Yarmohammadian, M. H., Abari, A. A. F. & Fathi, K., (2011), Internationalization of higher education systems, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 15, pp. 1690–1695. Baldauf, Jr., Richard, B., Kaplan, R. B., (2014), Language Planning and Policy in Latin America, Vol. 1, Cleveland, Multilingual Matters Ltd, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay. Bijos, L., (2013a), Mulheres Sul-Americanas: o presente mais que imperfeito (South-American Women: a presente more than imperfect), EdUCB, Brasília. Bijos, L., (2013b), A Violência no Distrito Federal: Desafio para os Educadores (Violence in the Federal District: a challenge to the educators). In: G. Caliman, (org.), Violências e Direitos Humanos: espaço da educação (Violences and Human Rights: space for education), Catédra UNESCO de Juventude, Educação e Sociedade, Uni Twin, Universidade Católica de Brasília, Liber Livro, Brasília, pp. 93–107. Bijos, L., (2010), Discriminação Étnica-Racial: “Nippo” Brasileiros No Japão (Racial-Ethnic Discrimination: “Nippo” Brazilians In Japan), Editora Universa, Brasília. Bijos, L., (2001), A Tempestade ou o Pesadelo da Globalização (The Tempest or the Nighmare of Globalization), Texto para Discussão N° 2, Série Relações Internacionais, Editora Universa, Brasília. Brasil. Ministério das Relações Exteriores 2008. Secretaria de Planejamento Diplomático. Brazilian Foreign Policy Handbook / Brazilian Ministry of External Relations, Bureau of Diplomatic Planning. Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, Brasília. Campos, Oliven, A., (2002), A história da educação superior no Brasil. In: S. Soares (ed.), Educação Superior no Brasil, CAPES, Brasília. Castro, J. de, (1996), Geopolitics of Hunger. Recife: Companhia Editora de Pernambuco, 3rd Commemorative Edition of the 50th anniversary of the first edition.


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Chacon, V., (2006), Brasilidade: Comunidade de Destino (Brazilianity: Destination Community). In: T. Mullholland and D. Faria (eds.), Brasil em Questão: a Universidade e o futuro do país, Editora Universidade de Brasília, Brasília. Diniz, E., (2003), Realismo, institucionalismo liberal e a inserção internacional do Brasil: uma agenda de pesquisa empirica. In: P.L. Esteves (ed.), Instituições Internacionais: segurança, comércio e integração, PUC Minas, Belo Horizonte. Draibe, S. M., (2002), Brasil: a proteção social após vinte anos de experimentação reformista. Documento apresentado no Taller Inter-Regional “Protección Social em uma Era insegura: Um Intercambio Sur-Sur sobre Políticas Sociales Alternativas en Respuesta a la Globalización”, Mayo, Santiago 2001, Chile. Freyre, G., (1998), Casa-Grande & Senzala, 34ª edição, Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro. Freire-Dowbor, F., (2000), Paulo Freire, a precursor, “Brazil”, Ministry of Foreign Relations, Brasília, Vol. 7/ 2000, pp. 16–17. Furtado, C., (1992), Brasil: a construção interrompida, Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro. Furtado, C., (1983), Não à recessão e ao desemprego, Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro. Jaguaribe, H., (2009), Brazil, the World and Man Today, Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão, Brasilia. Keohane, R., (1969), Lilliputian’s dilemmas: small States in international politics, “International Organization”, Vol. 23/2/1969. Knight, J., (2005), An Internationalization Model: Responding to New Realities and Challenges. The World Bank. In: H. De Wit, I.C. Jaramillo, J. Gacel-Ávila and J. Knight (eds.), Higher Education in Latin America: The International Dimension, Library of the Congress, Washington. Knight, J., (1994), Internationalization: Elements and Checkpoints, Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE), Nº 7, Ottawa. Lampreia, L. F., (2000), Education for human and social development in Brazil, Ministry of Foreign Relations, “Brazil”, Vol. 7/2000, pp. 57. Laus, S. P., Morosini, M. C., (2005), Higher Education in Latin America: The International Dimension. In: H. De Wit, I. C. Jaramillo, J. Gacel-Ávila and J. Knight (eds.), The World Bank, Library of the Congress, Washington. Leite, P. S., (2011), O Brasil e a Cooperação Sul-Sul em três momentos de Política Externa: os Governos Jânio Quadros/João Goulart, Ernesto Geisel e Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão, Brasilia. Liguori, A., Bijos, L. & Barenco, C. J., (2003), Acordos Internacionais: Projeto de Internacionalização da Universidade (Eng. International Cooperation Agreements: the University Internationalization Project). Pró-Reitoria de Extensão (PROEX), Diretoria de Programas Interinstitucionais (DPI), Brasília. Lima, M. R., (2009), Brazil rising: the country’s new status means reconciling divergent interests with the North, the South, and its neighbors, “IP Journal”. Marcovitch, J., (2001), The University of the 21st Century: International Forum of the Rectors at Universidade de São Paulo (Willi Bolle, Lorena Sales dos Santos), Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.


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OECD, (2015), Signing of cooperation agreement between the OECD and Brazil. Oliveira, H. A., de, (2005), Política Externa Brasileira (Brazilian Foreign Policy), Editora Saraiva, São Paulo. Miura, I. K., (2009), O Processo de Internacionalização da Universidade de São Paulo: Um Estudo em Três Áreas de Conhecimento, “XXXIII Encontro da ANPAD, 19 a 23 de setembro”. Ortiz, R., (1994), Mundialização da Cultura, Brasiliense, Campinas, SP. Nye Jr., J. S., (2003), The Paradox of American Power — Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York. Posthuma, A. C., (1999), Transformações do Emprego no Brasil na Década de 90, “OIT — Brasil — Abertura e ajuste do mercado de trabalho no Brasil”, Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego, Brasília: OIT e Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego, Oxford University Press, São Paulo. Rocha, A. J., (2002), Relações internacionais: teorias e agendas, IBRI, Brasília. Saraiva, J. F. S., (2001), CPLP: Plataforma para uma frutífura concertação político-diplomática. In: J.F.S. Saraiva (ed.), Comunidade dos países de língua portuguesa (CPLP): solidariedade e ação política, IBRI, Brasília. Síveres, L., (2015), Encontros e diálogos: pedagogia da presença, proximidade e partida, Liber Livro, Brasília. Slaughter, A.-M., (2011), International Relations, Principal Theories, Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law. Smith, P. H., Troutner, J. L. and Hünefeldt, C., (2003), Promises of Empowerment: Women in Asia and Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, USA. Soderqvist, M., (2002), Internationalization and Its Management at Higher Education Institutions: Applying Conceptual, Content and Discourse Analysis, Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki. Souza, P. R., (2000), More equality in education, Ministry of Foreign Relations, “Brazil”, Vol. 7/2000, pp. 9–11. The World Bank, (2005). In: H. De Wit, I. C. Jaramillo, J. Gacel-Ávila and J. Knight (eds.), Higher Education in Latin America: The International Dimension, D.C.: Library of the Congress, Washington. The World Bank 2005. Higher Education in Latin America: The International Dimension. (Editors Hans De Wit, Isabel Christina Jaramillo, Jocelyne Gacel-Ávila, and Jane Knight), D.C.: Library of the Congress, Washington. Tobbell, J., (2000), The oppressive curriculum: viewing the national curriculum through the Freirean lens, “Annual Review of Critical Psychology”, Manchester Metropolitan University, Vol. 2/2000, pp. 204–205. Trindade, J. C., (2001), UniversidadeEstadualPaulista. In: W. Bolle and L. Sales dos Santos (eds.), The University of the 21st Century: International Forum of the Rectors at Universidade de São Paulo, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.


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UNOSSC. United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation 2014. South-South Cooperation Offers a Path to a New Global Partnership for Sustainable Development. Access: South-South Cooperation Offers a Path to a New Global Partnership for Sustainable Development / October 9, 2015. Wachter, B., (2003), An Introduction: Internationalization at Home in Context, “Journal of Studies in International Education”, Vol., 7/1/2003, pp. 5–11. World Bank, (2005), Central American Education Strategy: An Agenda for Action, World Bank, DC, Washington. Zaglul, J. & Sherrard, D., (2005), Higher Education in Economic Transformation. In: C. Juma (ed.), Going for Growth: Science, Technology and Innovation in Africa, The Smith Institute, London. Web sources [1] ANA – National Water Agency, (2012), Brazil and Transboundary River Basin Management, Ministry of Environment. Paper presented by Minister Ney Maranhão, Marseille, March 2012, [http://www.worldwaterforum6.org/], accessed: 14.07. 2016. [2] Brasil. Ministério das Relações Exteriores 2016. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Plurinational State of Bolivia, [http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/en/ficha-pais/5978-plurinational-state-of-bolivia], accessed: 14.07.2016. [3] Brazilian Cooperation Agency (Agência Brasileira de Cooperação – ABC) 2015, Brasilia: Ministry for Foreign Affairs, [http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/], accessed: 09.10.2015. [4] Dascal, M., (2010), Colonizing and Decolonizing Minds. Tel Aviv University, [www. tau.ac.il/.../Colonizing%20and%20decolonizin], accessed: 19.10. 2015. [5] Data—World development indicators, (2012a), DC: World Bank, Washington, [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator- online], accessed: 20.01.2013. [6] EXAME, (2015), Revista Exame Abril, [http://exame.abril.com.br/carreira/noticias/ as-100-melhores-universidades-da-america-latina], accessed: 11.07.2016. [7] IBGE, (2015), Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). População (Population). Projeção da População do Brasil e das Unidades da Federação (Projection of Brazil and Federative Units Population), [http://www.ibge.gov.br/apps/populacao/projecao/], accessed: 20.10. 2015. [8] Ministerio Publico Federal, (2015), Brazilian Prosecution Service, [http://www. prsp.mpf. mp.br/versao-ingles], accessed: 16.10.2016. [9] OECD, (2015), Active with Brazil. OECD Publishing, Paris, [http://www.oecd.org/ brazil/ Brazil%20brochureWEB.pdf]. [10] OECD, (2015), Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris. [http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/annualreports/oecd/index.asp]. [11] Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), (2011), Lat-


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in American Economic Outlook 2012: Transforming the State for Development, OECD Publishing Paris, [http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/leo-2012-en], accessed: 20.01.2013. [12] OECD, (2012), OECD Family Database, OECD, Paris, [http://www.oecd.org/social/ family/database], accessed: 20.01.2013. [13] Parlamento Del Mercosur. Parlasur (Mercosur Parliament). Debate sobre la situación de los emigrantes del Mercosur (Debate on the situation of emigrants of Mercosur). Montevideo, Uruguay: Comision de Derechos Humanos y Ciudadania del Parlamento del MERCOSUR y la FAMISUR, 22 Marzo 2015, [http://parlamentodelmercosur.org/]. [14] Reimers, F., (2012), Revista Harvard Review of Latin America (Fall), “Innovating Universities”, [http://drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/ fall2012/inno vating-universities], accessed: 20.01.2013. [15] Rousseff, D., (2015), Discurso da Presidenta da Republica durante Compromisso Constitucional peante o Congresso Nacional (President Dilma Rousseff Official Speech at the National Congress), 01.01.2015, [http://www2.planalto. gov.br/ acompanhe-o-planalto/discursos/discursos-da-presidenta/discurso-da-presidenta-da-republica-dilma-rousseff-durante-compromisso-constitucional-perante-o-congresso-nacional-1], accessed: 07.13.2015. [16] Santos, R. de Freitas; Cerqueira, M. R., (2015), South-South Cooperation: Brazilian experiences in South America and Africa. Bioethics and Diplomacy in the Health Dossier – Analysis, [http://www.scielo.br.], accessed: 08.10.2015. [17] Student Guide, (2015), (Guia do Estudante 2015), [http://guiadoestudante.abril. com. br/blogs/melhores-faculdades/category/universidades-2/ranking-universidades/], accessed: 05.12.2015. [18] Tundisi, J. Galizia; Scheuenstuhl, M. Cortesão Barnsley, (2011), Water Policy in Brazil, [http://www.abc.org.br/IMG/pdf/doc-2011.pdf- online], accessed: 14.07.2016. [19] World Economic Forum 2015. The Future Role of Civil Society, World Scenario Series, January 2013, [http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_FutureRoleCivilSociety _Rep rt_2013.pdf], accessed: 19.07. 2015. [20] 2012b, Worldwide governance indicators. Government Effectiveness, DC: World Bank, Washington, [http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index. asp-online], accessed: 20.01.2013. [21] Zamorano, (2012), Explore Zamorano, [http://www.zamorano.edu/english/], accessed: 20.01.2013.


Marcelo Hernández Santos

Pedagogical equality: The radical version of socialist education in Mexico (1934–1938) Abstract: Radical orientations of socialist education are analyzed in this text. In Mexico, the version of Soviet socialism promoted by the presidential administration of then-President Lazaro Cardenas and known as Cardenismo was the responsibility of the Federal Directors of Education, who, loyal to the regime, aspired to concretize the ideas of scientific socialism with teachers and children. The text shows the radical discourse of socialist education implemented in the country, the concretion of which was based on the pedagogical work of schools and the civilizatorial aspirations of the Mexican government so that educational actors (students and teachers) would have equal relations (a society without classes) in the context of school work. The text closes with reflections on the need to continue exploring the socialist education’s possibilities in implementing a society without exploited people or exploiters in Mexico. The historical method is used in the text, which is based on the analysis of information gathered from training courses for rural teachers conducted in 1935. The historical event starts from the decisions made by federal supervisors in the context of the dispute between capitalism and communism and those made by the Catholic Church and the Mexican State in their struggle for control over education. The stories were drawn from the Historical Archive of the Ministry of Public Education/General Archive of the Nation (AHSEP/AGN). Keywords: Educational socialism, children and teachers, Federal Supervisors, primary schools, Cardenismo.


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Introduction: visions and versions of Cardena’s socialism Socialist education emerged as a state policy with the reform of Article Three of the Mexican Constitution in 1934. Previously, former President Plutarco Elias Calles, who still held sway over decisions made within the Mexican government, proclaimed the main objective of this ideological orientation in education with the “Grito de Guadalajara”: to tear “youth from the clutches of the clergy… The school is run by clerical and reactionary elements. The revolution has the essential duty to take hold of consciences… and to form a new national soul” (Raby, 1974, p. 40). The dispute with the clergy, the need for scientific education, and national unity through educational policy, were elements of debate and action that the Maximato group (period named after Plutarco Calles’ presidential administration, in which he was referred to as “el Jefe Maximo” or “Top Boss”) identified in 1934. The need to implement a government policy on a national scale was clear to Plutarco Calles, President of Mexico from 1924–1928, and later with Lazaro Cardenas (President of Mexico, 1934–1940). The problem was its concretion. The need to establish allies in the states was an urgent task of the regime, which did so successfully. According to (cf. Vaughan, 2000), building a new pact of loyalty between the government and people (the masses) progressed thanks to agreements with local governors and caciques, which included Avila Camacho in Puebla and Los Santos and Cedillo in San Luis Potosi. Particularly in education, the mechanics were similar: the General Directors of Education in the states, the Supervisors, and the teachers were all needed to transmit the entire educational policy. In that hierarchical order, socialist education’s political, civilizational, and pedagogical precepts were negotiated with the population1. The educational reform of 1934 established that education was of a socialist nature: Education imparted by the state will be socialist and, in addition to excluding all religious doctrine, will combat fanaticism and prejudice, for which reason the school will organize its teachings and activities in a way that allows youth to create a rational and exact concept of the universe and social life. The state alone will be responsible 1

Socialism in education seemed a contradiction because in reality the Cardenista government were moving towards the construction of a liberal/capitalist state. (cf. Hamilton 1983, p. 260) argues that Cardenas’ idea was to help the masses to address capitalism. Its main purpose was to eliminate “pre-capitalist and feudal structures establishing control of the economy”.

PEDAGOGICAL EQUALITY…

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for education; thus, the participation of the clergy in education at the primary, secondary, and normal school levels is prohibited. (Guevara, 1985, p. 63). The constitutional text devised in 1933 in the Six-year plan of government “was filled with phrases taken from Russian socialism” (Gonzalez, 2005, p. 170), and therefore it was imprecise because in fact other phrases were from the rationalist, liberal, and anti-liberal schools, educational projects that had been experienced in Mexico since the time of the armed Revolution (1910–1917). As expected, it underwent different interpretations and reactions throughout the country’s various organized groups. Without a doubt, the ecclesiastical sector was the most reluctant to accept the new text. Its reaction was logical because the educational reform placed it at the center of attack; it was the main enemy (“the participation of the clergy in education is forbidden”) and, from the point of view of the government, it was the main obstacle for the country to progress in all social orders, but mainly in the field of scientific understanding of society (“instill in youth a rational and accurate concept of the universe”). The Secretary of Education, Ignacio Garcia Tellez, responded to the Church by denying that the government promoted anticlericalism. He affirmed, “The socialist school does not impose dogmas of any kind… but seeks only the integration of a collective conscience that responds to a more just and humane moral”.2 Garcia Tellez wanted to qualify his rejection of the clergy. By saying that they sought collective integration, it was understandable that the Church did not enter into that strategy of promoting national identity. It wasn’t until 1938 that Cardenas was able to accept the participation of the clergy in education. The president of the Mexican Republic, given the rigmarole that was being provoked by the interpretations, wrote a text in the magazine edited by the Secretariat of Public Education, El maestro rural (The rural teacher), defining socialist education. It is unclear whether he wanted to calm the clergy’s spirits or wanted to provide the teachers with tools so that they could make better interpretations of the meaning of educational reform, so that in turn they would explain the ideological and practical scope of the constitutional reform to article three to other teachers and the people of the communities. Cárdenas defined socialist education in the following terms: Socialist education combats fanaticism, trains children for a better conception of their knowledge for collective life and prepares them for the 2

Revista El Maestro. Volume VI.


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social struggle in which they will participate when they are old enough to intervene as factors of production of economic production. (El maestro rural, 1935–1936). For the president of the republic, socialist education prepared children in science and social life in addition to combativity and to be generators, as workers, of the national wealth. In those terms, Cárdenas was a modernizer; he agreed, from the Grito de Guadalajara, with “seizing the national conscience.” Central to his clarification were his idea of science in education and the need for children to learn in schools. There was no defense of Marxism or socialism as a form of social organization in his speech. The fight against fanaticism and the scientific explanation of reality placed him not as a defender of Russian socialism, but rather as a liberal, populist, and modern promoter, who did not attack, but was not an outspoken defender of foreign ideas that were in vogue, like socialism. In the teaching sector there was also a debate on the new orientation of Article Three. From the viewpoint of the reformers, the aim was to propose an education “to deepen the scientific knowledge of the forms of exploitation of man over man and the methods of social struggle that would solve the problems of the rural environment and allow the organization of peasants” (Civera, 2008, p. 181). They followed Russian phrases. For many educators and for peasant society, 98% of whom were Catholic, these were “exotic” ideas (cf. Gonzalez, 2005, p. 15). Jose Santos Valdes, director of Regional Peasant Schools (schools which included boarding school and scholarships for children of peasants to be trained as rural teachers in the 1930s) and who had been a primary teacher and member of the Mexican Communist Party, in a booklet aimed at primary school teachers so that they could understand education Socialist, affirmed that this reform was not the first experiment and recalled all post-revolutionary education projects: “flashy experiments were made, looking for active schools, schools of work, schools of action.” From his perspective, in “Mexico teaching was always disoriented... our school always failed” (Valdes, 2005, p. 22). However, at this new conjuncture, as a communist, he believed that the contradictions of the capitalist regime could be better explained to teachers and achieve a society without exploited people. He believed that educational reform could be structured based on the principles of scientific socialism.


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Teachers, according to their political affiliation, understood socialist education. There were even those teachers who, due to their lack of militancy and higher education (most of them had barely finished elementary school, up to the fourth grade), did not differentiate between socialism and rationalism. They spoke of socialism more as an aspiration of social justice than as a philosophy of dialectical materialism with the possibility of concretion in a political and educational plan. It was understandable that many teachers who did not have solid knowledge in arithmetic, geography, or language, did not have any information about Karl Marx or socialist doctrine. (According to Quintanilla socialism had been discussed in Mexico since 1920.) That’s to say, most of the teachers were in a dilemma between “the demands of the vocation and the promotion of the political project” (Rockwell, 2003, p. 226). The school was the arena where this dispute was carried out. The consequences of this reform were undoubtedly paid by many rural communities and teachers, who came face to face with philias and phobias. Socialist education came to schools thanks to the Socialist Primary School Action Plan, a framework document of the reform, edited by the Socialist Orientation Institute. In this document the basic idea was to promote the socialized school, to ensure that the scholastic institution was not on the margin of life and society. Technical mastery of the pedagogical methods, still a part of the rationalist school (project methods, fields of interest), would help students and teachers to teach and learn for life (cf. Rockwell, 2003, p. 222). The precepts of the socialist school came to primary schools through the Federal Supervisors in the states and through the pedagogical cooperation courses that rural teachers took each week in 1935. Their orientation had nuances: it was radical, moderate, and non-existent. Some, who saw that it was a socialist education in a capitalist state, believed that it was education for the masses, removed from Marxist ideas and the real socialism of the Soviet Union. Other actors believed that pedagogical and power relations between students and teachers should radically change; they thought that there could be equality between students and teachers, emulating the communist regime that could be forthcoming. The idea of ending the exploitation “of man by man” and creating an egalitarian society was core to socialist doctrine, but how much was achieved in education? In this text I analyze the ways in which socialist education was spread to teachers and what means and actors made that possible. Being a state project,


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the most conspicuous figures to promote educational reform were those of the SEP’s (Mexico’s Ministry of Education) command apparatus, so it is important to observe how the differences in the appropriation of socialist ideas in education came about. According to the hierarchical chain of command, educational supervisors and general directors were directly responsible for promoting the educational reform among the teaching profession. For this reason, it is understandable that it was they, and not primary teachers, who understood socialist education as a Marxist political and scientific project and dialectical historical materia lism. In fact, the educational reform of 1934 was made up of several groups: the state, the Church, politicians and local politics vs national politics, the National Revolutionary Party, the Mexican Communist Party (the latter initially did not support it until afterwards under Cardenas) and educational supervisors and directors. The issue of socialist education is complex and has not been exhausted despite having been studied from many perspectives. It is clear that educational socialism was presented as a paradox, since the country was actually moving towards its consolidation as a capitalist liberal state. Perhaps this is why the National University of Mexico criticized the project as improvised, demagogic, statist, and technically inconsistent. Socialism as a way of life was possible for three quarters of humanity (cf. Hobsbawm, 2009), and Mexico could have opted for communism. Hamilton argues that this option may have been desirable for Mexico because of the economic strength of the USSR (cf. Hamilton, 1983). In this paper we will deal with those possibilities of concretion and the means that were created to educate and transmit formation and transmission that were created to ensure that socialist ideas, close to Marxism, would permeate the teaching sector in the context of an educational reform. Although the Mexican State formed cadres in socialism and raised innovative ideas in the field, scientific socialism in education was never possible. We have, instead, ideas, many revolutionary ideas that contribute to building a complex narrative of what was and could have been a state with a socialist education, ideals of equality, or struggle against capitalism. This text contributes to that narrative.


