Authentic Representation Research Articles

Evaluating a Technology-Based Assessment (TBA) to Measure Teachers’ Action-Related and Reflective Skills

Teaching performance can be assessed validly only if the assessment involves an appropriate, authentic representation of real-life teaching practices. Different skills interact in coordinating teachers’ actions in different classroom situations. Based on the evidence-centered design model, we developed a technology-based assessment framework that enables differentiation between two essential teaching actions: action-related skills and reflective skills. Action-related skills are necessary to handle specific subject-related situations during instruction. Reflective skills are necessary to prepare and evaluate specific situations in pre- and postinstructional phases. In this article, we present the newly developed technology-based assessment to validly measure teaching performance, and we discuss validity evidence from cognitive interviews with teachers (novices and experts) using the think-aloud method, which indicates that the test takers’ respective mental processes when solving action-related skills tasks are consistent with the theoretically assumed knowledge and skill components and depend on the different levels of teaching expertise.

‘Doing mindful colouring’: just a leisure activity or something more?

ABSTRACTAdult colouring books have become vastly popular in recent years, and have been successfully rebranded as a therapeutic tool for improving health and wellbeing. The aim of this study was to construct an authentic insider representation of the women’s lived experiences of ‘doing colouring’. This study adopted a qualitative interview strategy and reported on the narratives of 15 women’s experiences of mindfulness colouring books. Doing colouring can achieve a distinctive form of mindfulness with therapeutic qualities. This process increased the capacity for concentration, awareness and regulation for the enhancement of spirituality and self-care practice. Spiritual meanings were attached to doing colouring, specifically spirituality as connectedness to oneself with perceived inner peace and calmness derived from the mindful meditative experience. Doing mindful colouring was identified as ‘taking time’ to practice self-reflection, self-awareness and self-care to promote physical, emotional and social wellbeing. The meanings and practices of mindfulness were examined to provide an explanatory framework for understanding doing colouring to achieve health benefits. This research contributes to the emerging literature on mindfulness colouring books, thus advancing our understanding of the diverse benefits contributing to the practitioners’ sense of wellbeing.

Assessing Authentic Representation of Learning Outcomes in Tests of Teacher Education

Instructional decisions depend principally on the results of assessment in any of the education systems. But for the purpose, authentic representation i.e., direct alignment between the predetermined learning objectives and assessment tasks of the instructional system is essential. However, the weak linkage of the given two factors in instruction, makes ‘validity of results’ as well as resultant certification, questionable. The current study was, therefore, conducted to address the issue of alignment in learning objectives and tests, for assessing authentic representation of learning outcomes in tests being used for appraisal of teacher education. The accessible population consists of the tests developed and conducted for assessment of the prospective teachers by the teacher educators of public sector universities. A ‘Frame for Assessing Alignment of Tests’ (FAAT) was developed for data collection. This frame consists of two sub-frames i.e., FAAT-I, for collecting data from the teacher educators; and FAAT-II, for experts’ judgements to determine the level of alignment in learning outcomes and tests tasks. Data were collected on 36 tests, developed by the 18 teacher educators, in the form of teacher educators’ perceptions about the linkage and experts’ judgement to endorse the educators’ reported linkage or otherwise. The results showed that there is a partial evidence of authentic representation of learning outcomes in the tests tasks being used in teacher education programs.

JEWISH FLOW

ABSTRACT This article explores performances of Jewish identity in hip-hop music, specifically in relation to the racial dynamics underpinning modes of a rapper’s authentic representation. Hip-hop music, first developed within and still largely defined as a product of African-American culture, has included Jews in various, complicated ways. After surveying antisemitic representations of Jews, the article examines the methods in which white and black Jewish rappers have articulated their own sense of Jewishness in lyrics and music videos. As white rappers, Jews often either depict themselves seriously by aligning with African-Americans, or mark their difference through self-deprecating caricatures for ironic humor. A more recent subgenre of rappers, comprised of African-Americans who have converted to Judaism, present Jewish identity within a religious sphere misleadingly defined as white. Each of these representations underscores the role race plays in designating the self-identification of Jewish rappers.

