Open-ended Story Research Articles

Implementing digital neuroscience in special-needs-teacher education: exploring student-teachers' multifaceted learning outcomes related to teaching children with neurodevelopmental disorders.

In recent decades, there has been increased use of neuroscience in teacher education, which refers to applying knowledge from brain science to teaching. Similarly, digital learning has been extensively integrated into teacher education, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the benefits of assimilating educational neuroscience into special-education training-particularly using digital platforms-have yet to be examined. The current study explored the use of digitally-delivered educational neuroscience, related to neurodevelopmental disorders (ND), in teacher education, to gain insight into the learning outcomes alongside the contribution of the digital platform. Employing a qualitative approach, we recruited 193 student-teachers who learned a digital ND-related neuroscience course. Data collection included open-ended reflections, open-ended story questions and five focus groups - all of which were analyzed using content analysis. Findings revealed a process involving four learning outcomes: understanding brain-based mechanisms of ND, enhanced empathy, extended perception of teachers' professional role, and the design of pedagogical adaptations. The analysis also pointed out the various ways in which the digital platform facilitated these learning outcomes. The study provides theoretical insight into the role of digitally-delivered educational neuroscience in the service of inclusion. It further discusses the practical implications of using digitally-delivered educational neuroscience in teacher education to promote an inclusive pedagogy and best practices.

De-essentializing ethnic identities through narrating a plural belonging: Aesthetics of postmigration in Zafer Şenocak’s novel Perilous Kinship (1998)

I will relocate Zafer Şenocak’s work within the aesthetics of postmigration. His novel Perilous Kinship (Gefährliche Verwandtschaft 1998) can be regarded as an important attempt to challenge and change the political core narrative of Germany as a homogeneous society during reunification times. By contributing to the political and public discourses of national belonging, integration policies and immigration politics from the late 1990s onward, the novel’s fragmented, open-ended story can be seen as a distinct example for a narrative of postmigratory belonging that goes beyond territorial, ethnically essentialized and otherwise fixated constructions of cultural identities, including postcolonial and hybrid identity constructions. The novel, by style and structure, can be analysed through the lens of a transformative aesthetics that makes the visible invisible (and vice versa), undoes marginalization and in so doing demonstrates the construction of identity and society as plural and performative. It further challenges the perception of Berlin as a site of coherent national history by describing it as ‘The capital of the fragment’ and as ‘a city of immigration par excellence’. My argument is that the protagonist’s multi-layered cultural identity construction as someone, who discovers his Jewish-German-Turkish family connections, draws parallels to the conceptualization of Berlin as a super-diverse metropolitan space.

An open-ended story of some hidden sides of listening or (what) are we really (doing) with childhood?

The paper arises from a shared event that turned into an experience: the finding of a childlike piece of paper on our way to a conference about philosophy in schools and how it affects our educational ideas and research practices on listening to children. Triggered by the question of what it means to listen, we are led to the exercise of self-questioning inspired by some of the authors that have already written about the topic, specifically in the context of the community of philosophical enquiry. The thinking unfolds with the telling of the story about the found piece of paper, crossing different layers of questioning and trying to keep the enquiry open for the readers: what is it that we do not know about listening to children? And to what extent might that, which we do not know, be the cause of biased and adultist practices? Is it necessary to return to what philosophy is and where one can find it inside the school environment? Is it already there when the adults arrive? Are we not listening to it? Or are there specific places for philosophical conversations, such as the classroom? Is philosophy also invited to the margins of those spaces? Who decides what counts as philosophical? It is not about answering questions and giving closure to our concerns as educators and researchers, but rather sharing with the readers how even in the least suspected place - an academic event about bringing philosophy to school - one might still not be listening to children. In returning to this self-questioning movement, we want to echo some of the troubling in the thinking and practices of listening in the so-called movement of Philosophy for/with Children: this for/with phenomenon, its politics and relations; some of the assumptions that might be present in the dilemmas in practice for educators and researchers; but also its aesthetics resonances, the sheer beauty of troubling, the (out of) tune of self-questioning, the questions it raises for us as researchers and the space of doubting and uncertainty it offers, like a hesitation or a breathing space. And perhaps, we wonder, it is in-between spaces, in its cracks and transitions, that important things can find their way into our thinking and conversations about childhood. Just like a piece of paper in a hotel room.

The Power of Stories.