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Russian socialism for teachers The education reform of 1934 needed high and middle management within the Ministry of Public Education to spread the ideas closest to the spirit of the amendment to the Mexican Constitution’s third article. The cadres that were best trained in Marxist theory in turn trained other teachers in the ideas of educational reform. We know that many primary teachers were convinced of socialist education, but they did not necessarily have the theoretical arguments to assert and defend the position, which is why the General Inspectors of Education in the states and school-district supervisors were the closest collaborators of educational reform. The supervisors had watered down the socialist discourse through texts issued by the political parties and unions (PNR and PCM) and through their participation in Socialist Congresses organized by the Socialist Orientation Institute; they discussed the texts that were written about the Six-Year Plan of Government and the Socialist Primary School Action Plan. They read and wrote in the magazine El Maestro Rural and others. The other advantage they had was that they were militants of the Mexican Communist Party and thus mastered and believed in the discourse on the defense of socialist education. The supervisors brought socialist ideas to the teachers through training, either with courses in their school zones or in the Pedagogical Cooperation Centers that were usually taught by teachers of the ERC (Rural Peasant School). Because of the training these command figures held, “they had a more combative interpretation of socialism” (Rockwell, 2003, p. 224). The following location is a prime example of the influence on the figures. In 1935, rural schools in the Bimbaletas region of the Mexican state of Zacatecas were administered by the Federal Education Directorate in the state. This Directorate and the local ERC shared the “technical and administrative control of the rural schools of Bimbaletas, San Blas, Loreto, El Prieto, La Venta, Las Playas, Tierra Blanca, El Pastor, Juan Alberto.” Zacatecas is an illustrative case in terms of the political disputes created by the socialist political project at the local level. Salvador Varela was the Director of Education in Zacatecas and to achieve socialist education created The Union of Directors and Inspectors together with Tomas Cuervo, an education supervisor in Zacatecas and Querétaro. In other states, supervisors conducted other activities. For example, Lamberto Moreno and Elpidio Lopez in Sonora tended to the socialist program in a different way: they stopped antireligious teachers and trained them in “peda-


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gogical skills” so that they would leave verbalist teaching behind (cf. Kay, 2003, pp. 182–183). They did little to promote teachers’ political roles, but rather, fought against teachers who were engaged with the community leading their political and even economic organization. Socialist education spread from the state. In the case of Zacatecas, the Federal Director urged that the precepts of this theory be followed by teachers who worked in rural schools. In 1935 he issued Circular No. 46, which listed the characteristics of teacher training for socialist teaching “that counteracts the action of conservative elements that oppose the crystallization of revolutionary principles”.3 The courses, publications and conferences that rural teachers received were taught at centers of pedagogical cooperation (cf. Civera, 2008) and during Socialist Days (cf. Yankelivich, 2003). It is clear that the directors of education knew who was the enemy to overcome. “The conservative elements” were the clergy and therefore this command group within the SEP was prepared to face it. In training courses, the Maestro Rural, Impulso Juvenil and other manifestos were read. Teachers received the new pedagogical guidelines, saw how to solve other problems of the community and the union (lack of pay for example), fought against the reaction and located the main enemy: the bourgeoisie and priests. They raised other discussions, such as differentiating liberal schools from socialist schools. The former, they said, “superimpose individual selfishness on collective interests, protecting the formation of privileged groups.” The later was the antithesis, arguing for “the socialization of the means of production and change” (ibidem). The fact that education supervisors had a more combative idea of socialism enabled this Marxist interpretation in some schools. Teachers were trained to understand that there were only two classes: the working class and the bourgeoisie, and that capital consists of nature as an originating factor and work as a primordial factor (…) that the capitalist class has seized capital thanks to the exploitation of man by man (…) that to date the bourgeois class has maintained not only the economic domain and as a consequence political control, but also the moral domain over the working class, resorting for the latter object to the aid of the religions that are instruments of exploitation (ibidem). [By naming priests and the bourgeoisie as the main 3

General Archive of the Nation/Historical Archive of the Ministry of Public Education (AGN/AHSEP), Collection: Departamento de Enseñanza Agrícola y Normal Rural, series: Escuela Regional Campesina de Bimbaletes, Zacatecas, reference 3527X/210(X-5-B) (724.1) Various documents related to students. Box 1, reference 419-18, 4-9-5-73.


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enemies they began to question their coexistence and said that they pretended to be the friends of the people] (…) they were wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are connecting blow after blow, with the intention of continuing to dispose of your wealth and your freedom at their leisure (Civera, 2008, p. 183). Rafael Ramirez, Director of Cultural Missions and Ignacio Garcia Tellez, Secretary of Education, understood that teachers should be trained in the precepts of this school to promote the economy and community development. They tried to understand socialist education as “that which is based on dialectical materialism” and that would fight against “individualistic and liberal pedagogy (…) to the bourgeois individualist regime, to implement a regime without classes” (Yankelevich, 2003, p. 120). Teachers were to know that the socialist primary school emerged with the scientific socialism of Engels and Marx; teachers were made aware that it was an educational institution “that tends to prepare the working class integrally for the later implementation of the socialist regime.” Citing Karl Marx, they explained what socialist education was: “spiritual, polytechnic, and physical training (gymnastic and military exercises)” (ibidem). Cardenas was right, although he did not cite Marx, when he agreed that socialist schools should encourage children’s mental and spiritual growth and prepare them for production. The latter would be through polytechnic training. In addition, adding physical education to the curriculum and promoting the regional folkloric dances encouraged that spiritual vision. It is probable that many ideas that teachers discussed in training courses were not been carried out in schools and that many teachers did not fully understand the civilizing project. It is not within the scope of this essay to highlight any such cases, but rather to draw attention to the conditions and characteristics of teachers at that time in the face of the development of a government policy that came up against resistance among the populace. In 1935 “the situation of rural teachers was unsustainable” because “ill-advised” people considered the former an enemy willing to sacrifice the latter. On the other hand, teachers themselves were not in a position to assume the political task demanded by the educational reform. As mentioned above, most of the teachers had only attended up to the fourth grade of primary school and were far from having received vocational training. Teachers received their training from supervisors because they had a more combative interpretation of socialism/Cardenismo, but that was never a guarantee that the teachers would turn to revolutionary action.


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Scientific socialism and child autonomy The idea of socialist education, in addition to being based on dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, was a civilizing on, as it always proposed reclaiming the “patterns of conversion,” transforming the other [1], in this case teaching literacy and civilizing (the latter was more complex because it was about liberating the population and preparing it for socialism without even passing through capitalism). Like any conversion project, the Mexican school set out to teach values that were different and distant from those held by poor children. One of the targets was religion; therefore, anti-fanaticism campaigns were run in an attempt to enable peasant and working-class children to “understand that religious prayers and the false intervention of deities are useless... the ignorance of truth encourages religious fanaticism to take root” (ibidem). All of these orientations were based on the Socialist Primary School Action Plan that defined the characteristics of socialist education as being “progressive, scientific, anti-fanatizing, guiding, and emancipating” (Sotelo, 1981, p. 277). Mexican education has been instrumentalist, as missions have always been commissioned beyond its strictly pedagogical/formative function (cf. Ornelas, 2002). In this characterization, the educational reform of 1934 was very similar, though at this point in the advance of socialism to the world level as a way of life for the post-Depression population of 1929 (cf. Hobsbawm, 2009), the idea of the emancipation of the poor and the end of the exploitation of man by man was a serious and viable project, discussed even in the upper echelons of the Cardenista government. There were elements at play that spoke of a profound and historical educational reform. It was intended to be an instrument of liberation and the defeat of confessional education. The anti-fanatic and emancipatory ideas of the poor Mexican population were present in the plan for socialist schools. In this sense it was necessary for teachers to carry out “socializing actions” such as “cultural Sundays and anti-alcohol campaigns” (cf. Rockwell, 2003, p. 222). In Zacatecas these were known as “red Sundays.” Spiritual and material education was to be cultivated in students. It was necessary to promote and specify what the third article of the Mexican Constitution contemplated banishing fanaticism and teaching the “rational and exact vision of the universe.” Cardenismo prepared human resources (supervisors, directors, and federal teachers) along with a whole series of texts committed to the training of social leaders to lead communities to liberation and to remedy social injustice or, more specifically, to insert themselves in the


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what at that time was understood as the modernization of the country. The anti-alcohol campaigns and the textbooks of the series Simiente (Seed) would help to form in peasant children and parents the idea of equality and the economic and cultural liberation of their social class. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to instill in the children and in the population “defiance of superstition and fanaticism, the accumulation of wealth in the hands of few” (El Maestro Rural, 1934, p. 4). The task of the school, therefore, was to bring them closer to a scientific explanation of natural phenomena “attributed to the divine through earthquakes, eclipses, and flooding” (ibidem). The aim of scientific and anti-fanatic training of the rural population was to fight prejudices and “prepare the worker to defend himself against the bourgeoisie and fight for a more egalitarian society” (Civera, 2003, p. 148). All this civilizing mission and social transformation would be achieved using the school as a vehicle. Socialist education, at least from the perspective of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) in Mexico, looked to adapt schools to the new social order: “cooperativism, Ferrer Guardia’s modern school, the rationalist school, the Dalton plan, Pistrak’s Work Procedures Method, and the orientations of Freinet, Decroly, and Dewey” (Civera, 2003, p. 148). All these projects together, which had been applied since the 1920s in Mexico, would coexist and be a part of the pedagogies put in place in 1934. In order to achieve Marxist socialist education, there had to be concretions. For example, some supervisors explained the Marxist concept of “surplus value” based on the profit obtained by day laborers’ or peasants’ employers from their extra working hours. Textbooks and classes taught by primary school teachers worked off of these concretions and with such examples. Another way was for teachers to use singing in their classes with “musical compositions whose lyrics were positive proletarian ideology tending to form class consciousness”. Physical education was another means, where sporting triumphs were intended to simulate the class struggle: it was said that “coordinating their activities they will achieve triumph for a certain team, in the class struggle, when they manage to join forces and present a single front, they will achieve definitive triumph, and, as a consequence, their complete liberation” (ibidem). It was therefore a pragmatism; the opportunity to instruct in socialist dogma was never lost in that non-individualist-egoistic social vision to which


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children and society were subjected. The masses were the viable element of social organization. The idea of the socialist primary school was practical; it attempted to express socialist theory in everyday actions, and it was said that the “socialist school is the school of the exploited class; it is necessary that the different school subjects of the program focus on solving fundamental problems of workers and peasants.” Schools were to be practical and active and not contemplative, that is, capable of reflecting and acting. In this way school would be taught from and for the social environment. In times of harvest, for example, math classes could be taught through grain crops. The socialist school and the promoters of the most combative ideas of socialism, like the supervisors, went beyond the didactic-pedagogical and proposed a re-engineering of power relations in schools. In 1935, Tomas Cuervo, Federal Director of Education in Zacatecas, Mexico, for example, instructed the principals of elementary schools to promote school governance with the idea that “students govern themselves” (ibidem). Tomas Cuervo had taken up that idea during his education received in the government and applied it to Zacatecas. It was a revolutionary idea, since it was not enough to make changes in government if the students continued to be disciplined and controlled in many ways in the classrooms. The idea of child autonomy was very present in the educational reform. It was understood that “student self-government should replace the old concepts of arbitrarily coercive authority imposed by the teacher” (Kay, 2003, p. 89). Self-government was proposed as a project that needed to come to fruition because it urged an emancipated and democratic society and if students were accustomed to “blind obedience... only servants, rebels, or tyrants are educated.” It was the first project that claimed the rights of children to be agents of their own education, according to then-President Lazaro Cardenas. The role that the teacher held was to occupy the “highest position that the revolution entrusts him with... as a guide and counselor” (ibidem). Students were to remove themselves from absolute dependence on their teachers. Undoubtedly this idea placed at the front and center the revolutionization of teaching methods, in which teachers had to leave behind dictation or verbal classes and build their entire pedagogical relationship from self-government, exploration and learning by discovery, as well as to apply Dewey’s ideas of “learning by doing.”


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Tomas Cuervo had received his orientation from within the SEP. It is certain that he had read the Russian Alberto Pinkevich when he referred to the role of teachers in children’s autonomy: “[the teacher’s] task is reduced to drawing students’ attention to the problems that arise, helping them to understand and determine the method to solve them and, finally, to cooperate with them in the realization of their solutions.” Engracia Loyo explains that this role of teachers is largely due to the fact that they were defined as collaborators of a true revolutionary whose port of destination was to fight for the poor of the country for their liberation (cf. Loyo, 2009).

Final thoughts Finally, the most important lesson for children was that Tomas Cuervo, in his teacher-training course, conceptualized the teacher not as an authority towards his or her students, but as a companion. True, “[the teacher] is the oldest, the most expert, the most informed and the strongest, but he is not the head of his students or his administrator”. Humanizing relations in the classrooms was undoubtedly a commendable idea and was guided from the militant, radical, and bureaucratic viewpoint of the school-district supervisors in Mexico, especially in rural areas. It is beyond the scope of this work to determine whether the projects were able to be implemented in any school, but it contributes elements referring to the groups promoting the educational reform of 1934. It is likely that Tomas Cuervo did not fulfill his aspiration, but his convictions on equality were placed under scrutiny, because in teachers’ strikes, the presence of supervisors was demanded, but as mere teachers, not in their capacities as authorities. Cuervo believed totally in the power that socialist education had to change the country, for which reason he considered it “the present evolutionary moment in the country’s education” (ibidem). It is true that his vision was only a reproduction of the courses, lectures and texts he had received in his adhesion to the socialist school project that was discussed in many places, particularly from Narciso Bassols, Minister of Education. In the end, the story is implausible, and remains not as an accomplished fact, but as something counterfactual: as something that never happened. However, there is a settled notion: that socialist education, from the perspective of scientific socialism and dialectical historical materialism, could have been implemented in the country, but it was not possible. The approach sustained in this text is something very concrete and verifiable: that ideas about scientific


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materialism, society without social classes, actually circulated and were spread to teachers and children from the viewpoint of political/academic training of many teacher groups, mainly of education Federal Directors and Supervisors, but they were not necessarily put into practice. The speeches, lectures, and texts existed and, in the end, gave meaning to a complex narrative of the educational reform of 1934.

References: Book sources Civera Cerecedo, A., (2003), Del calzón de manta al overol: la misión cultural de Tenería, estado de Mexico, in 1934. In: S. Quintanilla, M. Kay Vaughan (eds.), Escuela y Sociedad en el período cardenista, FCE, Mexico. Civera Cerecedo, A., (2008), La escuela como opción de vida. La formación de maestros normalistas rurales en Mexico, 1921–1945, El Colegio Mexiquense, Mexico. Raby, D. L., (1974), Educación y revolución social en Mexico (1921–1940), Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico. Gónzalez y Gozález, L., (2005), Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 1934–1940: los Artífices del cardenismo, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico. Guevara Niebla, G., (1985), La educación socialista en Mexico (1934–1945), Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico. Hamilton, N., (1983), Mexico: Los límites de la autonomía del Estado, Era, Mexico. Hobsbawm, E., (2009), Historia del siglo XX, Crítica, Barcelona, España. Kay Vaughan, M., (2001), La política cultural en la Revolución. Maestros, campesinos y escuelas en Mexico, 1930-1940, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico. Kay Vaughan, M., (2003), El papel político de los maestros federales durante la época de Cárdenas: Sonora y Puebla. In: S. Quintanilla, M. Kay Vaughan (eds.), Escuela y Sociedad en el período cardenista, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico. Loyo, E., (2009), Lectura para el pueblo, 1921–1940. In: A. Hernández Chávez, M. Miño Grijalba (eds.), La educación en la historia de Mexico, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico. Popkewitz, T.S., (2007), La historia del curriculum: la educación en los Estados Unidos a principios del siglo XX, como tesis cultural acerca de lo que el niño es y debe ser, “Revista de curriculum y formación del profesorado”, Vol. 11, USA. Rockwell, E., (2003), Reforma constitucional y controversias locales: la educación socialista en Tlaxcala, 1935–1936. In: S. Quintanilla, M. Kay Vaughan (eds.), Escuela y Sociedad en el período cardenista, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico. Santos Valdés, J., (2005), Obras completas, Offset Azteca, Mexico.


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Sotelo Inclán, J., (1981), La educación socialista. In: F. Solana, R. Cardiel and R. Bolaños (eds.), Historia de la educación pública en Mexico, Vol. I, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico. Yankelevich, P., (2003), La batalla por el dominio de las conciencias: la experiencia de la educación socialista en Jalisco, 1934–1940. In: S. Quintanilla, M. Kay Vaughan (eds.), Escuela y Sociedad en el período cardenista, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico. Web Sources [1] Popkewitz, T. S., (2007), La historia del curriculum: la educación en los Estados Unidos a principios del siglo XX, como tesis cultural acerca de lo que el niño es y debe ser. In: Revista de curriculum y formación del profesorado, pp. 1-13, Vol. 3, No. 11, Granada, [http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=56711302], accessed: 11.10.2017. Archival Sources General Archive of the Nation/ Historical Archive of the Ministry of Public Education (AGN/AHSEP), Mexico City, Revista El Maestro Rural. Vol. VI. AGN/AHSEP, Mexico City. Collection: Departamento de Enseñanza Agrícola y Normal Rural, series: Escuela Regional Campesina de Bimbaletes, Zacatecas, reference 3527X/210(X-5-B)(724.1) Various documents related to students. Box 1, reference 419-18, 4-9-5-73.



The task to be fulfilled: construction of learning / construction of knowledge Abstract: The educational and pedagogical acts are representations of performances that can explain different aspects of teaching, as well as how to support the learning process. If pedagogical acts are not transformative themselves, it is not possible for students to process learning effectively. Notwithstanding the above, instructors must recognize that all transformative pedagogical acts are only possible with educational acts. Therefore, both of these acts are needed for students to act totally and completely. In this vein, teachers can ask themselves, Is the educational act performing in concordance with the pedagogical act? If possible, how it is possible? The purpose of this article is to comprehend how instructors can fulfill the task of using both education and pedagogical acts simultaneously. The article is divided into three fundamental theoretical propositions: 1) The strategies of learning that implement development processes for more human education, 2) The value of education and the ways in which it can improve the quality of life in the future, 3) The ways in which these educational and pedagogical acts can develop the educational field towards an absolute “human quality,” with absolute “human conditions.” This article suggests that these three propositions are needed to account for “human development” so that education can transform society. Therefore, more humane education is possible. The gap that instructors have between knowledge and learning development calls them to comprehend, not only the sense, but also the meaning of an education that eventually should


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help them model and visualize a more humane field of education, insofar that the society requires one. Key words: construction of learning, construction of knowledge, pedagogical act, educational act, human development, human condition.

The structures on which the notion of capital is based are developed on the basis of self-reproducing systems, which are models of thought in-extremis that are being installed in social constructions so that they sustain themselves over time indeterminately. The capital (considered in terms of money) is the main symbolic object of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, it is not just a mechanism, a financial instrument or an object that develops a specific model of economy, but it is as well a form that confines to a political mode, hence builds a political economy. The close relations that are generated between the capitalist mode of production (MPC1), between education and mode of production, and thus, between education and capital, lead us to the central point of the debate in the present article. The question is, of course, not concerning education in the capitalist mode, but the possibilities that in the framework of the exponential growth that capitalism has progressively acquired, one can think of a “more human” educational model. The referred educational model does not correspond with the developmental ideas and the concept of development, but with the individual and collective needs derived from the environment in which we live. An ideal education stimulates the creation of a project through the relationship between knowledge in economic development or capital growth as well as social models of sustainability to ensure the future of the State. Not every education should be “benevolent”, it should create “good” people, nor should it always be established as a point of balance between the members of a certain social organization. The relationships as well as the differences between the processes of training and social construction, seem to be a reason to question the concept of Education, which in any case should be primarily thought as, following the steps of Edgar Morin in Ciencia con conciencia (Morin, 1984), “Education with conscience”, although it may be considered in itself as of a utopian sense. In this sense, we shall start from the principle that Julia Varela raises in her Modelos críticos en Sociología de la Educación (Varela, 2010), stating that the

1

MPC corresponds to the acronym of “capitalist mode of production”

THE TASK TO BE FULFILLED…

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educational models are not defined against the “theories of reproduction”, but rather against the “theories of correspondence”. The modes of production refine and adapt their instructional processes to relations of correspondence, since these modes have the main objective of molding of the educational model into a sustainable process based on a specific order in the system. However, any social construction generates its own educational models, with the aim that the system is self-reproducing, and that, at the same time, it does not require any transformational “power”. In this regard, Varela points out the following: Aunque para numerosos autores las siguientes teorías forman parte de las “teorías de la reproducción”, sus perspectivas de análisis presentan ciertos rasgos comunes que permiten agruparlas bajo la rúbrica de “teorías de la correspondencia”. En todas ellas las funciones que desempeña la Escuela están directamente ligadas a las exigencias del capitalismo en las sociedades occidentales actuales, a las exigencias de la división social del trabajo, en suma, a las relaciones de explotación y de dominación. (Varela, 2010). The School does not reproduce the prevailing mode of production, it establishes “communicating vessels” between the parties, in order to grant them the value of sense and meaning, as well as to justify their need for existence. This defines the dominant logic of the model, and the way in which contact points are established between Education and Economics, Education and Politics, Education and Society. However, we should bear in mind a slight difference, since Varela affirms: “In all of them the functions carried out by the School are directly linked to the demands of capitalism” (Varela, 2010), and the school generates relations of production that try to make out of the model, indeed a recursive mechanism, but not only for the capitalism, but also for the dominant model. Moreover, it does so in ideology, in politics, in economics, in history, etc. Nevertheless, the mere fact that we understand and identify the relations of correspondence, and not exactly the relations of production, do not show in which way the functioning of the structure of the system takes place internally. Probably, for this reason, Varela intends to chart first the course that the school has taken and allows us to describe the latter in terms of “production model”, and not defines beforehand the nature of the relations of the “modes of production”. On the other hand, the idea that the theory functions as the one from


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which the Althusserian is derived, implies an understanding of the School as a structure of limitation in the sense of an Ideological Apparatus of the State, which is in fact like the School continues to function. It is precisely for this reason that Varela’s line of analysis must first follow the steps of Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet (1976), and then the American sociologists Bowles and Gintis. Baudelot and Establet have opened a wider path and explain how the school repeats and reproduces class divisions. But not only this, it also does the same with the spectrum of its model and generates itself the class struggle (and establishes it in quite a stark manner), showing by all its aspects how the very idea of class should be perceived. According to Bowles and Gintis, and in reference to what Paula Ojeda and Jorge Cabaluz (2011) explain, it could be stated that: In short, on the basis of a wide array of statistical, descriptive and historical sources, Bowles and Gintis argue that education reproduces the differentiation of the capitalist social structure, because it is what determines the functioning of the educational system (Cabaluz and Ojeda, 2011). However, we must still ask ourselves some important questions. Why can we see that there could be a connection between school and the “capitalist social structure”? and Why does the system of relations that weaves between one and the other, create the relations of dependency so closely linked, that they cannot be separated or differentiated afterwards? The capitalism is not merely a definition of an economic model, it is also its own operational structure. Moreover, the capital is not only a financial resource, but, because of its logic of operation, seems to have control over various “commercial transactions” that are executed and produces its surpluses. It works not in an equilibrium order but within the scheme of excess and surplus. As a consequence of all this, the reproduction of capital is the very reproduction of ideology and vice versa, and the capitalist mode of production continues to insert the concept of education under this slogan. In summary, education basically fulfills two functions, on the one hand: to argue and strengthen the need for the established order, whatever it may be (and this is pure ideology); and, on the other, to say how class relations and modes of production will be established. In the context of a theory of education that fosters learning and knowledge, it is unlikely that this function will be particularly linked to an economy or a policy. However, the object of the


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education and the ultimate purpose that it meets put it again in this function. Historically, the model has been committed to “education” within the above mentioned scheme that is not as simple as it may seem, since reproducing the processes of thought, learning and knowledge in terms of capital is not, in any case, a simple procedure. It implies firstly that traditional educational models respond directly and indirectly to the adaptation that the societies themselves are taking upon their stability. Pierre Bourdieu in Homo Academicus raises the following: Because of the fact that the educational system tends to become the official means of apportioning the right to hold a steadily growing number of positions, and one of the means of preservation or transformation of the structure of class relations through the mediation of the maintenance or change in the number and (social) status of the holders of positions in this structure, the number of individual or collective agents (parents’ associations, administration, managing directors, etc.) who are interested in its functioning and claim to modify it, because they expect it to provide satisfaction of their interests, is tending to increase. (notes 3: chapter 5 The critical Moment, 2008, p. 313).