History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s by M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska

Reviewed by: History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s by M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska Erik Christiansen (bio) History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s. By M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 258. $90.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $19.99 ebook) History Comes Alive offers the most comprehensive study to date of the relationship between Americans and history during the decade of the 1970s. Adding to the rapidly growing historiography of the 1976 bicentennial, and framing contemporary public engagement with the past within a new interpretation that clarifies how and why the seventies represent a watershed moment for public history, the book is essential reading for serious scholars of intellectual, cultural, and public history. The heart of the book consists of the five chapters (two through six) that creatively analyze the popular engagements with history during the bicentennial years from multiple angles. Chapter two closely follows the national commissions and related politics during the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations, as the official celebration shifted from national and partisan, to grassroots and politically dynamic. Much of this story has been told before, recently by Tammy Gordon, but Rymsza-Pawlowska's articulation of how shifts at the national political level reflected cultural shifts related to history builds to something new as she continues the narrative into the more explicative chapters that follow. Chapter three describes how accepted principles of preservation underwent a radical transformation that resulted in significantly less veneration of extraordinary historical artifacts, but also an increasing recognition of the ordinary and near-contemporary. Chapter four studies four distinct museum spaces to persuasively argue that contemporary public history professionals also rejected the centrality of artifacts and embraced immersive and emotional experiences as the new goal. The argument develops further in chapter five, which explores popular reenactments connected with the bicentennial, from the Wagon Train to a transcontinental "bike-centennial," and drives home the point that contemporary Americans [End Page 646] sought to experience the lives of ordinary people of the past and remake history's foreignness into something more familiar. Chapter six shows how activists used this growing historical engagement to press their fellow citizens to think critically about how commemorated historical events and ideas challenged complacency in the present. Given the strength of the later chapters, it is doubly unfortunate that the book begins, following an introduction, with its weakest chapter, which covers history on television from the 1950s through the 1970s. The presentation of Roots and Little House on the Prairie is fine, if not groundbreaking, but the discussion of earlier programming is riddled with errors and the arguments are marred by inexplicable omissions. Claims about the dearth of historically-themed TV shows during the 1950s and early 1960s collapse because she neglects to even mention (much less explain) hugely popular programs like Gunsmoke (fiction) and Cavalcade of America (non-fiction, and precisely the sort of narrative non-fiction show she avers did not appear until the 1970s). Similarly, using Disney's Tomorrowland and modernist architecture as proof that Americans of the 1950s ignored the past, while eliding contrary evidence including Disney's Frontier-land or Main Street, or the popularity of "colonial" suburban design, discredits the project. Her description of You Are There is objectively wrong and ignores the leftist interpretations of history offered by the blacklisted communist writers of most of the series' episodes. Innovations she attributes to 1970s programs, such as historical characters speaking directly to the camera, were pioneered by You Are There in the early 1950s. Both that series and Cavalcade were promoted and distributed through the nation's schools, but she argues that ABC's similar promotion of Roots a generation later indicates television's newly radical assertiveness regarding authentic historical representation. Citations for this chapter reflect limited engagement with the extensive literature on early television, which may explain the deficiencies. Moreover, this chapter seemed superfluous. With the exception of chapter two, her primary argument is consistently supported throughout the book. There were missed [End Page 647] opportunities for comparisons across time: the brief mentions of the bicentennial Freedom Train and other programs like "USA Redirected" and "Heritage...

The psychological exploration of women in the novels of Mahasweta Devi

Mahasweta, who considers herself to be more of a humanist than a feminist, maintains that a woman should be evaluated only on the basis of her humanity, and not in relation to her gender, ethnicity, caste, or social status. In contrast to Draupadi, who used her completeness of mind and body to combat her excluded status, Devi exemplifies the authentic representation of female assertion. The tales written by Mahasweta Devi reveal the unspoken reality of women's suffering as well as their capacity for surviving and resisting oppression. The voices of the characters are provided by Mahasweta. She reveals the 'unspeakable' reality about these personalities to the audience. In this paper, I'm going to talk about a few of her short stories, specifically Breast-Giver, Draupadi, The Hunt, and Behind the Bodice, in order to demonstrate that the women in her works are powerful, that they have a tremendous sense of self-respect, and that they are willing to fight all of their battles until the very end, even if that means death.

Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage by Jonathan M. Hess

Reviewed by: Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage by Jonathan M. Hess Joseph R. D'Ambrosi Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage. By Jonathan M. Hess. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. pp. 272. $49.95 cloth. Few nineteenth-century melodramas provide for us in the twenty-first century a window into the historical relationships between cultures or religions. S. H. Mosenthal's Deborah, a play about a Jewish woman eventually rejected by her Christian lover, inspired in Jewish and non-Jewish audience members an intense overflow of emotion that typically manifested through tears. Deborah and Her Sisters is the first full-length study that examines the history and legacy of Mosenthal's sensational melodrama, which premiered in Hamburg in 1849 and was performed and adapted around the Western world until the early twentieth century. In the book, the late Jonathan M. Hess argues that Deborah and its many adaptations invoked in audience members a compassion for Jewish suffering and, as such, functioned as "the epitome of and foundation for liberal feeling" (207). Deborah and Her Sisters offers an exposé into a dramatic work that illuminates the relationship between Jews and non-Jews almost two hundred years ago. Hess expands his study of the Deborah phenomenon over four chapters, each carefully constructed, deeply rooted in archival material, and supported with an impressive collection of images. The book's introduction contextualizes theatre practice and popular culture in the nineteenth century. Hess explains that Deborah's success in Germany became appealing to myriad theatrical giants including Augustin Daly, whose adaptation, Leah, made waves in the United States. Despite the generous artistic licenses taken within each adaptation, all of them made their audiences cry. Thus, argues Hess, "In an era that witnessed the rise of new forms of political and racial anti-Semitism, theatergoers often celebrated the pleasure taken in feeling the pain of the suffering Jewish woman as the ultimate litmus test for liberal feeling" (7). Deborah was, according to Hess, not simply a play that made people cry but one that bridged a divide between Jews and non-Jews through tears. In the first two chapters, Hess investigates the anatomy of the melodrama, traces how and why Deborah became an international sensation, and theorizes the meaning behind audiences' emotional reactions to the play. Chapter 1 analyzes Deborah's primary function as a tearjerker. By focusing on the text and reviews of several productions, Hess explains that when audience members came together to witness Deborah or one of the various adaptations, they "embrace[d] crying as a collective experience," a moment of community building despite differences in religious background (28). Arguing that the play is a "masterfully [End Page 211] constructed melodrama," Hess theorizes that the spectator's tears indicate a thrilling moment of identification with Jewish suffering, thereby deconstructing religious barriers for its audiences (35). Chapter 2 compares Deborah's many adaptations to Mosenthal's original text and production. Though producers were drawn to Deborah primarily for its commercial appeal, each adaptation had a personalized effect within the country where it was playing. Daly's Leah, for example, forced American Christians to "confront the brutality of their own past with its Puritan-like fanaticism and intolerance" (81). Hess shifts the focus of chapter 3 from the anatomy of Deborah's text to the function and impact of the actresses playing the title role. Deborah was an alluring part for both Jewish and non-Jewish actresses. This chapter asks, what does it mean to perform Jewishness and what are the intersections between theatricality and authenticity, particularly for a play that allegedly builds bridges between religions? Hess postulates that Jewish and non-Jewish audiences experienced the play as both a theatrical occurrence and an authentic representation of Jewishness, despite the religious background of the main performers. In his final chapter, Hess most closely engages with his major argument—that the Deborah phenomenon "probes the legacy of nineteenth-century liberal culture and its universalist aspirations" (9). Asserting that Deborah is an example of philo...