Stories hold an important role in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Their power derives in part from the fact that humans are biologically programmed for storytelling. Stories foster connection with others, socialization, and identity formation. They are integral to all psychoanalytic theories of therapeutic action, and their telling is therapeutic in itself. Psychoanalytic theoretical paradigms can be considered stories, as well. A positive outcome of analytic treatment has the individual emerging with an open-ended story that encompasses past, present, and future. Finally, an autobiographical example demonstrates how shared stories consolidate group identities, uphold and perpetuate a group's power over others, and perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Clare Pettitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv+348.

<i>Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848</i>. Clare Pettitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv+348.

Temporal structures of the poor: Social mobility and the struggle for the future in Chile

Since the ‘culture of poverty’ studies in the 1960s, temporal structures have become essential for understanding poverty and its reproduction. Most studies in this field have characterised poverty by a strong presentism, a neglect of the future, and a lack of agency in shaping the course of life. This article provides a novel approach to make sense of the intersection between time and poverty by empirically analysing the work that the poor perform to distinguish, link and valuate their past, present and future and make sense of their lives as stories of social mobility. Drawing on the biographical narratives of poor men and women from urban Santiago and rural Maule in Chile, we argue that the temporal structures of the poor intertwine a pragmatic presentism with the aspiration of social mobility through the sacrificial structure of an extended self. These findings reveal that the poor are not passive subjects of destiny but agents of a dynamic and open-ended story, and that their biographies are structured not only by the fatalism of the repetition of the past but also by a dramatic struggle for the future.

Sait Faik Abasıyanık’ın Seçilmiş Üç Öyküsünde Zaman, Mekân ve Ahlak

One of the most influential Turkish literature authors after the post-republic period, Sait Faik Abasıyanık pursued virtue and morality in his literary work, although literary critics have not underlined this aspect of his work. In his non-didactic and open-ended stories, the perception of morality he adopted is quite evident. Analyzing Sait Faik’s selected stories in the context of their temporal and spatial settings, this study aims to resolve the moral equation manifested. In this paper, three randomly selected short stories by Abasiyanik were studied to understand how he perceived morality and how the subject of morality is treated in his select short stories. His short stories The Old Teenager, The White Gold, and Just a Story were studied in terms of how the selected subject, morality, appears in these texts. While analyzing these stories, it is recognized that the author was affected from the space and time in and during which he lived and wrote in Istanbul.

Moral Reasoning and Moral Behavior: Intersections of Reasoning with Aggressive Forms and Functions in Early Childhood

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Children’s capacities for complex socio-moral reasoning carries across domains; similarly, children’s aggressive behaviors changes as a function of context. However, with a few exceptions, little research has considered children’s socio-moral reasoning and aggressive subtypes in concert. The goals of the current study were to consider these phenomena together, and to explore possible gender differences. In the current study, teachers reported children’s (N = 130, Mage = 56.05) aggressive behaviors (physical proactive, physical reactive, relational proactive, and relational reactive), and children completed an open-ended story interview pertaining to unintentional, multifaceted harm in order to assess their socio-moral reasoning strategies (moral domain: psychological harm, property damage, resource distribution; conventional domain: rule adherence). Practice or Policy: Findings support the form-by-function approach to aggression, and support the notion that children’s reasoning is an important factor in understanding aggressive subtypes. For example, care-oriented, but not justice-oriented, strategies in the moral domain corresponded with lower rates of aggression, but not all types of aggression and not for all ages. Moreover, several age by gender interactions occurred, suggesting that aggressive behaviors are not uniform across early childhood. Educators and parents may find utility in approaching children’s misbehavior with appropriative responses that are sensitive to children’s moral reasoning.

Dynamic Steady State by Unlimited Unidirectional Plastic Deformation of Crystalline Materials Deforming by Dislocation Glide at Low to Moderate Temperatures