The problem of the Apparatus The idea of Apparatus appears for the first time, probably, in the work of Lenin, and he defines it in terms of State Apparatus. Apparatus combines the sense of structure, order, and operating mechanism. Apparatus would be, according to Lenin, the whole conformation of order and the system of relations that elaborate a more adjusted abstraction to explain how relations and structures of power are articulated. Governments represent the apparatus that makes the State work and confer themselves the power to use violence and the means of coercion to exercise it. But Lenin is not left alone, he is accompanied by Friedrich Engels, who in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, defines the notion and structure of the State, starting from the very concept of apparatus. Althusser, on the other hand, adopts the definition in order to extend it to other fields. The fact is that according to Althusser, the apparatus is not only State Apparatus, the school can also be considered as an Apparatus. Thus, he


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raises an idea that there is indeed a State apparatus that can and has the capacity to exert violence, and that the State uses other means of coercion (and not only violence), grouped under the ideological apparatuses of the State (the church, the school, etc.). This idea can be found in the book entitled The Ideological State Apparatuses. In this sense, according to Althusser, the School is an apparatus that also represses, controls, and manipulates the conscience. It does so within its structure and functioning, implementing these mechanisms that come from the ideology2. Both notions originate from Marxist discourse conclaves. These are the ideas that Latin American intellectuals would have liked to appropriate and would have liked to propagate in the pedagogical discourse of the continent, since the school would not have to build knowledge, nor learning as its central goal, but to align itself with a certain political orientation, or at best of the cases, to reproduce the prevailing model. But, despite the fact that the debate about the ideological function of the school does not seem to be so relevant in recent decades, the question to be asked is whether a “resumption” of the discussion, or, in other words, a strong resettlement of its discursive logic, would be valid. And if so in any case, we should consider why invoking a notion that seems to stay anchored in its own past. As a starting point that will let us understand the phenomenon of training / education, it would probably be convenient to remove firstly the ballast of the ideological function, even though this does not seem to be such a simple operation. Beyond that, let us ask ourselves if the notion of the apparatus is still operative. Furthermore, let´s investigate if it would be valid for us to refer to the apparatus as a functioning structure of educational institutions, with the understanding that it is a structure defined from a series of components and models that constitute it. In conclusion, Althusser is the one who has reviewed the subject with greater precision, taking it from Lenin’s reference and his talk about state apparatuses. Lenin has told us that he refers to apparatuses as active formal structures that belong to the very structure of the State. Contributing from Marxist structuralism, Althusser comprehends education and systems of repression (the police and social control bodies) as ideological apparatus, which seem to have gained greater influence and importance. According to Lenin, the state structure itself is based on the representation of the State Apparatus, since the State is the

2

Understood here as false consciousness.


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apparatus itself and within it operate independently a cluster of other devices, but without ceasing to be (at the same time) interconnected with each other. In other words, each one has its own functioning. Althusser dedicates a chapter to the School, as a generator of social control and as an appendage of the State itself.

The role of the School / Higher Education as a socializing agent One of the principles that the school must comply with is to act as an object and agent of socialization. It is also up to the school to reinsert a set of ideological aspects as it seeks to give a sense of permanence to the economic, political, and social model that prevails. The notion of the agent that fulfils this task is related to Althusser and Poulantzas’s agent of the ideological apparatus of the State. The difference lies in thinking of the School as an agent and not as an apparatus. If so, if a school model is planned as an agent, then it educates for a given context, while the notion of the school as an ideological apparatus quickly separates us from this context. The school as an agent allows us to model it in many different areas: as a socializing agent, as an agent of change, as an educational or social inclusion agent, but also as an agent of control. However, the boundaries that define the function of the school as an agent of control seem to become increasingly blurred given that educational action is oriented to the construction of a process of creative and constructive development. This can be easily understood in reference to the first levels of education, primary and secondary, but what happens when we talk about Higher Education? Is education still comprehended as teaching development? Let’s see what the role of higher education is, in this sense Stephens Jennie et al., state that: The transition management framework specifies three different levels of exploration of transition within an evolutionary frame: strategic, tactical, and operational, each of which involves different policies and actors (Loorbach and Kemp, 2005). The strategic level focuses on higher-le vel activities of leaders (government, business, non-profit) who engage in strategic visioning and discussions, laying out long-term goals and objectives and establishing the structure and context for the issue. The tactical level concentrates on agenda and coalition building, and negotiation involving existing institutions and structures and transforming them to carry out the larger strategic goals. Finally, the operational level concentrates on project building and implementation, focusing on vari-


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ation and flexibility (Loorbach and Kemp, 2005). These different levels interact, reinforce, and iterate throughout the processes of innovation. And both actors and institutions are recognized as both responding to change and as agents shaping change (Kemp et al., 2007). To the authors’ knowledge, the role of institutions of higher education through all of their activities, including teaching, research and broader societal engagement, has not yet been explicitly explored within the transition management literature. Yet, given the importance of higher education in society and the potential for mutual learning (Scholz et al., 2000) higher education has unique potential to catalyse and/or accelerate a societal transition toward sustainability (2008, pp. 319–320). In view thereof, it seems necessary to explore the meaning content that society still attributes to the school. Since one of the elements that has contributed most to the disarticulation of the school apparatus is the media, it is advisable to have a look on the proper forms of the media that turn out to have provided us with the operative “coordinates” of what is considered social. The school, in the middle of this context, and understood here as an agent of transformation on the one hand and as an apparatus on the other, remains, apparently, in the background, as so it is losing more and more its relevance in the process of “socialization”. In reality, the school does not socialize anymore, what it does, according to Althusser, is to outline a model, a device for work. In On the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses Althusser has analyzed the very question of whether education is ultimately a process of formation for ideology and for work or just only focuses on work. The issue of the present dichotomy is based on the idea of capital. The division into social classes is thus present in the division, organization and management of the process of production, by virtue of the distribution of posts on the basis of the classes affiliation of the individuals who hold them (and, correspondingly, the number of years they have spent in school getting an ‘education’, whether ‘truncated’ or complete). The fact that a majority of these individuals — engineers, upper–level supervisory personnel, even directors – are increasingly simple wage–earners makes no difference here (Althusser, 2014). It seems obvious that all social or class mobility does not depend strictly on work, nor on the condition of higher education institutions being only transformed into agents of socialization. A wage earner has not been trained under an educational model that creates an “environment” tailored for their needs. In fact, he or she has only been instructed to be inserted in a precise model of


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work. There are institutions of Higher Education that have been created with the only purpose of meeting the needs and fulfilling requirements of certain private companies. A clear example of this is the The Center Technological University (Universidad Tecnológica del Centro) in Venezuela, which has been developed and sponsored by a group of private companies related to the sector in which these companies are operating. The UNITEC was created in 1976 with the main intention of providing a contingent of students with education in different university careers, such as engineering, computing, administration, industrial relations, etc., in order to achieve specifically qualified human resources that these companies would require and be assured of the level of their training. A university of this type embraces two definitions that are sustained by the discourse in question. First, education viewed as a supporting element of an educational model oriented to a specific mode of production and development; and second, a teaching model that is put at the state’s total margin, and that cannot count on the State´s resources and profiles that are designed for the society in general. However, the output of different engineers, IT and industrial relations graduates, etc. of these universities-company is, in numerical terms, far superior to those that will be required by them according to their respective needs, hiring at the end only those who obtain the best results and discarding the rest. As the design of the curriculum, or academic program, is extremely intertwined with its further implementation within a framework of a 10-year project, and is wholly subjected to the stratification, specialization and compartmentalization of the production areas of the company, most of the graduates who find themselves outside the labor market and do not find insertion in the labor field suffer because their profiles do not respond to the requirements of other organizations for which they were not formed. Although it is true that public university encourages the creation of institutions and the development of research projects that are linked to the development of private enterprise, private education in this area exceeds substantially the relations of power that are established between non-state organizations and the State. In the same line, it is important to highlight what has been affirmed by Víctor Morles, Eduardo Medina Rubio and Neptalí Álvarez Bedoya, in their book La educación superior en Venezuela: Likewise, and from the national universities, interesting experiences under the figure of university companies have been developed in the last decade. In the UCV (...) her twelve Faculties, the Center for Development Studies (CENDES)


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and some central dependencies have companies that generally fulfill three functions: generate own revenues for production or services, carry out scientific or technological projects and serve as venues for the training of teachers and students. This university develops an important economic activity from the Andrés Bello Foundation, responsible, among other functions, for managing and developing the Zone. Rent of this house of studies in a strategic sector of Caracas that means an important source of income. On the other hand, most private higher education institutions maintain close links with private companies. Some examples that stand out are: the Metropolitan University and the Institute of Superior Studies of Administration (IESA), in Caracas; the UNITEC in Valencia, the UBA in Maracay, and the IUP Santiago Mariño in several places. (2003, p. 74).

In the Latin American tradition, the State has monopolized all structures aimed at the development of higher education, because it has been the agent who has built the networks and has proposed projects for the development of research and science. The experiences in which the private company has begun to take sides, especially its involvement in the control of universities and training centers of higher education, as we can see are quite recent, this is due to multiple factors that would preferably constitute a topic for another article. However, it is important to say, for now, that the conflictual relationships between the public sector (represented by the State) and the private sector (represented by business organizations) in the area of educational development are becoming really highly conflictual, since state planning often does not correspond with the objectives that the companies are drawing. The development of educational models and the objectives to be met by both sectors, differ from each other, as well as their visions of development and modes of production. In this way, the structure combining the relations of knowledge together with relations of production are widely affected and, in many cases, quite distorted

The thesis of the parallel school The “parallel school” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 2008b, pp. 15–24) [we will define it as parallel higher education] means an overlap of actions and objectives in the field of training. School and family have always been the means of reproducing knowledge par excellence and we could still affirm that they continue to be so. However, we should place next to this pair, what Bourdieu and Passeron have called the “parallel school”. Both of them are referring to the intervention of the mass media that are assumed to be “trainers of principles” after having


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adopted functions that prototypically form part of the School and eventually of the family. In fact, the mass media together with the ICT begin to act as extra real structures of knowledge. They become direct mediators between the institutions and structures of the State, where the latter is supposed to assure an educational project that guarantees economic and human development at once. However, the idea that the mass media would replace the role of “real” education, opens a new file that would announce a series of educational shifts. School is a proper place to create educational space, so university is. Despite them having still control stemming from systems and social ordering agents, neither of them can overcome the force that the mass media exert. This sounds as great power that seems to be irrefutable, even thought it´s still university that keeps the monopoly of knowledge in its hands. At a time when mythology about the “parallel school” of the mass media is commonplace (as well as to determine massive investments in the sector of “little machines”), it is particularly interesting to have shown how the relation with the school conditions the successive relations with the cultural instances, both in terms of the access opportunity and the level of decoding. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 2008a, p. 21) Another essential aspect to highlight is what Pierre Bourdieu has defined as the forms of habitus, and that it is within education that the control and domination structures are supposedly built. The constitution of the habitus occurs when in the framework of “repetition” we build a “pedagogical action”. In that framework of actions, education would be a builder of habitus or methods, a constructor of customs that appear periodically according to specific and definite dates and times. According to Bourdieu, culture would be the product of the arbitrariness that, after so much “repeating”, becomes a habit and hence a cultural formation. What is not repeated in time do not become continuity. Thereby, Bourdieu states that: “If the habitus is the analogue of genetic capital, then the inculcation which defines the performance of Pedagogical Action is the analogue of generation, in that it transmits information generative of analogous information” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970, p. 32). In this way, it is peculiar that the school does not continue being the main engine of class reproduction, at least not in its usual form. It seems to be more and more clear that it´s not to be found in the center of its “hidden” function. In spite of these affirmations, it is still necessary to ask ourselves to what extent education in capitalism continues to be constructed as a discourse of power.


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Cultural power? Ideological power? Psychological power? Bourdieu says, “All pedagogic action (PA) is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970). Also Michael Apple, a recognized theorist of the curriculum in education, states something similar regarding the subject of power in education: “I wanted to focus on the connections between knowledge and power, since in my mind (...) cultural struggles were crucial to any serious movements for social transformations” (Apple, 2012, p. 5).

The legitimization of school discourse It seems necessary, first of all, to clarify the differences that may arise while using the above mentioned notions. The reason for this is basic, we are going to use concepts and ideas that focus on a textual and discursive model, separated from the “reality” that surrounds us. However, this is an idea that we must explore profoundly. Is it really true that, whatever the case, the “old” concepts of Marxism would not adjust to the reality of the contemporary society? Later, once this distinction is clarified, it is necessary to ask ourselves: Do all these definitions fit into the central framework of an educational project that we would classify as “more human”? In short, what does it mean to talk about a “more humane” education, is education by any chance geared toward “human” substance? Thereupon, if it so, is it possible to still think of the idea of Education, or we encounter only Instruction object3? If so, what is the main object of the school and its most distant differential — University. To specify on these points, we want in this section to talk briefly about two aspects that seem essential to us. Two aspects that in reality are limited to only one, and that is the legitimization of value (understood here as use value or exchange value), or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, what can be classified as Symbolic Value and Nominal Value of academic titles. What the French philosopher and sociologist has propounded is the relationship that is established between title together with profession and its legitimization sustained by academic discourses (discourses that are more or less legitimized, depending on which academic career we are talking about), as well as that the nominal ratio of the certificates is in direct consonance with the development of the market. The university legitimizes the relations of production insofar as it centers its teaching discourses on the basis

3

Capitalization in this case is intentional.


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of those relations of production. The degree granted by any university from the most well-known and prestigious to the most unassisted seems to be valued in function of the fluctuations that occur in the “market”. In relation to this Bourdieu raises: At all events, the tolerance of these effects also varies according to the same criterion, but in the opposite direction, on the one hand because aspirations tend to diminish as objective opportunities do, and on the other hand because various mechanisms, such as the plurality of markets, tend to disguise the devaluation — some devalued diplomas keep a certain symbolic value in the eyes of the least well provided — and the secondary benefits associated with the rise in the nominal value of the diplomas. The partly illusory rise of the ‘miraculously lucky survivors’ who attain posts improbable for the members of their class of origin (like the son of a primary teacher who becomes a teacher in a comprehensive school) at a time when these posts are becoming devalued by a general effect of translation, in other words, down classed, in fundamentally different, despite the surface analogies, from the more or less obvious decline of the person whose origins are in the dominant class, but who does not manage to acquire diplomas sufficient to maintain his position, such as the doctor’s son who becomes a literature student or an instructor in remedial education. (Bourdieu, 2008, pp. 163–164). Is there any close relationship between the entirety of the educational structure and its various components? And regarding university, is it perceivable?

Education and Development In Latin America, the “idea” that one should “create” an education that encourages an individual to achieve a job, the one that promotes Development, that in consequence guarantees accumulation of wealth, has spread everywhere4. However, under this perception, Development can be understood as a variable particularly oriented to the construction of economic growth, the one that derives from the capacity that we have for wealth creation. “Economic growth” is strictly linked to the issue of “values”5, this means: as long as we are able to create economic growth we would be encountering a society that

4

5

The concept of development will be stated with capital letters, when referring mainly to the Economic Development category. This should be understood here as a diminished ethic.


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is formed in certain “values” that lead the society to that goal. If the effects of education are associated with economic growth and not properly with human development, it seems reasonable to assume that education, in this sense, the product of a distortion at the base of its foundations, has diverted its main roles and has disregarded its fundamental objectives. The basis of the problem seems to be strictly epistemic, although governments do not perceive it so. Governments do not profile societies, they only adopt administration policies in which Education must fulfill central objectives within the framework of those policies. This framework of actions is defined as economic objectives, political objectives, social objectives, etc. If this set of concepts is installed under the scheme of the prevailing mode of production, it means that every educational project must be oriented towards a profile that reproduces ad infinitum the same model resulting afterwards in the accumulation of cultural capital. Therefore, we would be treating Development in the present work as directly Capital6. So nowadays, educational projects are basically oriented to developing curricular maps that are adapted to the needs of the production modes and to the creation of professional profiles geared towards wealth accumulation. The relations established between the public and the private affect directly the way these domains are linked, in the framework of a model that can serve as a prototype of the school object. Therefore, the creation and definition of an educational profile projected in the future7 (a prospective model), the one that seeks the consecration of a “subject full of consciousness of knowledge” is a utopian construction and in itself unrealizable. There is no educational project that can sustain this prerogative, or it does not seem to exist under the traditional model of education. The “Consciousness of knowing” has two meanings here, on the one hand, it is the awareness of a subject of its own ability to reproduce the prevailing production system; on the other hand, the capacity of a subject to evaluate, criticize and reformulate a system. Simply because this Education must, in one way or another, maintain the order of the system, inevitably reproducing an economic model and then a political model. Here we must necessarily establish a distinction between different levels of education. Higher education should not be presented as an educational model, at least in the same sense of the lower grades (secondary or

6 7

Stated with capital letters to highlight its function as category. Rhetorical construction.


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primary). The primary object, but also the objective of the University, is not to teach or educate, but to provide knowledge, and to promote the advancement and knowledge of sciences in relation to the increasing value of production. Knowledge can be translated in terms of capital on the one hand and in terms of power relations by other derivatives through the specialization of work. The complexity of these orders resides in that the “departmentalization” of knowledge increasingly acts to the detriment of their own professional, educational and social development. Commonly the following pattern can read in various studies and publications: Nowadays, the society intents to construct an educational model that includes the design of a project that will be able to foment an “education for the development”. Of course, historically speaking, the definition of an “education for development” would fit perfectly in the construction of a model that reproduced the dominant conception of the State; that which the capitalist mode of production would build to reproduce itself in time, especially if the reference is connected with a social project. This notion “social project” has been misrepresented, associating it with a jargon that would properly support the thinking of a left sociology. In any case, we should not confuse two things here; 1.- When we say capitalist mode of production, we refer to a kind of production mode of the economy that also has its categorical settings or borders; 2.- Capitalism also constructs a model of what is social. However, the correspondence of parties between State and education is neither so simple nor so direct. Antonio Romano in his article “Is there a post-structuralist subject?” (2010) the Latin American case would be a particular variant of the political development that would show the ideological function of the school, insofar as its function is slightly displaced from the reproduction of the qualification of the work force that the Educational apparatuses fulfill in any formation capitalist social (Romano, 2010). The concept of development has been perfectly manipulated from multiple perspectives and is associated fundamentally with that of mercantile and economic production. In other words, it is a concept that does not seem to be close to philosophy, but fundamentally in the fields of economics or sociology. Accordingly, Education and development are two epistemes that are supported by an abstraction, which is not very sustainable in itself, and at least initially, very distant from one another.