<em>The Simpsons</em> Do the Nineties

<em>The Simpsons</em> Do the Nineties

Risk & Representation: Framing HIV Now

The visual history of HIV is powerful and particular. From early on designers gave form to urgent messages and critical stances. In 2012, Truvada for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was approved for use in the United States (US). Truvada is an antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV that when taken daily by people without HIV can reduce the chances of contracting the virus by more than 90%. The advent of PrEP has created a radically new landscape for people at risk of contracting HIV, as well as a fresh opportunity for redefining sexual health. This article calls for designers to be present and active in creating new visual representations of HIV and risk, and articulating what PrEP means socially. Specifically, the thoughtful use of forums that foster self-authorship, community-constructed meaning, and the distribution of diverse narratives can serve to amplify authentic representation and awareness.

Elsewhere

Bilal Qureshi continues to look “elsewhere,” here musing on the contrast in stereotypes and complexities between a marquee movie, Tony Gilroy's Beirut, and an art-house work, Tamer Said's In the Last Days of the City. The overlapping theatrical release of the two films allows Qureshi to juxtapose their very different visions of the Middle East. While Beirut repeats familiar tropes from Hollywood's post-9/11 Arab thrillers, In the Last Days of the City's portrait of pre-revolutionary Cairo presents a welcome alternative to this clichéd gaze, presenting instead a more authentic and genuine representation of Middle Eastern subjectivity.

Representación sindical y redistribución: el caso de los jornaleros del valle de San Quintín

Este artículo analiza la relación entre el rezago en las condiciones laborales de los jornaleros mexicanos, la ausencia de una representación efectiva de sus intereses, la existencia de autoridades que toleran las medidas represivas de sus empleadores y su debilidad estructural en el mercado laboral. Se sostiene que esta situación obstruye cualquier demanda de cumplimiento de derechos, salvo en circunstancias extraordinarias como las que dieron lugar a la movilización y organización de los jornaleros del valle de San Quintín entre 2015 y 2017. En este caso, la lucha por la obtención de una auténtica representación de intereses, se traslapa con la demanda de mejores términos de intercambio entre trabajo y capital.

Telling Pictures, Seeing Words. Metaphors and Images of Emotional Competence

With the term “emotional competence” we can understand the ability persons have to recognise, accept, correctly express their emotional states. It is a matter of recognising, naming, taking and managing own and others' emotional characteristics. Being emotional competent is, also, being empathetic. To recognise, name and describe emotional states, a rational and denotative language based on conceptuality and classification is not enough. It is necessary the connotative and analogical dimension of the metaphor. The metaphor may be expressed not only through verbal language but also through images, which are excellent precious resources. Therefore, the symbolic apparatuses of the emotional competence become functional for constructing a more authentic knowledge and representation.

Aesthetics, Gender, and Canon in Anti-Caste Graphic Narratives, A Gardener in the Wasteland and Bhimayana

This essay considers graphic narratives about the lives of Dalit leaders Jyotirao Phule and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as portrayed in Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland (2011) and Durgabai Vyam, Shubham Vyam, Srividya Natarajan, and S. Anand’s Bhimayana (2011) to examine the aesthetics of publishing, gender, and canon from an anti-caste perspective. I argue that while maintaining the focus on the Dalit leaders, these works offer innovative ways to interrogate the issue of representation that has been central to the Dalit imagination. I examine questions such as how Dalit women are perceived, integrated, and represented in this structurally layered reinvention and how these graphic narratives reappraise the role of upper-caste participants in the anti-caste struggle. I investigate how this medium rises to the challenge of apprehending the issue of authenticity and representation in Dalit literature by problematizing the very notion of authentic representation to posit that the anti-caste struggle must be the work of everyone, not just Dalits. I use the term “anti-caste literature” to define these graphic narratives in an attempt to understand the impact of these works on the semantics of both anti-caste and Dalit literary canon.

CINEMA IN JAMAICA – THE LEGACY OF THE HARDER THEY COME

Mainstream cinema representing Jamaica and Jamaicans has always made use of clichés and stereotypes. The emergence of a local Jamaican cinema—beginning in 1972 with Perry Henzell’s movie—immediately started to give a new image of the country and its inhabitants. From The Harder They Come up to most recent movies, Jamaican cinema has used consistent style, techniques, and themes to give a new vision of the country. Jamaican movies may have low production value, but they provide a more authentic representation of Jamaica’s culture. Viewing Jamaican movies gives the audience a sense of a small but growing cinematic tradition.