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The development, which according to the economics Nobel Amartya Sen, is linked (usually) together with other concepts, e.g. human development, economic development, sustainable development, etc., and according to their results are taken into consideration or not, is consequently, the following: If an expansion of educational facility or health care increases labour productivity and thus the income level, the perspective of “human capital” would give it immediate recognition. But if that expansion adds directly to the length of our lives, reduces our ailments, and makes us happier and more fulfilled, without changing labour productivity or increasing commodity production, then — in most accounting of human capital — that achievement would simply not get the recognition it deserves. Here we can see two things, the relationship between human capital in connection with development seen from the productivity standpoint; and secondly the idea of “human capital” as an object of financial resources. Sen warns us however, of the damage that this relationship could cause against individuals. Even more if it is understood that these associations are not a priori To correct what is missed in the narrower perspective of “human capital” and “human resource development,” we need a broader conception of development that concentrates on the enhancement of human lives and freedoms, no matter whether that enhancement is — or is not — intermediated through an expansion of commodity production. Human beings are not only the most important means of social achievement, they are also its profoundest end. This “project” of creating a more ambitious, broad, more humane model of education still does not seem to be clearly described nor to have precise guidelines, and for this reason it constitutes the most profound and profuse challenge to be approached by the contemporary society. Furthermore, this problem must be approached with some precise questions, as well as with a fundamental and essential focus on the construction of knowledge and the construction of learning. It must create models of thought related to living in a more “humane society”. However, in the educational contexts the issue of knowledge seems to be deferred: the basic and fundamental matter of Education Sciences became the quest for “to be” and, at the same time, “to do”. To comprehend how to build the relationships between “to be” and “to do”, it is necessary to establish what is understood by the “practices of sense” and the “practices of meaning”. Speaking of “practices of sense” implies at the same time the comprehension of


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the “how” related to the facts, that requires a profound understanding of the epistemological problematics and respective ontological consequences related to them. To answer the question about the existence, or questions about the “to be”, there is a need for an affirmation that the place of the existence in the future, our future, the human future, will depend basically on the necessity to build a “human educational process”, and not only an “educational technical process”. A future that obviously is not clearly in sight. This invocation, this urgent appeal related to the “what will come” shows that education must be questioned fundamentally at the bases of its own teaching project, and that, at the same time, it should not restrict knowledge nor claim to identify it as a finished, totalized process. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance to think, according to the theory of complexity originally raised by Edgar Morin, that the education for the humanity must consider multiple aspects and levels, skills and strategies, that would respond to the learning and, obviously, to the teaching. But this is an abstraction if we understand that there is an educational Project for Humanity. The educational act and the pedagogical act themselves, as representations of certain performances that show different aspects of teaching and their sense, means that: All pedagogy should be transformed into a prospective act that offers the learner the possible different “tools” to perform in a world that is torn between the human and the nonhuman. Nevertheless, it seems that there will not be education if there is no vision, if there is no perspective on a “future”, a project that comprehends the reasons why, so far, we do not have an education with “human quality”. And, on the other hand, there will be no development if there is no social project, if there is no historical project, if there is no educational project coherent with the human politics. From this area (which is vastly widening) we want thereupon to propose a question about what the problems are posed by the human factor in an Education for Development. What do educators and educational institutions think about a project of this scope? Is it possible, from the education sciences perspectives, to transcend the limits of disciplines and to shape in this complexity (Edgar Morin) a new knowledge for a society, that presents itself as a highly technological one and less and less humanized one? Finally, our proposal intends to study the subject, starting from the basis of two central figures: the school subject and the teaching subject. Both points of view, i.e. the student subject and the teaching subject, promptly require the reinsertion to the school apparatus the simple but


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effective and concrete “tasks” (what is the effectiveness today of the concept the notion of: “school apparatus”, if this idea is only inserted as a result of a conceptual production that has become of “Marxism”? in general the “apparatus” refers to a structure. Education is circumscribed to endless expressions, which finally turn out to be not very concrete, and unlike clarifying the idea of, for example, what is and what is going to a university? it obscures it, or simply does not define it. The entire educational project that develops today seems to be communicating what Theodor Adorno said: “Where a text would have to offer exact justifications, the corresponding lectures could not go beyond the dogmatic affirmation of results.” (Adorno, 12) Although Adorno is referring to the record that has been made of his lectures, on the other hand, it opens a floodgate to think better the object of relation between subject and “education”, because both concepts are abstractions in themselves and the concrete object expected of education itself does not emerge, at least at first sight. The question is not in vain, from the moment we ask the bottom of any object of education. The reading materials on the subject, so general do not point to the elaboration of the theory and do not deepen on the reflection, but to an excessively pragmatic practice that is oriented in the “how” and almost never in the “what” canceling the whole process of reflection on the subject. In other words, “education” is not thought, it is administered in a mechanistic way. The danger of this incidence increasingly installed in society as a common pattern, is the loss suffered (...) as if it will end up resolving the issue. The school institution represents a place where not only teaching and learning projects, but also social development projects are modeled. All of them, in turn, try to relate to the development of an educational process that recomposes the human factor.

References: Book sources Althusser, L., (2014), On the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses, Verso, London, New York. Apple, M. W., (2012), Knowledge, Power and Education: The Selected Works of Michael W. Apple, Routledge. Baudelot, C., Establet, R., (1976), La Escuela capitalista en Francia, Siglo XXI, Madrid. Bourdieu, P., (2008), Homo academicus, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.


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Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., (2000), Reproduction in education, society and culture, Sage, London. Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., (2008a), Introducción a la traducción italiana. In: La reproducción: elementos para una teoría del sistema de enseñanza, Popular, Madrid, pp. 13–34. Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., (2008b), La reproducción: elementos para una teoría del sistema de enseñanza, Popular, Madrid. Cabaluz, J., Ojeda, P., (2011), Aproximaciones al vínculo aparato escolar/trabajo asalariado: Contribuciones de las teorías de la reproducción a las pedagogías críticas, “ESTPED Estudios pedagógicos (Valdivia)”, Vol. 37/2/2011, pp. 363–377. Morin, E., (1984), Ciencia con consciencia, Anthropos, Barcelona. Morles, V., Álvarez Bedoya, N. & Medina Rubio, E., (2003), La educación superior en Venezuela (1a ed.), UNESCO-IESALC, Caracas. Web sources [1] Karseth, B., (2002), The Construction of Curricula in a New Educational Context. In: Governing Higher Education: National Perspectives on Institutional Governance, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 121–140, [https://link.springer.com/ chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9946-7_7], accessed: 20.01.2018. [2] Varela, J., (2010), Modelos críticos en Sociología de la Educación [Diccionario en línea], [http://webs.ucm.es/info/eurotheo/diccionario/E/educacion_sociologia.htm], accessed: 20.01.2018. [3] Stephens, J., Hernández, M., Román, M., Graham, A. & Scholz, R., (2008), Higher education as a change agent for sustainability in different cultures and contexts, “International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education”, Vol. 9/3/2008, pp. 317–338, [https://doi.org/10.1108/14676370810885916], accessed: 20.01.2018.


Chesla Ann Lenkaitis

Mental and Visual Images: Bringing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition into Focus Abstract: L2 vocabulary learning is at the core of language learning. As a heart pumps vitality into the human body, vocabulary breathes life through meaning so that speakers can better communicate in a given language. In order to communicate in a variety of discourses, an L2 learner needs to have a quite extensive vocabulary. Because of this, vocabulary needs to be constantly nurtured through effective methodology. This study quantitatively investigates the effectiveness of two vocabulary learning strategies, the keyword method and the visual support method. The keyword method is a strategy that utilizes the association of a first language word (a keyword) with the unknown L2 word through the use of a mental image whereas the visual support method is a strategy that utilizes a visual image. Four L2 intact classes (n = 59) over a 6-day treatment period learned 24 Spanish concrete nouns using both the keyword and visual support methods in one of two presentation orders. Results of pre- and post-tests indicate that the use of an image, whether mental or visual, increased L2 learners’ knowledge of L2 vocabulary. The separate univariate ANOVAs and Tukey post hoc analyses data suggest that regardless of treatment, the participants increased vocabulary knowledge and retained this knowledge in a similar fashion. Keywords: foreign language pedagogy; L2 Spanish vocabulary; keyword; visual; quantitative.


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Introduction In the last 35 years, there has been an overwhelming surge examining L2 vocabulary learning as an inseparable and integral part of learning any language. Language teachers have realized the need to implement strategies and activities that require more attention and use in production tasks as well as explicit, intentional, and mediational strategies in order to improve the vocabulary development of the L2 learner (Ellis, 1994; Hulstijn, 2001; Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001; Nation, 2001). Given that the utilization of the mental and visual images has been traced back over 2500 years (Sadoski & Paivio, 2001; Schmitt, 2000), there is need to examine the benefits that the image can have in the modern L2 classroom. Recent L2 vocabulary research has shown that the utilization of these images has encouraged L2 vocabulary learning (Akbari, 2008; Sagarra & Alba, 2006; Tight, 2010). However, to evaluate the distinct benefits between mental and visual images, this study focused on four L2 intact classes over a 6-day treatment period where participants learned 24 Spanish concrete nouns using two treatments, the keyword and visual support methods, aiming to find whether mental or visual images were more effective in learning L2 vocabulary. The keyword method is a strategy that utilizes the association of a first language word (a keyword) with the unknown L2 word through the use of a mental image while the visual support method is a strategy that utilizes a visual image.

The Keyword Method First introduced by Feinagle (1813) and later coined by Atkinson (1975), once an L2 learner is introduced to and provided with or finds the meaning of the L2 target word, the keyword method consists of two steps. First, the learner and/or teacher must think of a L1 word (a keyword) that looks or sounds like part of or all of the unknown word. Therefore, a keyword sounds like part of or all of the L2 word. However, it generally has no relationship to the L2 word except for a likeness in form. Second, an image must be created in the learner’s mind that combines the L1 meaning of the L2 target word with the keyword. In this mental imagery link, both the keyword and the meaning should be interacting in a way that the learner can easily remember it (Atkinson, 1975;

MENTAL AND VISUAL IMAGES…

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Nation, 2001). Through a mental image with an accompanied verbal definition, the learner is able to code the word in two ways: visually and linguistically. According to Atkinson (1975) if an English L2 learner using the keyword method wants to learn the Spanish word caballo, which is the word for horse, the learner could apply the 2-step process in the following way. Using Atkinson’s example, first, the learner could use eye as the L1 keyword since caballo contains a syllable that resembles the word eye. Second, the learner could create a mental interactive image involving an eye with a horse, for example, a horse kicking an eye. It is important to note that even though this example bases the keyword on the stressed syllable of the L2 word, it is not a requirement of this technique. Although this strategy sounds a bit outlandish given today’s communicative methodology, it has been the focus of recent research as it engages learners in cognitive theory. Numerous studies implementing the keyword method, the majority of which were complete in experimental settings, for learning German (Desrochers, Wieland, & Coté, 1991), Spanish (Kasper & Glass, 1988; Raugh & Atkinson, 1975), Chinese (Wang & Thomas, 1992), English (Elhelou, 1994) and Tagalog (Wang, Thomas & Ouellette, 1992), indicate that the keyword method is more effective than repetition and that this technique be used to learn vocabulary words with various parts of speech that include concrete nouns, verbs, abstract nouns, and adjectives. More recently, in order to test the efficacy of the keyword method, using 778 university participants, Sagarra and Alba (2006) examined the effectiveness of three vocabulary teaching methods: rote memorization, semantic mapping, and the keyword method. Upon analyzing results, Sagarra and Alba (2006) concluded that the keyword method results in better retention of vocabulary than rote memorization or semantic mapping since it employed dual coding theory (DCT), since upon seeing an image, the brain is activated twice (Paivio, 1971; Robertson, 2003).

The Visual Support Method The use of visual support, which I will refer to as the visual support method, quite simply utilizes a visual image in order to form an association between the L2 word and its meaning along with a verbal and/or written definition. Unlike the keyword method that employs the use of a mental image based on the phonetic characteristics of the target word, the visual method utilizes a visual image that depicts the word meaning (photo, graphic, drawing). If an L2


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Spanish learner wants to learn the word caballo, which means horse in English, a physical image of a horse would appear with the introduction of the word to trigger the form and meaning of the word. However, a homophone is not linked to the physical image since no L1 keyword is needed nor is this visual image interactive. Therefore, the picture itself would only invoke one specific meaning. With the implementation of the visual support method, a single visual image that illustrates the meaning of the L2 word is presented with the L2 word and the English gloss. Through a visual image with an accompanied verbal definition, the learner is able to code the word in two ways: visually and linguistically. Perhaps since it has been assumed that pictures were and still an important part to language learning, there has been less research done on visual support method than the keyword method. In a recent study with 96 elementary Iranian English as Foreign Language participants, Akbari (2008) observed an increase in vocabulary improvement through the use of pictures. Through his study, over the course of a 10-session treatment period he compared the differences between 1) the use of pictures, 2) the use of context with model sentences, and 3) the use of L1 definitions and L1 synonyms of 100 lexical items. After analyzing the results of a 45-multiple-choice question pre-test and post-test taken by all 96 students, Akbari concluded that both picture and context improved vocabulary. Therefore, a learner can reach a higher level of vocabulary development through the utilization of the picture.

Research Questions The focal point of this present article is to examine whether the type of image, either mental or visual, plays a crucial part in L2 vocabulary learning. By comparing the keyword and visual support methods, this article hopes to answer the following research questions (RQs): RQ1: Is the use of images via the keyword or visual support treatments successful in promoting participant’s vocabulary learning and retention of Spanish concrete nouns? RQ2: Is the use of the visual support treatment more effective than the keyword treatment in promoting participant’s vocabulary learning and retention of Spanish concrete nouns?

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Procedure Each of the four experimental classes (Class 1= 17; Class 2 = 20; Class 3 = 11; Class 4 = 11) received two treatments during the study, the keyword treatment and the visual support treatment. During each of these consecutive treatments, a total of 59 participants in four classes attempted to learn a different set of 12 vocabulary items. Since each class underwent two 3-day treatments (50 minutes each), participants participated in a total treatment period of six consecutive class periods. Mirroring a similar design as implemented by Sagarra and Alba (2006), in order to eliminate any potential confounding effects of either list of vocabulary words and presentation order, the counterbalancing of treatments and presentation orders across each class was included in the experimental design. Each class was assigned one of two presentation orders as seen in Table 1. Table 1. Experimental Design

Words 1-12 13-24

Presentation Order 1 Keyword* Visual support*

Presentation Order 2 Visual support* Keyword*

*3-day treatment

Forty-four participants from two control classes comprised a control group. This control group did not explicitly learn the L2 target vocabulary nor implement either treatment. The two experimental classes and one control group instructors were full-time graduate teaching assistants with at least 2 years of experience teaching L2 Spanish. Each experimental class was also videotaped to confirm that lesson plans were followed accordingly and treatments implemented faithfully. Participants

Six intact undergraduate first semester Spanish 1001 classes from a large, public university were the participants for this study. Fifty-nine participants made up the four experimental classes whereas forty-four participants from two control classes formed the control group. Each of three teachers taught two classes of the same type.


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All participants were adult learners over the age of 18 years old and did not receive any type of compensation for their participation in this study. In order to consider the possible differences between participants in each class, each participant completed a background questionnaire at the beginning of the treatment period. Out of all the participants from the six classes, all but three were native speakers of English. However, since the non-native speakers of English (Vietnamese, Arabic, and Albanian) were highly proficient, advanced learners in English as determined at the time of the study, they were still included in the study. Means of class averages also confirmed the comparability of all classes involved in the study. Each class/group had an overall average of more than 83%. The difference between the lowest and highest class average was less than 10%. The group means indicated comparability between classes, thus suggesting all classes had an equivalent skill level for and understanding of the L2 being learned. This was confirmed when no differences between classes were found after performing a univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the individual averages, with comparisons by class. Words

The target vocabulary words used during the treatment were Spanish concrete nouns specifically related to clothing and traveling. The 24 words chosen were divided into two groups of 12. Each group of 12 was taught by utilizing each of the two instruction types via the two presentation orders. Table 2 lists the target vocabulary and their corresponding L1 fixed meaning for this study. Table 2. Target Vocabulary

Word 1–12 el impermeable – raincoat el paraguas – umbrella los guantes – gloves la bufanda – gloves el collar – necklace el anillo – ring la pulsera – ring la cartera – wallet la bolsa – purse los calcetines – socks

Words 13–24 las mangas – sleeves el parasol – beach umbrella el bañador – bathing suit las sandalias – sandals las bermudas – bermuda shorts la sudadera – sweatshirt el camisón – nightgown el pijama – pajamas el albornoz – bathrobe el sujetador – bra

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el cinturón – belt las medias – stockings

el calzoncillo – men’s underwear la braga – women’s underwear

Average syllables per word = 3.08 Gender of nouns = 7 male, 5 female Singular and Plural breakdown = 9 singular, 3 plural

Average syllables per word = 3.00 Gender of nouns = 7 male, 5 female Singular and Plural breakdown = 9 singular, 3 plural

Keywords and Interactive Images for the Keyword Method

Participants generated their own keywords and interactive images for the keyword treatment in this study. The benefit of learner-generated components is that it requires deeper processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) and more involvement load (Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001). Self-generated keywords, which require a strong need, will aid in better retention of vocabulary words than teacher-generated keywords that only involve a moderate need (Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001; Sagarra & Alba, 2006). Visual Images for the Visual Support Method

Forty-three university first-semester Spanish 1001 students who were not possible participants for the study piloted images that coincided with the 24 Spanish target vocabulary. Upon evaluating the response of what physical image best triggered the meaning of the target word, the visual images were chosen for the visual support treatment’s lesson plans as well as testing. Lesson Plans

The lesson plans over each 3-day treatment were alike in design for the experimental classes. After the treatment’s explanation, the teacher presented the first set of 12 vocabulary words in a narrative. Since the participants were members of intact classes, it was important that vocabulary items were not isolated and taught apart from the rest of the lesson. Therefore, the vocabulary was integrated into the grammar presentation and communicative activities. Upon hearing the reading of the narrative, participants undergoing the keyword treatment individually created keywords and interactive images for each of the 12 vocabulary words. Participants recorded their self-created keywords and interactive images in a notebook that was collected daily during


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the treatment period. Participants undergoing the visual support treatment, completed a memory matching worksheet with physical images to find out if they were able to decipher the L1 meanings of the L2 vocabulary words through context clues. For both treatments, participants each spent 10 minutes on the above activities. In order to control any other possible confounding variables, all tasks and conditions that followed the presentation of the vocabulary were alike for each treatment. Testing

All participants completed a five-section pretest in order to ensure that they were not familiar with either set of vocabulary prior to the treatment. Each section included 10 questions, four of which were distractors, for a total of 50 questions. A separate immediate post-test and delayed post-test were given for each treatment in order to test for each set of vocabulary words separately. Each of these post-tests had the following five sections, of five questions each (two of which were distractors), regardless of receiving the keyword method or visual support treatment: Section 1 – participants answered open-ended questions in complete Spanish sentences by utilizing the target vocabulary; Section 2 – participants produced the L2 target word from L1 translations; Section 3 – participants produced the L1 translation from L2 target words; Section 4 – participants produced the L2 word from visual images utilized during the visual support treatment and; Section 5 – participants produced the L2 word from visual images not utilized in the visual support treatment. Table 3 details the split-block testing design during the total 6-day treatment period. Table 3. Testing Design for Each Experimental Class or Control Class

Group

Pre-test Immediate Post-test #1* Sub-group 1 A B Sub-group 2 B C Sub-group 3 C A * ** *** ****

Delayed Post-test #1** C A B

Administered immediately after Treatment 1 Administered two weeks after Treatment 1 Administered immediately after Treatment 2 Administered two weeks after Treatment 2

Immediate Post-test #2*** B C A

Delayed Post-test #2**** C A B


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Coding

Each of the five sections was coded separately in order to see if a certain aspect about one section made participants from one treatment do better than the other treatment group in another section. When participants needed to write out the L2 vocabulary in test sections, participants were given partial credit for answers that were spelled incorrectly up to 3 letters. Even though the correct spelling/word form was not given in these instances, the almost accurate spelling of these words illustrates that learning has begun for the L2 target vocabulary. Therefore, it was important to give partial credit for partial knowledge of words (Laufer and Nation, 1995). When coding a L1 meaning from a L2 word, the participant either knew the meaning of the target vocabulary or he/she did not. If a participant used a synonym in place of the L1 equivalent taught in class, full credit was given. The three non-distractor questions in each section were each valued at 1 point. For partial credit, .5 point was awarded to the participant. Each section was worth 3 points, a total of 15 points for the entire test.

Results Data from each section was analyzed separately in order to see if a certain aspect about one section made participants from one treatment do better than the other treatment group in another section with each set of vocabulary. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were run utilizing the within-subjects variable, time of test, and between-subjects variable, treatment as well as for the interaction between time of test and treatment group. Univariate ANOVAs were also applied to each test administration in order to identify the precise source of the interaction effect for treatment and time of test. Quantitative results

It is evident that the scores for both the keyword and visual groups on each test administration for each vocabulary list were very similar. These scores showed increased learning on the immediate post-test and delayed post-test in comparison to the pre-test results. On the other hand, the control group showed very little sign of increased knowledge and remained close to zero throughout the testing. Standard deviations indicate that there was always more variation among instructed groups after their treatment than in the control group. Tables


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4 and 5 show group means and standard deviations for the three test administrations for words 1–12 and 13–24. Results of repeated-measures ANOVAs for each test section for words 1–12 and words 13–24 indicated a significant main effect for the within-subjects variable, time of test, and a significant main effect for the between-subjects variable, treatment. There were also significant results for interaction between time of test and treatment. When combining data on all five test sections for each set of vocabulary, the results of repeated-measures ANOVAs followed the same pattern as the individual sections. All significant results are reported in Tables 6 and 7. Table 4. Group Means and Standard Deviations for Words 1–12

Test Section and Statistic Section 1 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 2 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 3 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 4 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 5 Group mean Stand. deviation All sections combined Group mean Stand. deviation

Keyword Pre Post Delay

Visual Pre Post Delay

Control Pre Post Delay

0.05 2.73 0.82 0.21 2.11 0.94

0.03 2.34 0.89 0.18 2.03 2.09

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

0.07 2.27 1.20 0.26 0.93 1.17

0.07 2.30 0.90 0.21 0.87 1.00

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.02

0.09 2.34 1.89 0.36 1.02 1.23

0.16 2.23 1.84 0.45 0.96 1.16

0.09 0.09 0.35 0.29 0.29 0.57

0.03 1.77 0.77 0.19 0.84 0.82

0.03 1.68 0.77 0.18 0.96 0.86

0.00 0.07 0.04 0.00 0.23 0.14

0.11 1.64 0.84 0.42 0.89 0.93

0.00 1.90 0.74 0.00 0.91 0.89

0.00 0.07 0.04 0.00 0.23 0.21

0.43 10.75 5.52 0.29 10.44 5.27 1.06 4.04 3.77 0.84 4.53 3.89

0.09 0.22 0.46 0.29 0.45 0.67

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Table 5. Group Means and Standard Deviations for Words 13–24

Test Section and Statistic Section 1 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 2 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 3 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 4 Group mean Stand. deviation Section 5 Group mean Stand. deviation All sections combined Group mean Stand. deviation

Keyword Pre Post Delay

Visual Pre Post Delay

Control Pre Post Delay

0.00 2.23 0.04 0.00 1.79 1.01

0.00 0.00

2.41 0.93 2.03 1.07

0.00 0.04 0.04 0.00 0.21 0.21

0.02 2.02 1.16 0.09 0.89 0.89

0.09 1.91 1.23 0.27 0.92 0.96

0.02 0.24 0.09 0.10 0.40 0.25

0.61 2.23 1.90 0.72 0.76 0.91

0.64 2.40 1.90 0.56 0.80 0.91

0.70 0.52 0.57 0.70 0.51 0.59

0.00 1.52 0.53 0.00 1.00 0.66

0.02 1.56 0.71 0.09 1.00 0.63

0.02 0.00 0.00 0.10 0.00 0.00

0.02 1.65 0.48 0.09 0.89 0.66

0.04 1.55 0.80 0.19 1.00 0.85

0.00 0.02 0.13 0.00 0.10 0.31

0.65 9.63 5.18 0.72 3.52 3.01

0.79 9.82 5.43 0.67 4.17 2.78

0.74 0.83 0.83 0.71 0.89 0.65

Table 6. Repeated-Measures Analysis of Variance of Words 1–12

Section

Effect

df

F

1

Within-subject variable, time of test

2

64.317 0.00

0.45

Between-subjects variable, treatment

2

15.67

0.00

0.28

Time*Treatment Within-subject variable, time of test

4 2

15.19 0.00 125.10 0.00

0.28 0.61


2

43.34

0.00

0.52


4 2

29.58 92.25

0.00 0.00

0.43 0.54


2

41.41

0.00

0.51

Time*Treatment

4

18.84

0.00

0.32

2

3

p

ηp2


92 4

5

All sections combined



2

93.51

0.00

0.54


2

29.21

0.00

0.43


4 2

19.47 76.55

0.00 0.00

0.33 0.49


2

31.79

0.00

0.45


4 2

16.85 0.00 211.23 0.00

0.30 0.73


2

42.20

0.00

0.52

Time*Treatment

4

46.93

0.00

0.54

The significant interaction of treatment group with time of test showed that the three groups changed differently over time. Both this interaction and significant main effect for each set of vocabulary are clearly illustrated in Figures 1 and 2. Table 7. Repeated-Measures Analysis of Variance of Words 13–24

Section

Effect

df

F

p

ηp2

1


2

54.19

0.00

0.41


2

18.05

0.00

0.31


4 2

12.04 95.58

0.00 0.00

0.23 0.55


2

43.15

0.00

0.52


4 2

16.01 45.50

0.00 0.00

0.29 0.37


2

39.75

0.00

0.50

Time*Treatment

4

14.58

0.00

0.27

2

3

93


4

5

All sections combined


2

65.29

0.00

0.45


2

25.82

0.00

0.40


4 2

15.84 59.95

0.00 0.00

0.29 0.43


2

35.73

0.00

0.48


4 2

14.75 0.00 193.79 0.00

0.27 0.71


2

49.41

0.00

0.56

Time*Treatment

4

43.39

0.00

0.52

Although there were significant main effects for the within-subjects variable, the between-subjects variable, and the interaction between time of test and treatment group for each set of vocabulary, after performing separate univariate ANOVAS for each test administration, with treatment group as the between-subjects variables, significant results for words 1–12 were found for the between-subjects variable on the immediate post-test, F (2, 79) = 66.27, p = 0.00, çp2 = 0.63, and the delayed post-test, F (2, 79) = 18.79, p = 0.00, çp2 = 0.32 as well as for words 13–24 for the post-test, F (2, 79) = 60.30, p = 0.00, çp2 = 0.60, and the delayed post-test, F (2, 79) = 26.79, p = 0.00, çp2 = 0.40. Nonetheless, Tukey post hoc analyses indicated that the control group differed from the treatment groups (p = 0.00 in both cases for each set of vocabulary) and that there were no significant differences between keyword and visual support methods for either set of vocabulary. Therefore, there was nothing about any one section of each test that made participants from one treatment group do better than participants from the other treatment group on words 1–12 or words 13–24.


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Figure 1. Group Means for Words 1–12, Combining Data from all Five Test Sections

Figure 2. Group Means for Words 13–24, Combining Data from all Five Test Sections

Discussion RQ1: Is the use of images via the keyword method or visual support method successful in promoting participant’s vocabulary learning and retention of Spanish concrete nouns? It is evident that there was successful vocabulary learning when implementing the keyword or visual support treatments as seen by scores on immediate post-tests for vocabulary words 1–12 and 13–24. Although the delayed post-test scores decreased from immediate post-tests, participants still retained about 50% of what they initially learned on the delayed post-tests.


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Both the keyword and visual support techniques made participants focus on the vocabulary profoundly by requiring increased intellectual effort. Participants attempted to make a connection between the target vocabulary and keyword and interactive image and/or physical image through involving themselves in each process. With the keyword method, participants created keyword and mental interactive images while with the visual support method, participants studied the visual image to make a direct association with the L2 vocabulary word. With each treatment, participants engaged in two types of cognitive activity: linguistic and visual. Therefore, this study supports that learning techniques such as the keyword and visual support methods that focus on deeper levels of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), a high involvement load (Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001), and DCT (Paivio & Desrochers, 1981) are ways in which L2 instructors can successfully facilitate the learning and retention of vocabulary in the L2 classroom. RQ2: Is the use of the visual support method more effective than the keyword method in promoting participant’s vocabulary learning and retention of Spanish concrete nouns? No, there was no statistical difference in the way that the groups promoted vocabulary development. The separate univariate ANOVAs and Tukey post hoc analyses data suggested that regardless of treatment, the participants increased vocabulary knowledge and retained this knowledge in a similar fashion. Therefore, it can be deduced that what the methods had in common, the use of an image, helped participants acquire L2 vocabulary. Regardless of being the mental image via the keyword method or the visual image via the visual support method, both types of images were found to be beneficial in L2 vocabulary acquisition.

Pedagogical Implications The keyword and visual support methods of L2 vocabulary instruction were implemented into real classrooms with real learners using testing instruments that were ecologically valid for a vocabulary lesson. The quantitative data revealed that regardless of what treatment was implemented, the participants increased their vocabulary knowledge of Spanish concrete nouns in a similar fashion immediately after and two weeks post-treatment. Although vocabulary is an important component to learning a language, it is not the only component that must be focused on in a classroom. Therefore,


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it is imperative that the techniques employed in the classroom are time effective. A substantial amount of time should not be solely reserved for the implementation of a particular vocabulary technique so that all the language classroom goals of reading, writing, speaking and listening can be accomplished. Regardless of the strategy chosen, vocabulary learning should be done and must be done by the L2 learner and in the L2 classroom. Since vocabulary acquisition is such a complex and multi-faceted process (Nation, 2001), educators must support students in vocabulary learning. Instructors have the responsibility to implement and encourage the use of various L2 vocabulary teaching and learning strategies. In like fashion, students must take responsibility in their language development. This study thus revealed how to reveal how an image, via the keyword and visual support methods, can bring L2 vocabulary acquisition into focus in the L2 classroom and for the L2 learner.

References: Akbari, O., (2008), Teaching vocabulary items through contextualization and picture to elementary Iranian EFL students, “Asian EFL Journal”, Vol. 10 (3), pp. 53–77. Atkinson, R. C., (1975), Mnemonics in second-language learning, “American Psychologist”, Vol. 30, pp. 821–828. Craik, F. I. M. & Lockhart, R. S., (1972), Levels of processing: A framework for memory research, “Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior”, Vol. 11(6), pp. 671–684. Desrochers, A., Wieland, L. D. & Coté, M., (1991), Instructional effects in the use of the mnemonic keyword method for learning German nouns and their grammatical gender, “Applied Cognitive Psychology”, Vol. 5, pp. 19–36. Elhelou, M-W. A., (1994), Arab children’s use of the keyword method to learn English vocabulary words, “Educational Research”, Vol. 36, pp. 295–302. Ellis, N. C., (1994), Vocabulary acquisition: The implicit ins and outs of explicit cognitive mediation. In: N.C. Ellis (ed.), Implicit and Explicit Learning of Languages, Harcourt Brace, London, pp.211–282. Feinaigle, G. V., (1813), The new art of memory, Sherwood, Neely & Jones, London. Hager, M., (2011), Culture, Psychology and Language Learning. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers. Hulstijn, J. H., (2001), Intentional and incidental second language vocabulary learning: A reappraisal of elaboration, rehearsal and automaticity. In: P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 258-286.


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Hulstijn, J. H. & Laufer, B., (2001), Some empirical evidence for the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary acquisition, “Language Learning”, Vol. 51 (3), pp. 539–558. Kasper, L. F. & Glass, A. L., (1988), The role of the keyword method in the acquisition of Spanish vocabulary, “Human Learning”, Vol. 1, pp. 235–250. Laufer, B. & Nation, P., (1995), Vocabulary size and use: Lexical richness in L2 written production, “Applied Linguistics”, Vol. 16, pp. 76–104. Nation, P., (2001), Learning vocabulary in another language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Paivio, A., (1971), Imagery and verbal processes, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. Paivio, A. & Desrochers, A., (1981), Mnemonic techniques in second-language Learning, “Journal of Educational Psychology”, Vol. 73(6), pp. 780–795. Raugh, M. R. & Atkinson, R. C., (1975), A mnemonic method for learning a second-language vocabulary, “Journal of Educational Psychology”, Vol. 67, pp. 1–16. Robertson, I., (2003), Opening the Mind’s Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How to See, St. Martin’s Press, New York. Sadoski, M. & Paivio, A., (2001), Imagery and text: A dual coding theory of reading and writing, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, New Jersey. Sagarra, N. & Alba, M., (2006), The key is in the keyword: L2 vocabulary learning methods with beginning learners of Spanish, “Modern Language Journal”, Vol. 90 (2), pp. 228–243. Schmitt, N., (2000), Vocabulary in language teaching, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tight, D. G., (2010), Perceptual learning style matching and L2 vocabulary acquisition, “Language Learning”, Vol. 60 (4), pp. 792–833. Wang, A. Y. & Thomas, M. H., (1992), The effect of imagery-based mnemonics on the long-term retention of Chinese characters, “Language Learning”, Vol. 42, pp. 359–376. Wang, A. Y., Thomas, M. H. & Ouellette, J. A., (1992), Keyword mnemonic and retention of second language vocabulary words, “Journal of Educational Psychology”, Vol. 84, pp. 520–528.


Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska-Heim

Audio Description of artworks in university – level teaching – problems issues Abstract: The aim of the article is to present various problems concerning the teaching of Audio Description of artworks in university-level. Audio Description works were conducted by students of Art History of the University of Łódź under supervision of prof. Aneta Pawłowska and Julia Sowińska-Heim Ph.D. The project involved the creation of a series of audio description of selected works from the Museum of Art in Łódź (ms1 and ms2), the Museum of the City of Łódź, as well as the Factory Museum. In the subsequent academic years, starting from 2013/14, student groups consisting of 8–12 people, created audio-descriptions based on collections of Łódź museums. The main part of the project was activation and development of students, who, by engaging in practical activities and through direct contact and interaction with cultural institutions. Another important issue was increasing chances of visually impaired people to access important cultural heritage and thereby promoting social inclusion in the cultural area. Keywords: Audio Description, visually impaired people, art collection, museums, academic didactic

Our project concerning Audio Description (AD) primarily aimed at increasing chances of visually impaired people to access important cultural her-


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Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska -Heim

itage and thereby promoting social inclusion in the cultural area. Undertaken activities were an element of the open museum concept while determining the needs of disabled recipients. Another important part was mobilization and development of students, who, by engaging in practical activities and through direct contact and interaction with cultural institutions as well as art recipients (disabled people), trained their workshop, while developing new skills, and, establishing valuable relations thanks to working in the university environment. Activities undertaken within the project have created an interactive and creative environment both for students looking for a career path and for new opportunities for cooperation and development of cultural institutions, NGOs and local community, including frequently neglected group of people with visual impairment. The project involved the creation of a series of audio description of selected works from the Museum of Art in Łódź (ms1 and ms2), the Museum of the City of Łódź, as well as the Factory Museum. Contact with a wide variety of museum spaces and exhibits related to these museums: from the works by the artistic avant-garde through nineteenth-century interiors to the factory machinery, gave the students opportunity to learn about a broad spectrum of challenges which audio-descriptors face. Engagement of doctoral and undergraduate students in research and development works allowed the participants not only to broaden their knowledge, but also to gain practical skills. Cooperation with Łódź cultural institutions took the form of volunteering, trainings and internships. A valuable final effect was also development of students’ responsibility for their own environment and involvement in the public affairs of the University, acquisition of soft competences, such as teamwork, creativity, communicativeness and time management (Wentz, 2012, pp. 39–42). The students took part in workshops prepared especially for them, held by the employees of the National Museum in Warsaw, the Museum of Art in Łódź, and Zachęta museum in Warsaw. Additional consultations were also organized with methodologists from the University of Łódź (e.g. from the Department of Journalism and Social Communication). Students’ work was verified upon consultations with the blind (correctness of the description was verified directly during the tour in the museum spaces). The audio-descriptions prepared within the scope of the project were recorded by the students in the professional recording studio of University of Łódź. The AD were accompanied by appropriate, specially selected background music. After proper verification and

AUDIO DESCRIPTION OF ARTWORKS IN UNIVERSITY…

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refinement, final editions of the recorded selected artistic objects were handed over to museums. The Audio Description texts were matched with appropriate accompanying background music As part of spreading research results and popularization of the subject, team members, including selected students, participated in conferences, and gave interviews on the radio and the press. There are also a number of publications, including a book. Social inclusion and activation of people with visual impairment is a very important issue that requires continuous research and broadening of activities. What seems a significant aspect of the complex problem is providing visually impaired and blind people with access to broadly understood culture, including visual arts based primarily on visual stimuli. AD is an important tool that builds a bridge between artifacts and the blind, enabling perception of artworks (plastic, film, or theatrical arts). It is an attempt to translate the message and visual language into other senses, with the main stimulus aimed at atactivating the sense of hearing. However, although audio description is more and more often used in museum spaces, its methods and principles have not been clearly determined and defined so far. The ongoing discussions concern not only specific problems, but also such fundamental issues as understanding “objectivity” of the AD (Palmer, Salawy, 2015, pp. 126–148; Kruger, Oreo, 2010, pp. 141–142). This problem may also be perceived in a broader context, generally referring to methodology of describing artworks and how the message influences their perception. The basic question is, therefore, what should a description include. According to a dominating belief, an appropriate AD should depict visual side of the artefact (a painting, film scene, architecture, etc.) in an objective and concise manner. Subjective and qualitative assessments as part of descriptor’s interpretation should be eliminated. It is also important to distinguish and separate emotions and impressions that reception of the work arouses in the author of the audio description (American Council, 2010, p. 17). At the same time, the question arises about a type of information provided in a description, which is necessary for full reception and understanding of the artwork. Opinions on the content included in the description are divided even among people with visual impairment. According to the research conducted at the Museum of Art in Łódź by prof. Aneta Pawłowska, for some participants description which is maximally objectified and completely limited to the formal aspect of the painting is not


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enough, since it gives no possibility to understand aesthetic values c ontained in the work (cf. Pawłowska, 2015; Pawłowska, Sowińska-Heim, 2016; Pawłowska, Sowińska-Heim, 2016). A similar attitude is expressed by the American Council of the Blind, since, although its definition of AD assumes objectivity, what they give as an example of interesting descriptions of artworks that enjoy immense popularity and attract a wide audience is Robert Sutter’s Museum of the Mind series, in which the author goes beyond impassioned comment. For instance, Sutter’s description of Thomas Eatkins’ work, Max Schmitt In a Single Scull, starts with the following sentence “it would be truly the command of the space over your sofa” (Description of a Museum Painting). In this simple way, imagination of the recipient is stimulated from the very beginning. Referring to individual daily experience, especially connected with the sense of touch, physicality facilitates perception and understanding of the description. It is also advantageous for the blind to have the opportunity provided by some museums to experience the artwork by touching it (American Council, 2010, pp. 51–52). Although AD focuses primarily on the work itself, it should also include basic historical and factual information, such as the artist’s name, nationality, title, date, work dimensions and technique. This information should be placed at the beginning of the description. The American Council of the Blind also advises that the introduction should include the nature of the exhibition space, its size, mood or atmosphere (American Council, 2010, p. 52). In Poland, basic rules concerning ways and rules of making culture and art available to visually impaired and blind people were developed by two leading institutions dealing with creation of audio-description. These are the Warsaw Culture Without Barriers Foundation1 and the Białystok Audio Description Foundation2. The starting point for all AD works,

1

2

The Culture Without Barriers Foundation was established in 2004 and is takes active part in the process of making culture available to the blind. Within the framework of the Foundation’s activities, 81 performances have been made available in 24 Polish theatres; adaptations have been made in 7 museums: the Warsaw Uprising Museum, the Royal Castle, the National Museum in Warsaw, the Fryderyk Chopin Museum, the Museum of Central Pomerania in Słupsk, the Schindler’s Factory Museum Branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Cracow, the Museum of King John III’s Palace at Wilanów and the History Meeting House; Audio Description and subtitles for the deaf have been prepared for 51 films. The Foundation operates throughout Poland mainly in Warsaw, Poznań, Katowice, Cracow, Łódź, it is also active on the Internet. The Audio Description Foundation has been active since 2008, initially in Białystok. Its main objectives include initiating and supporting scientific research aiming at improving accessibility of culture and art for people with disabilities, information, education, training


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both in the field of visual and architectural arts, as well as exhibitions, museum exhibits or nature trails, must, of course, be adequate qualifications. Although according to the accepted assumptions, a description should refer only to what is visible and answer the questions: who?, what?, how?, where?, when?, recommendations include a statement indicating that outside the objective historical facts, knowledge gained in the preparation process should also cover various interpretations of the work and knowledge of the anecdote (Culture Without Barriers Foundation). The guidelines also indicate that a descriptor should avoid simple answers to questions what for?: except where such clarification is necessary in order to avoid ambiguity and vagueness of the message. At the same time, in justified cases, it is possible to give up a simple description of the image and replace it with explanation introducing and clarifying cultural codes, symbols and formal procedures used in the artwork (Cultural Without Barriers Foundation). A brief general description, containing everything that is most important in a given work/painting/scene should be then defined, ranked according to importance of the information with preservation of linear continuity of the description. Other important issues are narration conciseness and clarity of the visual elements, which are crucial for understanding of the work (Szarkowska, 2009). Too much information contained in the message distorts clearness of reception and introduces information chaos (Szarkowska, 2009). As emphasized by Chris Downey, an architect who suddenly became blind in 2008, sight definitely makes it easy to separate and arrange individual components, but without visual reception too many data are overwhelming (Nijs, Vermeersch, Devlieger, Heylighen, 2010, p. 1819). Interesting research experience includes previously mentioned attempts and Audio Description works conducted by students of Art History of the University of Łódź under supervision of prof. Aneta Pawłowska and Julia Sowińska-Heim Ph.D. In the subsequent academic years, starting from 2013/14, student groups consisting of 8–12 people, created audio-descriptions based on collections of Łódź museums. In the first year of the course, students from the 3rd year of undergraduate studies worked on a description of the Neoplastic Room3, being the heart of the Museum of Art in Łódź (currently a branch

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and technical support for the disabled, people and institutions from the cultural and art sector and people supporting Foundation’s goals, as well as developing Audio Description standards and professional ethics code for people who prepare audio-descriptions. The Neoplastic Room was designed in 1947 by Władysław Strzemiński at the order of the director of the Museum of Art in Łódź, Marian Mnich. It was a central place in the struc-


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of ms1), according to the avant-garde concept of Wladyslaw Strzemiński. In the next year, students elaborated audio-descriptions of selected artistic objects presented at the Museum of Art in Łódź, a branch of ms2, including: No title by Sam Francis, Paranoid Ladyby Peter Klasen or Insurgent at the Church of St. Cross by Eugene Haneman. In the academic year 2015/2016 close cooperation with the Museum of the City of Łódź, located in the nineteenth-century palace of a former Łódź factory owner, Izrael Kalamowicz Poznański, was established, resulting in elaboration and creation of Audio Description of the museum interiors, i.e. the main hall, a dining room, an office of Izrael Poznański, a mirror room, art rooms, a male room and a corridor from the private part of the palace, living rooms from the former housing space, a small dining room and a fireplace room. In 2016/2017, within the framework of apprenticeship, students of art history with students of Spanish philology created descriptions of the interior and selected objects (e.g. historic looms) at the Factory Museum in Łódź. This time descriptions were translated into Spanish and English so that they could also be used by foreign tourists visiting the museum. It should be added that the descriptions created in the teams consisting of a student-art historian and a student-philologist were very clear and exhaustive with a great emphasis on each statement and word. Blind and visually-impaired participants of the project finish, consulting the descriptions, especially praised their clarity. Students involved in the project in a comprehensive way could train their skills both during specialist workshops prepared for them by professional museum workers in both Łódź and Warsaw, as well as consult with methodologists from the Department of Journalism and Social Communication of the University of Łódź. A selected group of Audio Description projects were provided with sound at the recording studio of the University of Łódź. A great challenge and a new experience for students was matching Audio Description texts with an appropriate music background, accompanying verbal descriptions. All descriptions were always presented and consulted with the blind in the Polish Association for the Blind, Łódź Branch or in cooperation with the Łódź Branch of the Chance for the Blind Foundation. After appropriate verification and refinement, final versions of the recorded audio-descriptions of selected artistic objects were prepared and transferred ture of the permanent exhibition. The room was opened to the public in 1948. At that time, it was an original experiment in the area of arranging museum space based on the assumptions of avant-garde art. To see more (Bois, 1993, pp. 128–133).


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to museums. A further goal of the activities is creation, together with students from the Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics of the University of Łódź, a mobile application, which, through a beacon system, would allow free navigation of people with visual impairment in the museum space and presentation of descriptions of the works in front of which they stand in their own mobile phones. A basic goal of project-based classes in the history of art related to Audio Description was creation of a situation of various art concepts presentation in the museum space as a real task to be performed. In addition, students had the opportunity to improve their ability to “describe an artwork”, one of the most important competences of the history of art, practiced during a variety of preparatory classes and then to use this skill to solve the problem indicated by the lecturer. Majority of classes were conducted in the museum space, which widened the students’ knowledge of importance and functions of museums and prepared them practically for further work in museum institutions. Moreover, in-depth, critical analysis of the material and visual structure of selected works of contemporary art increased their analytical skills and continued to discuss the phenomenon of contemporary visual arts: their content and context of their creation and functioning. In addition, students gained additional practical skill, namely presentation of art to the blind and visually impaired. It was a very important element, because statistics show that 67% of respondents declare inability to help the blind and even experience anxiety (Aiden, McCarthy, 2014). What is very important in case of the project-based method during Audio Description classes is development of student’s subjectivity. It is equally important that work on the project is carried out in groups (teamwork), which teaches responsibility and self-evaluation, helps to develop cooperation skills and interpersonal competences (often the leader appeared spontaneously among the student, supporting lecturer’s actions). Work in the group also supported development of students’ decision and choice sphere, which belongs to the scope of so-called “soft competencies”, so much praised by modern employers. It should be added that, in order to reinforce the need for cooperation, all members of each team were assessed for carrying out the project. It included assessment of the lecturer and of students from other project groups, as well as self-evaluation. Analysis of the self-evaluation cards brings interesting information on benefits of participating in the project, such as “acquiring a new skill - ability to construct descriptions of interiors adapted for the blind”, an


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ability to empathize with “a way of perceiving the space by a blind person”, but also strengthening the ability to work in a group. An additional goal of the auto-description course, conducted with the use of this method, is showing connection between art history and other disciplines, since the projects are intended to have interdisciplinary character (collaboration with students from other faculties e.g. of philology or computer science deepens this impression). The students naturally used the facilities, such as new media e.g. Facebook, internet platforms for data transferring, etc. What appeared very difficult in the process of creating AD was the fact that some described artworks belonged to the circle of abstract art. Thus it was necessary to devise a procedure that does not refer to the real world, since the work itself is devoid of all the illustrative features and the artist did not try to imitate nature. However, eliminating interpretative elements and subjective comparisons (e.g. to clouds or scattered yarn in case of paintings by Władysław Strzemiński from the 1940s) from the description, consistent with the postulates commonly formulated by Audio Descriptors (Grabska, Morawska 1977, p. 537), made the narrations, permeated with mathematical references to numerical relations, too tedious for visually impaired people, who were present in the museum during project finalization. Some description elements, despite previous consultations with professional audio-descriptors, were considered by visually impaired people as incorrect, one example was the AD of the work Composition of the three equivalents by Georges Vantongerloo from 1921 too strongly refer to purely mathematical references: The upper vertical white rectangle reaches half of the height of the entire painting. A green one of the height of ¼ of square and rectangle height. In the bottom right-hand corner, there is a white figure similar to the square. Separated from the violet rectangle, green rectangle identical in shape, Its left edge outlines half of the central square. In the bottom left-hand corner, a white rectangle that extends over half of the entire painting. (Room audio-description, 2014, p. 5) Similarly, description of the interior of the Neoplastic Room, which, in order to reflect interrelationships of walls colours, were measured by the students with steps, was not approved of:


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Take two steps and turn left. Entrance to the smaller Neoplastic Room is in front of you. After 5 steps you will be inside the Small Neoplastic Room. (Room audio-description, 2014, p. 5) In this case, “typical steps”, measured several times, turned out to be different for each blind person, and a visually impaired person needed support of a seeing person to get to the proper point of the room. However, during classes with Audio Description at the Factory Museum in Łódź, a group of blind and visually impaired people, consisting of beneficiaries of the Chance for the Blind Foundation, clearly pointed out the need to determine a distance between objects, preferring, this time, steps to the metric system. It would probably be a good solution to create special touch path, socalled delineating strip as an element of the Touch Information System, to mark the surface for blind and visually impaired people through clear identification of communication lines with places to stop to get information about the object (Blind and visually impaired people in the public space). An interesting approach towards the requirements of Audio Description is adopted by Robert Więckowski, a journalist who has been blind for years. He approaches the subject of describing artworks for the blind from the viewpoint of a visually impaired person and a literature expert at the same time. In his article, titled Audiodeskrypcja piękna (Więckowski, 2014, pp. 109–123), he analyses the problem of accuracy of translation, in this case of the original artwork and description of audio-description, and perception of the resulting description, depending on its length and degree of detail. The author emphasizes that five types of description: anarchic, with the unifying frame, with semantic dominant, kinetic, space deforming, being categories suggested by Janusz Sławiński in the field of literary research, could be applied effectively to Audio Description works (Więckowski, 2014, pp. 117–118). Więckowski also emphasizes that since literature has ekphrasis, namely descriptions of visual artworks that paint the image with words, which are faithful and expressive at the same time, it is analogically possible to create verbal descriptions with clearly defined contours and shapes for the blind. He also advocates the use of stylistic traits, primarily metaphors, in audio-descriptions of artworks, because they, as the author states, that can effectively build aesthetic tension at the recipient (Więckowski, 2014, pp. 120–121).