Literary Ethnography and Translation in Rachid Djaïdani’s Boumkoeur

Rachid Djaïdani’s Boumkoeur (1999) exposes the inheritance of colonial anthropological thinking that dominates the reception and production of French minority literature of the banlieue. By using the ethnographic document as a textual template, Djaïdani situates his narrator, Yaz, in the space of negotiation in which colonial ethnographers and their native informants interacted in the field. Describing the French banlieue as a postcolonial ethnographic field, Djaïdani shows how Yaz as a narrator-ethnographer participates in tasks of cultural and linguistic translation. The novel directs the reader’s attention away from the production of an authentic representation of cultural difference. Instead, the novel suggests a new form of literary translation capable of abiding by translation ethics that aim to render in the target language meaningful signs of the complex cultural history of “minor” texts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]; Venuti, 1996) in the source language. The novel serves as an experimental literary ethnography, conceived as a new form of translation, in which the translator is an ethnographer, and the act of translation is one of linguistic and cultural translation. In this new form of translation, the translator is present in the text as an active agent. This presence makes palpable the fraught negotiations out of which any translation is born; moreover, the translator is invested with the functions of the author, adding a new literary element to the act of translation.

Fictions of Eichmann: the authentic self, authenticity, and the facts of atrocity

ABSTRACTThis essay chronicles a turning point in the concept of legal evidence as it is used to establish the reality of atrocity. In the wake of the Eichmann trial that began in 1961 and Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial in her landmark thesis, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the discourse of ‘authenticity’ became central to representing atrocity, as atrocity became enfolded within legal discourse, rendered in terms of legal concepts of truth and verification. Yet the concept of ‘authenticity’ itself became contested, torn between the demands of aesthetic representation on the one hand and legal representation on the other. Using current research on Eichmann alongside my archival investigation into Arendt and Eichmann’s papers, I juxtapose Arendt’s version of the ‘real’ Eichmann, drafted during the Jerusalem trial in 1961, with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s character, Walter Campbell Jr., who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eichmann in his 1961 Mother Night. Doubling the historical figure of Eichmann, Mother Night oscillates between fictional and factual discourse in its attempt to locate an authentic representation of atrocity. I argue that in the attempt to determine and assess the facts of atrocity, fiction may itself produce a type of authentic factuality.

The Habsburg Empire at the Liberalization Stage: The Progress of Civil Society

In the article the author determines the formation of a functional correlation between the institutions of civil society and ethnic nationalism in Austria-Hungary. It is established that civil society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to form clearly after the democratic reforms of the sixties of the XIX century. It is proved that civil society has undergone stratification in various national and linguistic spaces in the form of educational, scientific, economic, and creative organizations. Civil society on the periphery of the empire has acquired a stable ethno-cultural character.The findings indicate that the acute crisis of identity in Austro-Hungary developed on the basis of two actively functioning sources: the old conflict environment of local historical and state identities and new formations that arose as a result of the cultural and political expansion of ethnic groups belonging to nations that were treated as young and stateless. The problems of economic, social, mental autonomy and cultural coexistence could not receive an authentic representation only in terms of administrative and political decentralization or integration, since in each national-ethnic event they had a spiritual and cultural content and socio-humanitarian content. In the early twentieth century. in Austria-Hungary there was a situation of unstable equilibrium of the composite society, which was characterized by the asynchrony of historical development.The ethnic factor played a dissonant role in the social life of Austria-Hungary. Most ethno-national groups were in different segments of the formation of political nations, in different socio-cultural contexts, which led to difficulties in the formation of classical institutions of civil societies and its formation as homogeneous. The period of modernization of the Austrian empire proved that liberalism and nationalism are historically linked precisely with the principle of people's sovereignty.
 Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Empire, multiethnicity, liberalization, civil society, national movements

Who Wrote the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa? Reflections on an Enigmatic Text and Its Place in the History of Buddhist Philosophy

In recent decades, scholars of Buddhist philosophy have frequently treated the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa (TSN), or “Teaching of the Three Natures,” attributed to Vasubandhu, as an authentic and authoritative representation of that celebrated thinker’s mature work within the Yogācāra tradition. However, serious questions may be posed concerning the status and authority of the TSN within Yogācāra, its true authorship, and the relation of its contents to trends in early Yogācāra thought. In the present article, we review the actual state of our knowledge of the TSN’s possible origins, considering, too, the implications this may have for contemporary treatments thereof.