Journal of Human Dignity and Wellbeing Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska -Heim

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According to an Audio Descriptor, Barbara Szymańska, “Correctly created AD no longer audible, becoming identical with presented image” (Szymańska, 2010). This is a very difficult task. When creating audio-descriptions, one should not forget that a target group consists of individuals with very different experience and education level: architects, sociologists, teachers, but also unemployed people. Points of reference are different in case of those who have lost sight and those who have always been blind. Taking into account the fact that in Poland there are over 1.5 million people with sight impairments, which hinder normal functioning, a problem of creating audio-descriptions seems particularly important. These days, when dominance of visual culture is particularly visible, one should never forget about people with visual dysfunctions, who are equal culture recipients. At the same time, there is a lack of detailed research thanks to which a basis for creation of Audio Description rules could be elaborated in a scientific way. Therefore, it is particularly urgent to improve the quality of reception of visual materials, including widely understood artworks: paintings, graphics, spatial artistic installations, sculptures, photographs, etc. by people with visual impairments. Efforts should be made to develop standards that will best reflect expectations of the target audience group and facilitate inclusion of people with visual impairments in social life. It seems that all these challenges can be met through broader inclusion of academic circles and students themselves, being people who are developing their habits related to their role in the museum space and dissemination of cultural goods, into broadly understood Audio Description problems.

References: Book sources American Council of the Blind’s Audio Description Project. Audio Description Guidelines and Best Practices, (2010), J. Snyder (ed.), USA. Audiodeskrypcja Sali, (2014), typescript, Katedra Historii Sztuki, Łódź. Bois, Y.-A., (1993), Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge-London, pp. 128–133. Grabska, E., Morawska, H., (1977), Artyści o sztuce. Od van Gogha do Picassa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa. Kruger, J.-L., Orero, P., (2010), Introduction. Audio description, audio narration - a new era in AVI, “Perspectives: Studies in Translatology”, Vol. 18.3, pp. 141–142. Nijs, G., Vermeersch, P.W., Devlieger, P. and Heylighen, A., (2010), Extending the dialogue between design(ers) and disabled use(rs): from conversation to


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embodied skill. In: International Design Conference — Design 2010, Dubrovnik. Palmer, A., Salawy, A., (2015), Audio Description on the Thought-Action Continuum, “Style”, Vol. 49, pp. 126–148. Pawłowska, A., (2015), Sztuka audiodeskrypcji — audiodeskrypcja sztuki — koncepcja nowej metody z zakresu upowszechniania sztuk wizualnych. In: K. Klimczak, J. Płuciennik (eds.), Twórczość, uniwersytet, pasja… O zaangażowaniu w dydaktyce, Łódź , pp. 49–63. Wentz, F. H., (2012), Soft Skills Training: A Workbook to Develop Skills for Employment, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Salt Lake City. Pawłowska, A., Sowińska-Heim, J., (2016), Audiodeskrypcja dzieł sztuki — metody, problemy, przykłady, Łódź. Pawłowska, A., Sowińska-Heim, J., (2016), Niewidomi w świecie sztuki. Pozawizualna percepcja dzieł plastycznych. In: P. Gryglewski, A. Barczyk (eds.), Sztuka Polski Środkowej, Studia VI, Księży Młyn Dom Wydawniczy, Łódź, pp. 233–242. Szarkowska, A., (2009), Audiodeskryberem być – wywiad z Krzysztofem Szubzdą, „Przekładaniec”, Vol. 20, pp. 131-135. Więckowski, R., (2014), Audiodeskrypcja piękna, „Przekładaniec”, Vol. 28, pp. 109– 123. Web sources [1] Aiden, H., McCarthy, A., (2014), Current attitudes towards disabled people – Scope, [www.scope.org.uk/.../Publication%20Directory/Current-attitudes], accessed: 17.10.2017. [2] Description of a Museum Painting, [http://www.acb.org/adp/museumpainting. html], accessed: 12.09.2015. [3] Fundacja Kultury Bez Barier, Audiodeskrypcja – zasady tworzenia, [http://kulturabezbarier.org/container/Publikacja/Audiodeskrypcja%20%20zasady%20 tworzenia.pdf], accessed: 17.06.2017. [4] Niewidomi i słabowidzący w przestrzeni publicznej, [http://edroga.pl/drogi-i-mosty/niewidomi-i-slabowidzacy-w-przestrzeni-publicznej-iiia28123305], accessed: 15.09.2017. [5] Szymańska (Interview), (2010), Wywiad z Barbarą Szymańską Wiceprezes Zarządu Fundacji Audiodeskrypcja, [http://www.audiodeskrypcja.org.pl/?start=75], accessed: 18.10.2017.


Shannon M. Hilliker

Teacher candidate use of hyperlinks to support peer social interaction in an online course Abstract: Master’s programs to prepare tomorrow’s teachers must be rigorous in order to train effective teachers to support the construction of learning in our pre-K-12 public schools. To this end, teacher education courses and full programs have moved online to not only reach a more diverse population, but offer convenience to those that wish to become educators. There are many advantages that have been documented to online course delivery of teacher education course work. This study builds on that body of research and moves toward discovering the ways in which teachers use the online environment to interact and support one another given the social nature of learning. Teachers in a 15-week course about instructional technology use the online environment to share links with one another. An advantage of the “hyper” environment where they are learning is that they can provide links as referents for 1. classroom resources 2. more information 3. “tech sources” and 4. pedagogical sources. These four categories are highlighted with a focus on how they are used for idea exchange among teachers Key words: online learning, teacher education, social learning, teachers, instructional technology, higher education


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Introduction Technology has made the development, delivery, and access to online courses increasingly easier and popular for both instructors and students. Online courses require students to conduct their work online in a course space entirely via the World Wide Web. Most studies in online higher education focus on topics such as student learning and achievement, student satisfaction, student attitudes and perceptions, student/instructor interaction, and course design (Eom & Ashill, 2016; Harrison, Hunt, Thomas-Varcoe, Motteram, Rawlings & Gemmell, 2016; Khan, Egbue, Palkie & Madden, 2017; Lenert & Janes, 2017; Martin & Bollinger, 2018). Online courses have captured the attention of many researchers in an effort to demonstrate that online learning can be superior, or at minimum, equal to face-to-face learning (Bandara & Wijekularathn, 2017; Cavanaugh & Jacquemin, 2015; Slover & Mandernach, 2018). Online discussions and interaction opportunities can allow for knowledge construction through social negotiations from the participants. Creating environments where students can interact with their peers is essential to learning (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). Online classrooms can be venues for activities that allow for this social interaction. When students are given the opportunity to interact with one another in their online courses one of the key features that can support this interaction is that students in the course can add hyperlinks to their course posts to further their sharing of ideas with one another. The “hyper” environment, is unique to an online class.

Affordances of Online Learning in Teacher Education Along with the ability to support social interaction, there are numerous other advantages of online courses. Researchers have explored actual courses delivered online to receive feedback from students who have taken and instructors who have taught classes online in order to provide insight into advantages and affordances of the asynchronous learning environment. In Murray’s (2005) dissertation, as part of the data collection, the author asked both students and teachers about the advantages and disadvantages in an online class to find out, from a psychological perspective, about power and relationships in online learning. When Murray (2005) asked his participants about the advantages of taking online courses he got responses that cited driving and parking time, being able to log on and be in class at any time from any location, students can

TEACHER CANDIDATE USE OF HYPERLINKS TO SUPPORT…

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pay attention to the work and those submissions they wanted and ignore those that were not of value to them, and there is more continuity than sitting three hours once a week in a face-to-face classroom as online class participation takes place throughout a span of time (pp. 103–111). Some studies contrast the face-to-face environment to that of the online environment to find ways in ways in which both modalities compare in terms of advantages and affordances. In a professional development study by Hawkes & Romiszowski (2001) the discourse of an online course was compared to the discourse in a face-to face classroom. The authors concluded that the value of the online course is that it facilitated collaboration between teachers and encouraged their critical reflection (p. 285). The online version provided convenient access to colleagues where teachers could share experiences, the speed at which messages are sent and received promotes interaction, it is time and place independent, interaction in multiple topics is possible, students can look back at previous posts and dialog can be on going for an extended period of time. In a study by Chiero, Beare, Marshall & Torgerson (2015), an online teacher education program was compared to a traditional face-to-face program. Teacher candidates in the online program felt that they were more prepared than the traditional teacher candidates. The advantages to completing the program online were that the teachers could be any place geographically and do the work from home, faculty members followed the students in close collaboration via a spiral curriculum, so candidates felt close ties and had deeper collaboration with their faculty and peers. In Johnson-Taylor’s (2005) dissertation she looked at learning in the faceto-face, online and hybrid (both face-to-face meetings as well as an online component) mediums. The author found that students can be more reflective and develop well-constructed and thought out responses in the online environment. They have time to think and re-think their responses as well as edit. The online environment gave more opportunities for communication because students were not judged by appearance, students may perform better at a certain time of day and students can’t “hide” as they are usually given credit for participation. In a study by Harlen (2004) comparing face-to-face and online professional development courses for teachers, the author provided what he considers some advantages and disadvantages of an online class. The advantages of online include provides time for reflection, provides flexibility for when and how long students explore and follow up on discussions, the opportunity


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to read and reread and to give and receive comments on different experiences from others, and exposure to a team of experts beyond the facilitator of the course. In conclusion, it has been shown that onlineclasses are spaces that can support social interaction and therefore learning. Faculty and students, especially in the field of teacher education, cite many ways that the online environment can be beneficial. There have not been a lot of studies, however, that look at the specific discourse from an online class to analyze exactly how students find something special in the online environment to support their interaction and learning. In this particular case, teachers used hyperlinks in their interactions with one another to support their interaction without implicit instruction in the course to include links in their posts. Given the number of times teachers used links in their work online the following research question was answered: In what ways do teachers share links with one another in their online coursework?

Research Methodology Nine participants who completed an online instructional technology focused course participated in the study. Students were expected to log onto the course and contribute at least 3-4 times a week in the course. Some course work required students to work in small groups with a partner(s) and then present their work to the whole class. All assignments required peer feedback and written work was also given feedback by the instructor. The course consisted of seven modules (15 weeks) about using media in the language classroom for K-12 teachers. The students were never asked to include links in their course work. Participants were pre- or in-service teachers, came from various backgrounds, taught in various settings, had varied professional experience, and taught in different content areas. Using content analysis of the archived coursework from the semester-long instructional technology course instances where teachers used links in their posts to one another were categorized. Analysis of key course assignments such as discussion entries and subsequent dialog with peers provided insight into the ways these teachers used hyperlinks in the course. After the course all participants agreed to an online interview and later six participated in two online focus groups.


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Analysis of the data began with the archived coursework. The discourse of peer interaction to find instances where the teachers used a link in their post were imported into Nvivo. A code or category was assigned to each instance where a link was present in a course post. The individual interview and focus groups were conducted to probe the participants for further ideas about the patterns of link usage that had been found in the course work.

Results A student sharing external hyperlinks demonstrates the non-linear, multimodal nature of online learning. In a face-to-face classroom a website may be referenced, but the exact address may not be available and students would not have the opportunity to look at the site as it should be viewed via independent, not instructor-dependent, navigation in context. Once a student provides a link, colleagues can look at it immediately and decide if it is useful. Students reported different reasons for providing a link in their posts. The first reason is to provide each other with links to sites that can be used in the classroom with students and ideas on how to use the Internet in the classroom. Also, students provided links to sites that had more information on topics being discussed in class, to cite a source that would strengthen their argument or give more information about their submission to the course. Lastly, students supplied each other with links for “tech” help and pedagogical help for topics and projects completed in the course. When asked in the online interview about using outside sources and linking them in his coursework, and why he took the time to search for sources, Jack stated: …I also like to share things that I find that are interesting and/or enlightening. Sometimes I like to include references as “preemptive strikes” to a post I make that might be controversial… I think that this is about the best place for it because the links are con venient – the person is online already, so all they need to do is click on it. Had I given a similar link in a real-time environment, I doubt as many people would have looked at it. I can’t image people rushing home going, “Oh, oh! Let me take extra time to look up that site!” I might do that, but then I sometimes am strange in my quest for knowledge…


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I usually searched for sites that were pertinent to the discussion at hand. I hope they were [helpful]. I tried to find information to give different opinions just to show what is out there. –Jack Why the students chose to add links to their coursework was interesting. Soonhee stated, “…looks more interesting and professional” and “...I see people do that…so perhaps, I did too…” Abigail stated that she added links “to share information” and Nicole said, “i definitely though links added clout and importance.” Since all of this sharing of sites is going on, I wondered if they were actually being used by others. During Soonhee, Ann and Ashley’s focus group I asked them if they followed the links and then if this helped in their understanding of the coursework. Ann stated, “…if someone takes the time to provide a link i’ll check it out.” Ashley reported, “yes, I used merlot…I wish I had kept a list of the links because over the past year or so I have wanted to visit places again and had trouble finding them.” Finally, Soonhee stated that she visited a few, but did not want to take the time for things to load, but saved the sites for future use. In the second focus group, Abigail followed Lee’s sentiment and said, “i also didn’t feel at all like looking at the links...links are kind of like footnotes in a book. if you are totally into the subject, you look at the footnotes, otherwise you never lay eyes on them.” Nicole said, “i looked at links provided in people’s discussions — not always, but often.” Through referring to links, students in the class can provide one another with information that is pertinent to any topic in the course. There are various reasons why students chose to add links to their posts and each is discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Use of links for classroom resources Students supplied links that they had used in their own classrooms along with their assignments. Often students gave lists of sites they had used that matched the course content such as ones for chat rooms, e-pals, foreign newspapers, concept maps and diagrams, and content area support. In an assignment for class that used PowerPoint to present images in the classroom, a student included the website on one of the last slides to reference where he got the images to teach body parts in his German classes. Nicole responds that the images he used were of high quality. The student responds that


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she should look at the site and gives an explanation about how the site allows for sharing of images with an open license agreement. Nicole responds to him. This shows not only the sharing of ideas, but resources that Nicole was able to immediately look at and bookmark for use later. As soon as I saw your Ppt, I made sure to grab the www.sxc.hu from the bottom of one of the pages on your slide show to add to my “favorites” list. I am getting so many shared resources from all you folks who are out there teaching already and it’s really helpful to me to see what and how you’re already using them. In an assignment where students have to incorporate audio into a lesson plan, one of the resources that a student uses is a song from School House Rock to help explain tax for the math classroom. The student is able to provide the site so that others can listen to a clip of the song. Soonhee responds to his lesson and says: Thank you for reminding me of ‘School House Rocks’, a wonderful material source. I visited the website and was impressed to see that there were such creative educators who dedicated to make children’s learning this interesting in past time. Students can share sites that they have found beneficial in their own classrooms. With the number of sites that claim to be educational or beneficial for the classroom, it is essential that students are pointed to the types of resources that have already been used by their peers. Sharing classroom resource links cuts down on the time needed to try out sites before they are used in the classroom.

Use of links for more information Links that students supplied for one another also provided additional information on topics studied in the course. For example, students wrote their ideas about the WebQuest that they planned as a final project. This was done as a discussion, so they could read one another’s submissions and offer ideas. Abigail wrote about her WebQuest on the local history in Albany for ESL students and expressed concern that she was not familiar with WebQuests. Nicole read her discussion entry and gave her positive feedback, but states that she is not really familiar with WebQuests either. Abigail takes the time to find a site that she was able to gather more information from and provides it for Nicole to read. This is


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followed by a six-turn exchange strengthening their initial ideas starting with Abigail saying, “Thanks for the thumbs up on this project. I am surfing around looking for WebQuests that might give me a better idea of what is involved. Check this out: www.lausd.k12.ca.us/lausd/offices/di/burelson/lessons…” In the discussion section on image use in the classroom, one of the topics was culture and images and how culture plays a role in the perception of images. One student writes about her foreign cultural background and how images of American politicians make her feel. Kay responds with a link to a site that included old video clips from a U.S. perspective to show the difference. My favorite is one called “Peace Little Girl or Daisy”. You can find it by pressing the arrow next to the section underneath the screen and choose it on the list. It is from 1964 during the Johnson presidential campaign. Here you can see how images can create a mindset. http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/search/index.php?search_ string=fear&action=new_search&x=16&y=13 During the module on video, students were asked to discuss story versus glitz. One student writes about how her parents took her to Broadway shows frequently and she feels that they combine glitz and story and can be used in the classroom. Jack writes back about the use of video, glitz and story in the EFL classroom with the following links to articles to help him explain his problems with using her ideas in his classroom. Here is an article I found interesting addressing constructivism in multicultural contexts: www.usca.edu/essays/vol122004/Bae.pdf. I thought I would go ahead and provide some links to EFL vs. ESL sites. As I am in China, I think this is pretty pertinent. http://www.benzhi.com/page.php?id=41 http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/sean/esl%20tips/esl_efl.htm (really brief) I really didn’t have time to look for any more. Usually I would find professional articles. Jack is working in a different environment where the target culture is not present which is particularly relevant to the discussion topic. In order to better represent his situation to his classmate, he provides her with sites that give her


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more information about the differences in ESL/EFL environments. Without the opportunity to provide this information via a link in context, Jack would have a harder time explaining his circumstances. In the first module students are asked to write about their experiences with media use in the classroom as a warm up and to see how the discussion and discussion responses work. Soonhee talks about Korea and gives information to the class about the issues that will be covered in this class and what Korea is facing concerning this topic. …Korea is very developed in terms of use of computer in education. The attached are some statistics on history of computer use in Korean education. Also attached is a good article on future of instructional technology from Seoul National University in Korea. As is mentioned in this article, in the process of implementing computer literacy programs, many scholars are worried of various side-effects that have been emerging. aped.snu.ac.kr/cyberedu/cyberedu1/eng/eng9-03.html -Soonhee Soonhee is able to give her fellow students links to real world information to strengthen her commentary on the course discussion. The opportunity to refer one another to more information on topics in the course via links is a unique aspect of online learning. Students can provide links with information such as definitions or sites that they feel will provide their classmates with viewpoints that they can read about in the content of the course to enhance their understanding about the topics discussed. Further, as discussed in the next two sections, students supplied one another with both technological and pedagogical ideas via hyperlink sources.

“Tech” Sources The third category is using links as “tech” sources. Students were able to supply links in order to help one another with technical difficulties when making multimedia files during the course. For example, students submitted a lesson using homemade audio in the classroom. Jack submitted a lesson where he used some software to simulate a phone conversation for use in his EFL class. He put this up on a website attached to his lesson so the other students could use what he had made. Kay responded to his lesson and asked how he was able to create his audio files. Jack responds to her:


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…I use a program that is similar to a bionic version of HyperCard. It is called “Runtime Revolution”. Here is a link to their site: www.runrev. com. The links that Jack provides his classmates gives them information and a way to access the software that he used to make an audio file for his classroom. In this way, he not only explains what he did, but has the ability to share this “tech” source with other students in the class who are interested in the way in which he made his audio file for his lesson plan. Here Ann reads that her colleague is having trouble finding a fitting background for her WebQuest. Ann takes the time to not only search for one for her on the Internet, but attaches them for her to see. I read your comment about wanting a background…I’ll note the site below for you, if you don’t already have it. I’ve also attached a few that I downloaded. Two are backgrounds which can be resized. Check it out. The site is: http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/default.aspx?lc=en-us -Ann This illustrated the sharing of not only ideas, but the affordance of the online environment for Ann to efficiently help her colleague with a “tech” aspect of a WebQuest that she has expertise in and her classmate is struggling with. Similarly, a student asks Jack where he got his background for his WebQuest. Jack responds: I got that background from the Absolute Background Texture Archive (http://www.grsites.com/textures/). It is a pretty cool site because you can actually change colors on backgrounds they have there. In sum, it is through the use of links that students can share with one another websites that have useful technical help and ideas. Students can follow the links that are provided alongside their work for the course. The technical links would not be much help if they could not be viewed with the file that the student is working on for class.

Pedagogical Sources The last subcategory is using links for pedagogical resources. Similar to the “tech” sources, students posted sites for one another to get more pedagogical ideas. For example, students posted their vision for their final project, so


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they would have a chance to dialog about it with other students before actually building a WebQuest themselves. A student submits her ideas and Jack responds to her with a website suggestion that she may be able to use on the resources section of her project. He then asks questions to further her thinking about her quest. I think this is a good idea for a web quest. I know that the students I teach have difficulty describing the weather…I thought I’d share it with you: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dvn/ScienceandEducation/glossary.php. Students had to submit lesson plans dealing with each topic in the course. Kay submitted a lesson with a rubric and one of her classmates asked her about the rubrics she always uses and if she makes them on her own. Kay responded, …I made the rubric with this great site. It allows you to put in the information and it makes the rubric. It is also free! Doesn’t get much better than that! I also placed it on shared references http://www.thinkinggear.com/tools/rubrics. cfm.” There were also issues with providing links that I asked the second focus group about. I asked Lee, Abigail and Nicole: “Was it too time consuming to offer advice and provide links to help other students?” It is interesting that although Nicole was fully involved in a course based strictly on sharing, she made a statement about not sharing. Lee stated that he thought links were too personal to be sharing them and Abigail dismissed them totally. Lee: I did not think it was too time consuming to offer advice, in some respects I may have felt as though I had some level of experience that was more advanced…so maybe that helped… Nicole: i just don’t think that online classes are a venue for offering or asking for help other than the prof. not from each other. Lee: As far as providing links…I don’t like this practice because “links” are more personal, involving more personal history. Abigail: I was almost always on the receiving end, and couldn’t help my fellow teachers much in the way of tech support, but I did encourage those who were falling behind, for example… Nicole: i did use others links that were in the resources; i love seeing what others use for links, personally. Abigail: I am not keen on links…I often disregard them…I prefer books!!!!!


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Summary The ability to use hyperlinks is a unique affordance of the online environment for technological and pedagogical idea exchange among teachers. It was obvious by the number of times that links were provided in discussion posts that the ability to share links so easily was important. Through systematically identifying the actions of the students in the class, four categories were found that describe the ways in which the links were used by students in the course. Students provided links to one another for classroom resources, to give more information, and for “tech” and pedagogical ideas and help. Finally, the affordance for students to include a hyperlink in their posts is significant to their idea exchange. This affordance of the online environment is important as students can not only reference materials outside of the course easily, but those who are viewing the information can simply click on a link and be taken directly to the site referenced. The face-to-face environment does not allow for the sharing of links while the dialog of a course is in progress. Students in the course share links with each other for various reasons that were important to their inquiry about technology use for the classroom: 1) use of links for classroom resources that can be used with K-12 students, 2)use of links for more information where students provide one another with links that give them more information about the topics in the course,3) “tech” sources to help one another with technical problems while making multimedia files for those needing assistance, and 4) pedagogical sources where ideas are shared about teaching techniques. Further, the idea that links are now being used in online courses allows for more information to be tailored to the individual needs of the students in the class. If someone is struggling with a specific technological problem, for example, the other students in the class can offer additional information outside of the class in the form of a link, but still offer the help within the context of the course. This is especially important with the amount of information that is available on the Internet. If there is an online resource that has already been used by another student and that student shares the resource with others, it helps shorten the amount of time each person has to spend finding helpful information. The sharing of links is also advantageous as the poster has usually tried the website and already established that it is dependable.


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References: Book sources Bandara, D., Wijekularathna, D. K., (2017), Comparison of students’ performance under two teaching methods: Face to face and online, “International Journal of Education Research”, Vol. 12/1/2017, pp. 69–79. Cavanaugh, J. K., Jacquemin, S. J., (2015), A large sample comparison of grade based student learning outcomes in online vs. face-to-face courses, “Online Learning”, Vol. 19/22015, pp. 25–32. Chiero, R., Beare, P., Marshall, J. & Torgerson, C., (2015), Evaluating the effectiveness of e- learning in teacher preparation, “Educational Media International”, Vol. 52/3/2015, pp. 188–200. doi:10.1080/09523987.2015.1075101. Eom, S. B., Ashill, N., 2016, The determinants of students’ perceived learning outcomes and satisfaction in university online education: An update, “Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education”, Vol. 14/2/2016, pp. 185–215. doi:10.1111/dsji.12097. Harrison, R., Hutt, I., Thomas-Varcoe, C., Motteram, G., Else, K., Rawlings, B. & Gemmell, I., (2017), A cross-sectional study to describe academics’ confidence, attitudes, and experience of online distance learning in higher education, “Journal of Educators Online”, Vol. 14/2/2017, pp. 74–82. Harlen, W., (2004), Can teachers learn through enquiry on-line? Studying professional development in science delivered on-line and on-campus, “International Journal of Science Education”, Vol. 26/10/2004, pp. 1247–1267. Johnson-Taylor, S., (2005), Asynchronous, hybrid and face-to-face: A study examining teaching and learning in three mediums. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University at Albany. Khan, A. A., Egbue, O., Palkie, B. & Madden, J., (2017), Active learning: Engaging students to maximize learning in an online course, “Electronic Journal of E-Learning”, Vol. 15/2/2017, pp. 107–115. Koç, M. M., (2017), Learning analytics of student participation and achievement in online distance education: A structural equation modeling, “Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice”, Vol. 17/6/2017, pp. 1893–1910. doi:10.12738/ estp.2017.6.0059. Lenert, K. L., Janes, D.D., (2017), The incorporation of quality attributes into online course design in higher education, “International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education”, Vol. 32 (1), pp. 1–14. Martin, F., Bolliger, D.U., (2018), Engagement matters: student perceptions on the importance of engagement strategies in the online learning environment, “Online Learning”, Vol. 22/1/2018, pp. 205–222. doi:10.24059/olj.v22i1.1092. Murray, T., (2005), Exploring the psychological terrain of the virtual classroom: The nature of relationship and powering online teaching and learning, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University at Albany.


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Slover, E., Mandernach, J., (2018), Beyond online versus face-to-face comparisons: The interaction of student age and mode of instruction on academic achievement, “Journal Of Educators Online”, Vol. 15/1/2018, pp. 105–112. Tharp, R., Galimore, R., (1988), Rousing minds to life, Cambridge University Press, New York. Web sources [1] Hawkes, M., Romiszowski, A., (2001), Examining the reflective outcomes of asynchronous computer-mediated communication on inservice teacher development, “Journal of Technology and Teacher Education”, Vol. 9/2/2001, [https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=idde]


Krzysztof Cichoń, Ewa Kubiak

Hey! Teachers! Leave the students alone (with images) Abstract: The article concerns the possible use of not only theoretical writings of Aby Warburg, but also visual material, panels-montages found in the Mnemosyne Atlas, during a didactic process concerning students of art history. In the academic year 2016/2017, we decided to undertake an experimental challenge to conduct an iconographic seminar “in the footsteps of Aby Warburg” (Department of Art History, University of Łódź). The course program included several stages: getting acquainted with Aby Warburg and his texts as well as studies devoted to his thoughts; reconstructing one of the Mnemosyne Atlas panels and interpreting it, and, finally, creating students’ own panels, which aimed at illustrating not just one of the motifs, but rather a certain cultural phenomenon (it was important, however, that in the final stage of “creation”, selection of paintings was dictated by a certain iconographic similarity). In our opinion, the choice of an undefined, and therefore intuitive and difficult to specify “Warburg method” helps develop looking at iconographic motifs. Seeking similarities of gestures and composition, which at first seem to be unrelated, allows for an intercultural journey given a new meaning by reflection of a researcher. We have also decided to repeat the experimental program in this academic year and crown the two-year didactic experience with an exhibition of panels mounted by students: both from the Mnemosyne Atlas and assembled by the course participants. Keywords: Aby Warburg, Menemosyne Atlas, iconography, panels-montages.


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Introduction Due to interest in Aby Warburg and his legacy still growing at the turn of the 20th and 21st century, he was recognized as personalization of key functions and figures of imagination for the contemporary culture (Sierek, 2015). The most interesting puzzles associated with the Warburg’s Nachleben is explanation why in the middle of contemporary global interest there is a white spot (or rather a deep black hole), that is, no traces of common use of a method of mounting images, which Warburg proposed in the Mnemosyne Bilderatlas, in the didactic practice. Even in university didactics. And a university is still treated, in accordance with the postulate of Wilhelm von Humboldt, as an institution directly connecting research work (experiment) and didactics. Hundreds of produced works clarify and speculate what the most relevant Pathosformeln meaning is today, and equally many works are devoted to a concept of image as a tool of memory. At the same time, however, it is difficult to point to a non-incidental didactic practice based on the right to direct and free (but not arbitrary!) juxtaposition of images postulated by Warburg (Kramer, 2001, pp. 1476–1484). Their juxtaposition should help us see arrangement of unclear and extra-cognitive (and therefore misexpressed in words) forces and aspirations that form the world of human psyche and the course of cognitive processes. The lack of such a teaching practice seems strange, given a role attributed to theories focused on a notion of image and visuality in contemporary culture (iconic turn, visual turn, etc.). When browsing through literature from the field of pedagogy and theory of education, one may soon make sure that the very notion of an image, iconicity or and even unconsciousness manifesting itself through images occurs very rarely. Perhaps this resistance or even fear of applying a method that Warburg used, juxtaposing subsequent Mnemosyne Bilderatlas panels, in research in the iconic culture layer results from two reasons. First, from the aforementioned fact, that majority of panels are constructed by searching and juxtaposing similar images, or similar motifs, gesture arrangements (Gebardetrageren) and compositional layouts. These elements are recognized as similar, although it is not possible to indicate an unambiguous material basis for this recognition. Therefore, it is openly non-rational behaviour within the meaning of the Enlightenment tradition, and the influence of the Enlightenment on the majority of contemporary didactic practices is undisputed. What happens through concepts in reflection, in Warburg’s method of mounting images is shifted to the outside. It takes place

HEY! TEACHERS! LEAVE THE STUDENTS ALONE (WITH IMAGES)

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in the sphere of images, searched with smaller or greater proficiency, which are visual symptoms of the phenomenon in question. By analogy to the concept of “work on a myth”, popularized by Hans Blumenberg (2012, p. 7), an image role in the cognitive process can be called according to Warburg “work over an image”.1 It is usually work whose course and scope is surprising even to our rational awareness. In a didactic process, the use of a method which is based on abandonment of full, rational control of its course is at least difficult. What may be a universally accepted principle for the avant-garde art may still arouse mistrust when it is supposed to play a role of a didactic method. Such practices are perfectly conceivable in small experimental theatre groups (bringing such excellent results as in case of Grotowski’s theatre), but, or institutions gladly identifying themselves with “pure reason” (such as universities) or those responsible for symbolic and social security (like educational system — schools), such a method can be very difficult to accept, if only due to technical problems with supervision, evaluation of teaching process effectiveness based on calculation and statistical criteria. The other reason is probably even more important. It is a long shadow of Zauberberg, which includes the memory of Warbug from the period of work on the Mnemosyne and his stay at the Bellevue clinic in Swiss Kreuzlingen. A method applied by someone who has had this kind of crisis episode in his biography will not be favourably received by institutions specialized in teaching. Only twenty years before, the same clinic run by the same Biswanger family had treated Frederic Nietzsche. For rational intellectual tradition, effectively disenchanted by Max Weber’s, delegating the power of resolving and judging to the sphere of image juxtaposition is still clear sign of dangerous madness. Warburg’s timeliness also comes from the fact that nowadays we have very little time to deal with this fear, in face of increasingly common delegation of our power of recognizing and “thinking” about the image to machines and virtual technologies. Warburg’s way of treating images during montage of Mnemosyne Bilderatlas panels, described in the clearest possible way, can be divided into two 1

Work on Bilderatlas was supposed to lead to an image of the “comprehensive” world; it is clear, for example, in the motto repeated by Warburg: per monstra ad spheram. Comprehensiveness of such an image of the world (analogous to Blumenberg’s Bildwelt and Heidegger’s das Weltbild) results from recognition of the role of a researcher as a micro-world. Fundamentally and relationally connected with a studied image-object-macro-world (Heidegger, 1974, p. 144).


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separate and repetitive groups of activities2. The first one (though chronologically second) will be arranging, mounting, composing, juxtaposing the following selected examples. This is a strictly manipulative activity. Today, due to the common use of graphical computer interfaces, daily transfer and update of folders with graphic files, it does not require arrangement of cut-out reproductions on the panel, but the principle of operation of many socially attractive programs (e.g. Pinterest) is very similar. A concept which seems to be the most convenient reference point to other cultural practices (including the history of ideas) is an abovementioned notion of montage. Montage, freedom of montage is one of the most characteristic formal features of, firstly, an avant-garde art work, and in the second half of the 20th century, a lifestyle, most often referred to as postmodernism (Kramer, 2001, pp. 1476–1484). Loosening of rigorous cognitive paradigm and form release from a requirement of cohesion and appropriateness for the environment became a carrier of the 20th century culture at every stage of creation. It created a sense of total freedom, aleatoricism that brought surprising results. Specificity of Warburg’s method stems from the fact that, unlike, for example, Dadaist, surrealist collages or avant-garde film editing, the main goal is not to achieve intense, affective aesthetic expression, an artistic effect, but a cognitive one: revealing hidden features, relationships between connections, analogies between elements of reality not associated directly in the montage3. A composition of mounted images gets changed, corrected not to increase expression, but under the influence of reflections on outlined similarities. These changes aim at purification, clarification, deblurring, explanation of not a unique form of the whole (which artists usually want to achieve), but a meaning visible in juxtaposed images. A meaning that, once seen, will always lead further, inside the culture, beyond the scope of the initial montage, expanding a cognitive horizon. Depending on the innate, individual security need, for some people such a perspective of wandering into the unknown and irrational will be attraction, while for others– an unnecessary, harmful risk.

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Reducing a description of cognitive activities to two alternating ones makes it possible to treat work, being an act of consideration over arrangement of panels, as a special case of a Turing machine. And it seems to be important for any technological attempts to imitate such processes. Customary separation of cognitively oriented science from searching the aesthetic effect of art, which took place in the era of Galileo and Kepler, so important for the positivist science of the 19th century in view of a contemporary cultural system, is rather insignificant. Post-avant-garde art regained the license to provide an equally source and, thus, equally important image of reality as science, poorly coping with addiction to money and power.


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Aby Warburg’s panels as “didactic help” In the academic year 2016/2017, we decided to undertake an experimental challenge to conduct an iconographic seminar “in the footsteps of Aby Warburg” (Department of Art History, University of Łódź)4. Conducting such classes was possible only with a small group of students5. For educational reasons, an annual program of the seminar was divided into several parts. The first one was devoted to Aby Warburg himself and to Polish source literature related to him. We started with the earliest study by Jan Białostocki (1987, 43–56), who in the 1980s tried to introduce Warburg to Polish scientists. The text was reviewed by Gabriela Świtek (2009, 99–111). It is a perfect complement to Białostocki’s deliberations, placing his reflections in the context of contemporary knowledge and a change in understanding of research on an image. In the context of research on Warburg, the researcher mentions the work of such theoreticians as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp or aforementioned Georges Didi-Huberman. The next stage of the course was familiarizing students with “Mnemosyne Atlas”, the last iconographic and cultural project by Aby Warburg. This time the basis was Polish translation with the introduction by Martin Wernke (2015)6. Another important element was texts published in “Konteksty” journal from 2011, particularly those devoted to the “Mnemosyne Atlas”, both by Aby Warburg himself and by contemporary researchers (Warburg, 2011, pp. 110–115; Mazzucco, 2011, pp. 120–142; Didi-Huberman, 2011, pp. 143–147; Leśniak, 2011, pp. 156–161; Buchloh, 2011, pp. 184–194; Dziewańska 2011, pp. 195– 200). As is known, the subsequent panels in the atlas have titles and lists of the presented works, but it was students’ task to interpret the mounted panels. Each of them was expected to reconstruct one of the panels with the use of possibly contemporary reproductions and to gather and write down their own reflections on how Warburg had mounted it. Graphics, book pages or newspaper 4

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The most interesting application of juxtaposing montage of images is a commentary on Warburg’s method by G. Didi-Huberman. A reproduction of the Laocoon Group is adjacent in the author’s imagination with a photo of the Hopi Indian dancing with a snake held in his mouth in 1924 (Didi-Huberman, 2002, 226–227). The group consisted of nine people: Paulina Drezniak, Adam Gabrysiak, Agnieszka Górska, Tymoteusz Kałużewski, Marta Kwiatkowska, Karolina Ochocka, Kaja Poszalska, Aleksandra Preczyńska, Marzanna Sawicka. A German edition “Mnemosyne Atlas” was published by Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink in 2000. Based on this publication, an Italian version was published two years later (in 2002), followed by two Spanish versions in Spain (2010) and in Mexico (2012), as well as a French edition (2012) (Brożyński, 2015, p. VIII).


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extracts in “re-mounted” panels remained in a black and white version, while reproductions of paintings, sculptures and architectural objects, as far as it was possible, were replaced by coloured ones. Students’ interpretation differed in a degree of reflection depth, resulting both from various level of knowledge of the works themselves and the realities of the period from which they came. However, what appeared equally important was the ability to create possible connections between viewed motifs. After several meetings, discussions, looking at the panels together, initial shyness towards the project gave way to interest in Warburg’s iconographic experiments. Analysing the panel no. 8 [Ills. 1 and 2], Agnieszka Górska writes that “it is dedicated primarily to Mithra, a god popular in the Roman Empire in the first centuries A.D.”. In the first part of her study, the author introduces the very form of the deity based on the studies by Maria Jaczynowska (1987, p. 212) and Milcea Eliade (1994, p. 212). However, she also got to the episodes of Aby Wargurg’s life, which became the impulse determining creation of the described panel: During his travel to Italy in 1928, Aby Warburg arrived at the church of San Clemente, where one of the Roman mithraeums was located. He also visited ancient ports of Ostia and Santa Maria di Capua near Naples. He also knew about the one discovered in Dieburg in Germany: from this place comes a two-sided relief with a depiction of hunting Mithra and Phaethon begging his father to ride a solar chariot (Górska, 2017). A final stage of the struggle with Warburg’s montage method was creation of students’ own panels. Of course, the lecturers and authors of this article also took part in all stages of work. In the following part of the paper, we have decided to present three panels assembled by us.

Warburg’s panels as inspiration and beginning of “individual montage” Panel no. 1 [Ill. 3] juxtaposes different, spontaneous forms behaviour towards monuments, which are nowadays easy to spot, thanks to the Internet. These are behaviours that may be all described as ludus in the literal, simplest meaning: a joke, an antic, a sudden whim, a fancy. From a semiotic point of view, such photographs show the process of unforeseen change of message introduced by its recipient. In the IT jargon, such behaviour towards a sculpture in the public space may be described as “overwriting” additional information.


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All these behaviours confirm accuracy of defining our species as homo symbolicus by Ernst Cassirer. Such a situation of changing a message, changing a code, transforming it into a completely separate and not related to the original one, is, as a matter of fact, a molecular structure that gives culture as a whole an unforeseen course. Certainly, such behaviours, such a desire to establish an individual meaning that erases established meaning is also a feature of art. A good example is a barge floating on the Vltava river with a huge hand and a middle finger shot up, higher than the Hrad towers or the residence of the President of the Czech Republic. The author of the sculpture, David Cerny, annoyed by victory of the post-communist elect, used such a “gesture” to comment on the new reality, but a photo of the sculpture against a background of the Hrad additionally underlines its clear meaning. Montage of images allows us to remain flexible in this type of sudden, constantly appearing fluctuations of meanings and signs that remain beyond any control and hierarchical supervision. Panel no. 2 [Ill. 4], which may be called “Moloch (Μολόχ)”, shows the possibilities of freeing from a predictable (reasonably assumed) meaning. In the smallest, minimal variant, it could be limited to two images placed side by side. So on the one hand, we have a Soviet propaganda poster printed in Tiflis probably in the 1920s, with a signature: “Flower children of communism”. It was probably created on the occasion of the post-revolutionary new holiday, Children’s Day, which, at the same time, became apotheosis of a new Soviet man, called homo sovieticus. On the other hand, there are illustrations of the Canaanite-Phoenician cult of Baal as a deity requiring a sacrifice of children, popular in the press illustrations in the late 19th and early 20th century. Formal similarity (compositional, at the level corresponding to the pre-iconographical description in E. Panofski’s method) is obvious. A fired furnace accented in Baal’s images corresponds to an almost abstract motif of sunrays, which from the upper left corner are directed towards the child, raised above the head. At the same time, both motifs: the Soviet iconography of a child with a clear health and hygiene aspect and collective religious imagination driven by archaeological discoveries, which feeds on the Old Testament and “oriental” horror, have nothing in common as long as we remain within the culture treated as a collection of “culture texts”, senses expressed through a language and concepts. However, only seemingly superficial similarity of images is, colloquially speaking, “senseless”. Both compared images are explicitly propaganda-driven, rhetorically sharpened, distinct, affective, and appealing. Both images have


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a very unpleasant, alarming meaning, resulting from the historical context. Iconography of Baal’s sacrifice overlaps and permeates with iconography of ritual murders and religiously motivated anti-Semitism. A fate of children, especially orphans brought up by the state into new Soviet people, was a fate filled with violence and oppression. In this context, such an optimistic poster becomes as unpleasant as a newspaper illustration of a bleak, eastern ritual. Trauma of childhood in the Soviet orphanage and trauma of being a child (res), something dependent on the will of the pater familiae in the ancient world, in a way incomprehensible to our rationality, overlap, draw attention, become clear, “recall” in our memory. Thanks to formal similarity, we came across a clear trace of a junction of meaning routes that verbally and conceptually have nothing to do with each other. Panel no. 3 [Ill. 5] illustrates the main principle of economy of attention. Looking at images, searching signs, juxtaposition of similarities and differences makes sense as an activity aimed at recognizing the future, not the past. Popper’s “poverty of historicism” is, after all, expressis verbis a phrase with an economic subtext. Homo symbolicus looks at images, hoping that energy invested in this activity will pay off from the future. A starting point for this panel is one of many Internet illustrations showing signum temporis: virtual distraction. Such an “image” may illustrate not only colloquial and ubiquitous signals, such atmospheric pollution, stress and “modern pace of life”, but also more objective ones, like WHO forecasts about a violent epidemic of psychosomatic diseases with environmental sources difficult to diagnose. For every person who for many hours stares attentively at subsequent screens-images, providing new information, the meaning of what they see is obvious. No freely precise pre-iconographical description can help us decide whether or not the man in the picture “is able” to see anything on the screens flashing in front of him. Images of film heroes without eyes, mounted with images of real users of new technologies more clearly raise the question of whether treating education as a social system of forming common imagination and memory, shouldn’t we get used to the new, not necessarily human, silhouette of Mnemosyne and her sister, Sophrosyne.

Conclusion Thanks to studying similarity of images, one may free themselves from the rigors of human thought, using only abstractions that can be expressed con-


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ceptually. Such “irrational” combinations make up an affective layer of culture, carrying fear and desire. A layer that is rather at the level of the mythos than logos closer to the surface. Searching similarity of images allows for something very difficult for the history of ideas. We may move on a plane that is closer to “what is real” and thus unclear, dark, unaware in our own psyche. In face of what the possibilities of rationally consistent, conceptual articulation are exhausting. Literally, this layer of culture should be called and connected with what is: real and factual. In what and thanks to what we can exert an effect on our surroundings. The Latin term of things (res) corresponds to Greek: χρῆμα, πρᾶγμα. It is, therefore, a very pragmatic plane of the world, the one through which spread aspirations, actions intentionally aimed at changing the situation. The third term corresponding to res is ὑποκείμενον. Writing about foundations of modernity, Martin Heidegger recalls this term and points to its literal meaning. Hypokeimenon (material substratum) is what stands below, what is underneath, what gathers everything and absorbs like a sponge, taking a role of a film, a screen on which everything is already deposited as Heidegger’s “World Picture” (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 115–154). In our opinion, the choice of an undefined, and therefore intuitive and difficult to specify “Warburg method” helps develop looking at iconographic motifs. Seeking similarities of gestures and composition, which at first seem to be unrelated, allows for an intercultural journey given a new meaning by reflection of a researcher. We have also decided to repeat the experimental program in this academic year and crown the two-year didactic experience with an exhibition of panels mounted by students: both from the Mnemosyne Atlas and assembled by the course participants.