3D technology of Sony Bloggie has no advantage in decision-making of tennis serve direction: A randomized placebo-controlled study

This study aimed at exploring whether 3D technology enhances tennis decision-making under the conceptual framework of human performance model. A 3 (skill-level: varsity, club, recreational) × 3 (experimental condition: placebo, weak 3D [W3D], strong 3D [S3D]) between-participant design was used. Allocated to experimental conditions by a skill-level stratified randomization, 105 tennis players judged tennis serve direction from video scenarios and rated their perceptions of enjoyment, flow, and presence during task performance. Results showed that varsity players made more accurate decisions than less skilled ones. Additionally, applying 3D technology to typical video displays reduced tennis players’ decision-making accuracy, although wearing the 3D glasses led to a placebo effect that shortened the decision-making reaction time. The unexpected negative effect of 3D technology on decision-making was possibly due to participants being more familiar to W3D than to S3D, and relatedly, a suboptimal task-technology match. Future directions for advancing this area of research are offered. Highlights 3D technology augments binocular depth cues to tradition video displays, and thus results in the attainment of more authentic visual representation. This process enhances task fidelity in researching perceptual-cognitive skills in sports. The paper clarified both conceptual and methodological difficulties in testing 3D technology in sports settings. Namely, the nomenclature of video footage (with/without 3D technology) and the possible placebo effect (arising from wearing glasses of 3D technology) merit researchers' attention. Participants varying in level of domain-specific expertise were randomized into viewing conditions using a placebo-controlled design. Measurement consisted of both participants' subjective experience (i.e., presence, flow, and enjoyment) and objective performance (i.e., accuracy and reaction time) in a decision-making task. Findings revealed that wearing glasses of 3D technology resulted in a placebo effect that shortened participants' reaction times in decision-making. Moreover, participants' decision-making accuracy decreased when viewing video scenarios using 3D technology. The findings generated meaningful implications regarding applying 3D technology to sports research.

Cinetopia: Leftist Street Theatre and the Musical Production of the Metropolis in 1950s Bombay Cinema

The city of Bombay emerged as an emblematic space of India's postcolonial modernity in Hindi cinema during the 1950s, India's first decade of independence. This article focuses on the mise-en-scène of musical sequences—from popular Hindi films such as C.I.D. (dir. Raj Khosla, 1956), Awara (The Vagabond, dir. Raj Kapoor, 1951), Shree 420 (The Gentleman Cheat, dir. Raj Kapoor, 1955), Aar paar (This Way or That, dir. Guru Dutt, 1954), and Pocket maar (Pickpocket, dir. H. S. Rawail, 1956), as well as less commercially successful films such as Phir subah hogi (Dawn Will Come Again, dir. Ramesh Saigal, 1958)—that featured Bombay in a prominent role and delivered it to the Indian public as an iconic space oscillating between exuberance and disenchantment. The author analyzes how these musical sequences use performance, music, and set design to reimagine the metropolis as a site of social critique and utopian fantasy. The urban landscape created through these musical performances and the often highly stylized studio sets is not meant to be read as an authentic representation of real-life locales. Instead, the set as artifice insistently draws attention to its constructed nature and, in fact, relies, for its legibility and evocative power, on this “unreality effect.” The author's aim is to show how this unreal city emerges, in part, out of popular cinema's encounter with the Indian left cultural movement and leftist street theater of the 1940s, and how it functions as a “cinetopia,” a heterogeneous space of utopian longings and dystopian disenchantment.