References: Book sources Białostocki, J., (1987), Posłanie Aby M. Warburga: historia sztuki czy historia kultury? In: J. Białostocki (ed.), Refleksje i syntezy ze świata sztuki, Cykl drugi, PWN, Warszawa, pp. 187–203. Blumenberg, H., (2012), Praca nad mitem, translated by: M. Herer, K. Najdek and Z. Zwoliński, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa. Brożyński, P., (2015), Wstęp do wydania polskiego. In: M. Wernke, C. Brink, P. Brożyński and M. Jędrzejczyk (eds.), A. Warburg, Atlas obrazów Mnemosyne, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warszawa, pp. VII–XXI.


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Buchloh, B., (2011), Atlas Gerharda Richtera: archiwum anomiczne, transalted by: K. Bojarska, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty. Antropologia kultury, etnografia, sztuka”, Vol. LXV/2-3/2011, pp. 184–194. Didi-Humermana, G., (2002), L`image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Les Éditions de Minuite, Paris. Didi-Huberman, G., (2011), Atlas Mnemosyne jako montaż, translated by: T. Swoboda, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty. Antropologia kultury, etnografia, sztuka”, Vol. LXV/2-3/2011, pp. 143–147. Dziewańska, M., (2011), Ćwiczenia z wyobraźni. Atlas. Jak unieść świat na własnych barkach? Georges’a Didi-Hubermana w Museo Reina Sofía w Madrycie, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty. Antropologia kultury, etnografia, sztuka”, Vol. LXV/2-3/2011, pp. 195–200. Eliade, M., (1994), Historia wierzeń i idei religijnych, translated by: S. Tokarski, Vol. II, Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, Warszawa. Górska, A., (2017), Panel 8 Atlasu Mnemosyne. Intepretacja, Łódź, [typescript, seminar work]. Heidegger, M., (1974), Budować, mieszkać, myśleć, (Germ. Bauen, Wohnen, Denken), translated by: K. Michalski, “Teksty: teoria literatury, krytyka, interpretacja”, Vol. 6/18)/1974, pp. 137–152. Heidegger, M., (1977), The Age of World Picture. In: M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by: W. Lovitt, Harper and Row, New York, pp. 115–154. Jaczynowska, M., (1987), Religie Świata Rzymskiego, PWN, Warszawa. Kramer, O., (2001), Montage. In: G. Ueding (ed.), Historische Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 2001, Vol. 5, Niemeyer, Tübingen, cols. 1476–1484. Leśniak, A., (2011), Wstęp do politycznej analizy Atlasu Mnemosyne Aby’ego Warburga, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty. Antropologia kultury, etnografia, sztuka”, Vol. LXV/2-3/2011, pp. 156–161. Mazzucco, K., (2011), Mnemosyne: Bilderdemonstration, Bilderreihen, Bilderatlas. Chronologiczna prezentacja dokumentów związanych z Atlasem Warburga, translated by: M. Salwa, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty. Antropologia kultury, etnografia, sztuka”, Vol. LXV/2-3/2011, pp. 120–142. Sierek, K., (2015), Fotografia, kino i komputer: Aby Warburg jako teoretyk mediów, (Germ. Foto, Kino und Computer. Aby Warburg als Medientheoretiker, 2007), translated by: J. Gilewicz, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warszawa. Świtek, G., (2009), Triumf uczoności. Posłanie Aby Warburga według Jana Białostockiego. In: M. Wróblewska (ed.), Białostocki, Stowarzyszenie Historyków Sztuki, Warszawa, pp. 99–112. Warburg, A., (2011), Atlas Mnemosyne. Wprowadzenie, translated by: K. Pijarski, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty. Antropologia kultury, etnografia, sztuka”, Vol. LXV, no 2-3/2011, pp. 110–115.


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Wernke, M., (2015), Wstęp do wydania niemieckiego, translated by: P. Brożyński. In: M. Wernke, C. Brink, P. Brożyński and M. Jędrzejczyk (eds.), A. Warburg, Atlas obrazów Mnemosyne, pp. XXVIII–XL.

Illustrations

Ill. 1. Panel no 8, Mithra, from the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg


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Ill. 2. Reconstruction pf panel no 8 form the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg by Agnieszka Górska (2017)


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Ill. 3. Panel no 1, Monuments and Sign Overwriting, by Krzysztof Cichoń (2017)


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Ill. 4. Panel no 2, Moloch (Μολόχ), by Krzysztof Cichoń (2017).


Ill. 5. Panel no 3, Blind Future, by Krzysztof Cichoń (2017).

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REPORTS


Jesús Eloy Gutiérrez

Book Review: “La educación o la utopía necesaria”, La educación encierra un tesoro (Eng. Learning: The treasure within: report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris, France: Unesco Publishing) by: Delors, Jacques, Madrid: Santillana-Ediciones UNESCO 2010

Today, when the world seems to be heading for a new war, with a global dimension, we ask ourselves if Jacques Delors’ proposals have really been taken into account and how much of these ideas have been put into practice. Delors was President of the International Commission on Education for the 21st Century of UNESCO and book compiler Education holds a Treasury, which was the result of the work of the Commission. The work is a compendium organized into three parts and an epilogue, in addition to the prologue of Delors himself, which is entitled “Education or the necessary utopia”. In the first part entitled “Horizons” we talk about the grassroots community to the world society; from social cohesion to democratic participation; from


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the grassroots community to the world society. In the second part, the “Principles”, addresses the four pillars of education and its permanence throughout life. The third part, the “Orientations”, this chapter deals with basic education at the University; the teaching staff, analyzing for new perspectives; the political role: making decisions in education; and international cooperation: educating the planetary village. Finally, in an epilogue, considerations are collected on various aspects of the pen of several specialists such as Isao Amagi, Roberto Carneiro, Karan Singh or Zhou Nanzhao, among others. I will focus on what Delors wrote. The author presents education as an instrument for humanity to achieve the ideals of peace, freedom and social justice, thus helping to diminish the great scourges that currently plague it: poverty, exclusion, misunderstandings, oppression, and wars. The progress of knowledge can contribute to the promotion of the human race. Delors asks himself: “How to learn to live together in the ‘planetary village’ if we can not live in the communities to which we belong by nature: the nation, the region, the city, the town, the neighborhood?” And the great responsibility in response to that question is granted to democracy, which asks if we want and can participate in life in the community. Undoubtedly, this form of political organization has gained ground to totalitarianism and arbitrariness but tends to weaken, anchored in the disappointments that economic and social progress has generated. It is fair when a broader look at education must be made. What are the tensions that are at the center of the problems of the 21st century? Namely seven, which are made at dissimilar temporal levels: 1.- “between the global and the local”; 2.- “between the universal and the singular”; 3.- “between tradition and modernity”; 4.- “between the long term and the short term”; 5.- “between the indispensable competence and the concern for equal opportunities”; 6.- “between the extraordinary development of knowledge and the assimilation capabilities of the human being”; and the 7.- “tension between the spiritual and the material”. The dilemma of globalization leads to a rethinking of the formal education system by one that privileges life-long education or permanent education, where a fundamental pillar is granted to the stage of basic education: that should record the “taste and pleasure to learn, the ability to learn to learn”. That is, “the curiosity of the intellect.” Therefore, the author dreams when he says: “Imagine even a society in which each would be alternatively educator and educator”.

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In this way, permanent education is presented “as one of the keys to accessing the 21st century”, precisely because it is a world that changes rapidly and that erases traditional frames of reference. This already implies an obligation, to better understand the other, knowing their history, their traditions and their spirituality, which is “to understand the world better”. Interdependence is recognized. And from there we must promote the realization of common projects or the peaceful solution of conflicts. A utopia, “a necessary utopia”. To the extent that each human being takes advantage of and uses every opportunity that comes his way in life to update, deepen and enrich his knowledge and adapt to this changing world, he will be able to develop his own being. The only guarantee that this is fulfilled is that education is structured on the basis of four lessons learned: learning to know, which translates into obtaining the necessary instruments for understanding; learn to do, which determines how we influence our environment; learn to live together, which is to communicate and work with others in common experiences; and learn to be, which would be the natural result of the realization of the three previous aspects. Thus, education would fulfill its mission to fructify all talents and individual creation capacities, which would imply that each person takes responsibility for himself and carries out his personal project. The proposal of a lifelong education gives primary importance to basic education but invites a review of secondary education and the adaptations that higher education must have in order to respond to the phenomenon of massification. In this sense, this proposal would allow ordering the different stages of learning, preparing transitions, diversifying and valuing trajectories. For educational reforms to be successful, in addition to the long-term approach, three agents must converge: the local community (parents, directors, and teachers) to diagnose needs and dialogue with other social agents; the public authorities that have the duty to draw up concerted educational policies with the rest of the agents; and the international community. In this last aspect, international cooperation has a crucial role. Because, as acknowledged by the Commission admits, that by then the adoption of certain measures aimed at achieving satisfactory solutions to global problems was evident, but that they were nevertheless insufficient and called for the reform of international institutions. Therefore, he presented a series of recommendations. The question, two decades later, is how much of that has been fulfilled. Namely: Has a dynamic policy been developed in favor of the education of


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girls and women? How much is the minimum percentage of development aid to finance education? Has the mechanism of “debt swap for education been applied”? Have the so-called new technologies been spread globally under equal conditions? How extensive is the participation of non-governmental organizations in supporting international cooperation activities? What has a different proposal to these proposals being submitted to the discussion? Finally, the report points out that UNESCO contributes to peace and mutual understanding among human beings by giving value to education as a tool that generates the “spirit of concord”, a reflection of the will to “cohabit, as militants of our village”. planetary, that we must conceive and organize for the benefit of future generations. “Here are the coordinates against war, nationalism, sectarianism and the disorientation of these times”.


Anna Wendorff

Book Review: Audiodeskrypcja dzieł sztuki. Metody, problemy, przykłady (Eng. Audio description of works of art. Methods, problems, examples), by: Aneta Pawłowska, Julia Sowińska-Heim, Publishing House of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2016, pp. 144, ISBN WUŁ 978-83-8088-384-0, e-ISBN WUŁ 978-83-8088-385-7, ISBN MMŁ 978-83-65026-22-4

The monograph aims to reflect on knowledge and practical achievements regarding the concept and problems associated with making visual arts available in a manner adapted to perception of people with vision impairment. The authors also share experience gained during implementation of their own project (which made it possible to verify knowledge during practical activities) and show how creation of audio descriptions, i.e. verbal descriptions of art works adapted to the needs of the visually impaired, using the project based learning method may become an important element of an academic didactic process. In the first chapter, titled “Sposoby rekompensaty zaburzeń wzroku” (Eng. Methods of compensating visual disorders), the authors examine multisen-


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sory solutions, complementing verbal descriptions, such as models of entire buildings or interiors, bas-reliefs or typhlographics (convex graphic forms). They also emphasize importance of making original art works made of durable materials available, as well as reproducing exhibits based on original pieces. They also mention additional materials, i.e.: Braille prints, enlarged prints, audio guide recordings, websites according to the standards of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or the Seeing Assistant smartphone app. In the second chapter, “Metody tworzenia audiodeskrypcji” (Eng. Methods of creating audio descriptions), Pawłowska and Sowińska-Heim refer to methods of delivering visual content in a verbal way, which enables blind and visually impaired people to perceive works of art. They discuss the subject of painting theme and a direction of its description, calling for succinctness, clarity and language economy. They also recommend transition from a general to more detailed description, which should then be supplemented with the context of work creation, e.g. a technique or style of the art work. Moreover, the researchers address the issue of duration of audio description (AD) and emphasize that AD should be personalized, different for those who have been blind from birth and those who have lost their sight at a later age. In the third chapter “Piękno, ekfraza, obiektywizm” (Eng. Beauty, ekphrasis, objectivism), the authors ponder on how to reconcile audio description faithfulness with interpretation ambiguity and experience of aesthetic emotions. Paraphrasing Voltaire, we could say that the audio descriptions are like women: either beautiful or faithful. As a matter of fact, this transformation has its own scientific foundation, since audio description falls within the scope of a specific kind of translation, namely intersemiotic translation. The researchers are in favour of experiencing emotions and beauty, which, according to them, may be achieved by using ekphrases or searching for correspondence of arts. In the fourth chapter, titled “Beneficjenci końcowi tworzonych audio deskrypcji” (Eng. Final beneficiaries of created audio descriptions), the humanists point out that audio descriptions are created not only for blind and visually impaired people, but also for those with other sight disabilities or the elderly. They also emphasize difference between a person who has been blind from birth (Pol. “niewidomy”) and the one who has lost sight (Pol. “ociemniały”) and stress importance of the topics discussed, since there is a significant number of people with visual impairments in Poland and around the world, who due to their disability find it difficult to function normally and maintain

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contact with art. Thus, it is so important to create audio descriptions, which make exhibitions and museum collections available and accessible to this group of audience. In the fifth chapter, “Percepcja otoczenia miejskiego oraz dziedzictwa architektonicznego” (Eng. Perception of the urban environment and architectural heritage), the authors refer to perception of art works with the help of other, non-visual stimuli, such as hearing, touch, echolocation of obstacles or creating personal cognitive maps by the blind. They also describe multi-sensory influence of urban space or haptic experience of the environment. What is more, they discuss the issue of using new technologies in making urban space accessible to people with visual impairment, providing the example of beacons, small radio signal transmitters, thanks to which it is possible to send information about location to smartphones. Let us emphasize that the presented book is an outcome of a scientific and research project of Pawłowska and Sowińska-Heim from the Department of Art History at the University of Łódź, implemented from 2014 to 2016. In addition to basic research, the project also covered practical classes called “Audio description of art works”, carried out in the above-mentioned organizational unit of the Faculty of Philosophy and History of the University of Łódź in the academic year 2013/2014 as part of a professional project or an “E-type” academic course related to the 20th-century art. This is noteworthy, since the problem of audio description is not addressed during the studies in history of art or in the artistic faculties. It is discussed during translation studies, especially post-graduate ones, such as “Digital and social inclusion: websites, audio description, multimedia” carried out by the University of Silesia in Katowice, a postgraduate course in Audiovisual Translation at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań or Postgraduate course in specialist translations: audiovisual works of the SWPS University. We may also find single courses or seminars, which are usually carried out as a part of courses for audiovisual translators, e.g. Audio description in the theatre and museum or Audio description in cinema and television within teaching offer of the Chair for Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication of the Jagiellonian University or courses of FORTIMA Akademia Filmowego Słowa: Audio description of film works. Description of the classes conducted at the Department of Art History of the University of Łódź was discussed in detail in the sixth chapter, “Nauka audiodeskrypcji w edukacji akademickiej” (Eng. Teaching audio description


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in academic education) and the seventh one “Tworzenie audiodeskrypcji — Uwarunkowania sytuacyjne” (Eng. Creating audio descriptions — Situational conditions) of the reviewed book. Students participating in the course created audio descriptions, describing key visual elements necessary to understand paintings and objects from the Museum of Art in Łódź (ms¹ and ms² divisions) and the Museum of the City of Łódź under bilateral cooperation agreements. The descriptions were then digitized and sounded in the UŁ Recording Studio. In the sixth chapter, we learn that the classes were conducted, using the Project Based Learning Method with the PBL (Problem Based Learning) strategy. At first, students carried out surveys regarding perception of visual arts by the blind from the Łódź Branch of the Polish Association of the Blind, and then they outlined the project. Works on the project also covered consultations with educators holding certificates for work with the audience with communication challenges and with the Foundations: Audio description, “Chance for the Blind” or “Culture without Barriers”. The students worked both in a traditional way and in cyberspace, using a virtual dashboard on the Google Docs, mailboxes and Facebook. The seventh chapter discusses all stages of the project. The first one included description of the Neoplastic Room at the Museum of Art in Łódź (ms¹) and four works exhibited inside: Counter composition by Theo van Doesburg (1925); Unistic Composition II by Władysław Strzemiński (1932); The composition of three equivalents by Georges Vantongerloo (1921) and Abstract Painting II by Henryk Stażewski (1928–29). The second one: audio description of selected objects from the Museum of Art in Łódź (ms²), namely: black and white photography by Eugeniusz Haneman, Insurgent at the Church of the Holy Cross I (1944), an acrylic painting on canvas by Peter Klasen, Saturday morning (1967) and oil on canvas Untitled by Sam Francis (1966). The third one: description of museum interiors of the Museum of the City of Łódź, being a part of a permanent exhibition, implemented within the “Museum within our reach” project, co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage within the “Accessible Culture” Program. The reviewed book also includes audio descriptions from three above-mentioned project stages, photos of paintings and audio-described objects, as well as photos from project implementation, students’ evaluation and self-evaluation charts, which document work with the project based method, as well as

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commentary of the educator from the Museum of the City of Łódź, Paulina Dzwonkowska, on audio description in museum practice of the MCŁ. The work is addressed to those interested in the problem of making art works available to the disabled, both in the museum and urban space: art historians, museum educators, architects, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, translators, museum workers, curators, designers, etc. Let us point out that the reviewed scientific monograph is innovative and pioneering in terms of the subject matter discussed, since on the Polish publishing market, we will not find a comprehensive book in Polish about art work ADs. There are only guide books, such as “ABC. Gość niepełnosprawny w muzeum” (Eng. ABC. A disabled guest in the museum), edited by Joanna Grzonkowska and Marek Rogowski (Narodowy Instytut Muzealnictwa i Ochrony Zbiorów, Warszawa, 2013), or individual contributions in a form of scientific or general articles. An unquestionable advantage of the book is also practical description of a university teaching process: creating audio description using the project based method. Let us also mention that the book has already been recognized in the academic environment, its authors have been granted the 1st-class Award of the Rector of the University of Łódź, and the project itself has been distinguished in a business environment, receiving the prestigious 2017 LUMEN Prize — Leaders in University Management.


Notes about Authors

Prof. Leila Bijos PhD has a Post-Doctoral Research at the University of Saint Mary’s, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Department of Sociology & Criminology. Doctor of Philosophy, Development Sociology, University of Brasilia (UnB). Master of Arts, Political Science and International Relations Studies, University of Brasilia (UnB), Brazil. Specialization in Human Rights and Political Science. Associate Professor at the Graduate Course on Intellectual Property, Transference of Technology and Innovation, Centre for Development Technologies, University of Brasilia (UnB). Associate Professor at the International Relations Course and at the Law Program, Catholic University of Brasilia (2000–2017). e-mail: [email protected] Marcelo Hernández Santos PhD Professor and researcher of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Unidad Zacatecas, Mexico. Doctor at History. Line of research: history of education: educational reforms. 20th century. He is member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico, from 2015. e-mail: [email protected]


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Notes about Authors

prof. Carlos Dimeo Álvarez PhD with habil. Doctor Habilitowany at the University of Łódź (Faculty of Philology), Doctor of Social Sciences, Mention of Cultural Studies (University of Carabobo – Venezuela). Master’s Degree in “Management of Communication and Culture” (FLACSO-Argentina) and master’s Degree in “Venezuelan Literature” (University of Carabobo). Studies in the Master of the CENDES-UCV (Centers for Development Studies – Central University of Venezuela) “Development Studies and Public Policies“. e-mail: [email protected] Chesla Ann Lenkaitis PhD is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages at Binghamton University (Binghamton, New York, USA). Dr. Lenkaitis is the language coordinator of the department’s introductory and intermediate language program and is the program coordinator of the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in French and Spanish Adolescence Education. She dedicates herself not only to teaching Spanish but also to helping present and future educators identify the most effective ways to facilitate the teaching and learning of a second language (L2). Her areas of specialty include vocabulary acquisition and technology integration in the L2 classroom. More specifically, she examines the use of telecollaboration and its impact on the L2 learning and teaching, intercultural competence, and global citizenship and awareness. e-mail: [email protected] Shannon M. Hilliker PhD received her PhD at the University at Albany in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on language learning in 2007. She has been in the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) field since 1999 where she has taught in both ESL (English as a Second Language) and teacher education. Dr. Hilliker is an Assistant Professor of TESOL at Binghamton University (Binghamton, New York, U.S.A.). Her research interests include rural education, teacher professional development, elementary ESL after school programs, international student success and online conversation and culture exchange. e-mail: [email protected] prof. Aneta Pawłowska, PhD with habil., She is an art historian, doctor habilitatus in humanities specializing in recent history, history and culture of Africa, an associate professor at the University of Łódź. Her scientific interests focus on the history of Polish art of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the art and culture of sub-Saharan Africa. She conducts research on audio description of works of art. e-mail: [email protected]

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Julia Sowińska-Heim PhD is an art historian, employed as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History of the University of Łódź. The area of her research concern especially the theory of adaptive reuse in the context of architectural heritage integrity and authenticity, as well as border, context of contemporary cultural, urban and social changes. The other research trend concerns audio description of artworks and making the cultural heritage available to visually impaired people. e-mail: [email protected] Anna Wendorff PhD is a literary specialist and translator, PhD in the field of Latin American literary studies, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Spanish Philology at the University of Łódź. She focuses her research interests around contemporary Latin American literature and the theory and practice of artistic translation. e-mail: [email protected] Jesús Eloy Gutiérrez PhD Venezuelan theater historian and researcher, born in Cumaná. Teacher of the History and Anthropology schools (Central University of Venezuela). Current Head of the Observatory Unit (Documentary Center) of the Teresa Carreño Theater. Doctor in History of the Hispanic World (outstanding Cum Laude) by the San Pablo CEU University, Madrid, Spain. Bachelor`s in History and Master in Contemporary Latin American Theater by the UCV. Master’s Degree in History of the Hispanic World by the Higher Council of Scientific Research-CSIC, Madrid. He studied the Advanced Program of Creative Writing at the Institute of Creativity, ICREA (Caracas). e-mail: [email protected] Ewa Kubiak PhD, art historian, working at the Department of Art History at the University of Łódź since 2002. She is conducting research on Latin American colonial art. Author of many articles on colonial art in Polish, English and Spanish. Recipient of the Lanckorońscy Foundation Fellowship of Brzezie (Rome, 2004) and two fellowships of the Foundation for Polish Science (Brasil 2006; Argentina 2008). e-mail: [email protected] Krzysztof Cichoń PhD, art historian, working at the Department of Art History at the University of Łódź since 1992. He defended his doctoral dissertation at Lviv Academy of Fine Art in 2000 (Iconography of cosmos in European art from antiquity to baroque). His scientific interests focus on the medieval and contemporary art, as well as the theory and philosophy of art. e-mail: [email protected]