This paper presents an outline of the quest for the mechanical steady state that an unlimited unidirectional plastic strain applied at low to moderate temperature is presumed to develop in single-phase crystalline materials deforming by dislocation glide, with particular emphasis on its athermal strength limit. Fifty years ago, the study of crystalline plasticity was focused on the strain range covered by tensile tests, i.e., on true strains less than unity; the canonic stress–strain behavior was the succession of stages I, II, and III, the latter supposedly leading to a steady state defining a temperature and strain rate-dependent flow stress limit. The experimentally available strain range was increased up to Von Mises equivalent strains as high as 10 by the extensive use of torsion tests or by combinations of intermittent deformations by wire drawing or rolling with tensile tests during the 1970s. The assumed exhaustion of the strain-hardening rate was not verified; new deformation stages, IV and V, were proposed, and the predicted strength limit for deformed materials was nearly doubled. Since the advent of severe plastic deformation techniques in the 1980s, such a range was still significantly augmented. Strains of the order of several hundreds were routinely reached, but former conclusions relative to the limit of the flow stress were not substantially changed. However, very recently, the plastic strain range has allegedly been expanded to 105 true strain units by using torsion under high pressure (HPT), surprisingly for some common metals, without experimental confirmation of having reached any steady state. This overview has been motivated by the scientific and technological interest of such an open-ended story. A tentative explanation for the newly proposed ultra-severe hardening deformation stage is given.

Can Machines Tell Stories? A Comparative Study of Deep Neural Language Models and Metrics

Massive textual content has enabled rapid advances in natural language modeling. The use of pre-trained deep neural language models has significantly improved natural language understanding tasks. However, the extent to which these systems can be applied to content generation is unclear. While a few informal studies have claimed that these models can generate ‘high quality’ readable content, there is no prior study on analyzing the generated content from these models based on sampling and fine-tuning hyperparameters. We conduct an in-depth comparison of several language models for open-ended story generation from given prompts. Using a diverse set of automated metrics, we compare the performance of transformer-based generative models – OpenAI’s GPT2 (pre-trained and fine-tuned) and Google’s pre-trained Transformer-XL and XLNet to human-written textual references. Studying inter-metric correlation along with metric ranking reveals interesting insights – the high correlation between the readability scores and word usage in the text. A study of the statistical significance and empirical evaluations between the scores (human and machine-generated) at higher sampling hyperparameter combinations ( $t=\{0.75, 1.0\}$ , $k=\{100, 150, 250\}$ ) reveal that the top pre-trained and fine-tuned models generated samples condition well on the prompt with an increased occurrence of unique and difficult words. The GPT2-medium model fine-tuned on the 1024 Byte-pair Encoding (BPE) tokenized version of the dataset along with pre-trained Transformer-XL models generated samples close to human written content on three metrics: prompt-based overlap, coherence, and variation in sentence length. A study of overall model stability and performance shows that fine-tuned GPT2 language models have the least deviation in metric scores from human performance.

Identifikasi Level Berpikir Kreatif Siswa dalam Menyelesaikan Soal Cerita Open Ended pada Materi SPLTV

&lt;div align="center"&gt;&lt;table width="645" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"&gt;&lt;tbody&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td valign="top" width="439"&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract:&lt;/strong&gt; The purpose of this study was to identify the level of students' creative thinking skills in solving open-ended story problems in SPLTV material. The study was conducted by giving open ended story matter problems to SPLTV material to 34 high school students in class X. The results of data analysis showed that the level of creative thinking of students at the very creative level was 3 students, the creative level was 14 students, the level was quite creative as many as 3 students, the level was less creative as many as 14 students.&lt;strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Abstrak:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;Tujuan penelitian ini untuk mengidentifikasi level kemampuan berpikir kreatif siswa menyelesaikan soal cerita &lt;em&gt;open ended&lt;/em&gt; pada materi SPLTV. Penelitian dilakukan dengan memberikan masalah soal cerita &lt;em&gt;open ended&lt;/em&gt; pada materi SPLTV kepada 34 siswa kelas X SMA. Hasil analisis data yang diperoleh bahwa level berpikir kreatif siswa pada level sangat kreatif sebanyak 3 siswa, level kreatif sebanyak 14 siswa, level cukup kreatif sebanyak 3 siswa, level kurang kreatif sebanyak 14 siswa.&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;

Virtual Sense of Community in a World of Warcraft® Storytelling Open Forum Thread

World of Warcraft® (WoW), a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) extends to its members a virtual landscape of live gaming opportunities through such platforms as “dice” rolled character stats, open-ended story development, and interactive AI. These affordances are underpinned by a kind of virtual sense of community bringing players together in order to develop relationships and the self, adventure together, build up wealth, and overcome obstacles in order to complete quests. In addition to live game-play (or “in-world”) communities, WoW residents create alternative communities through rich online forums—here, new members are recruited into guilds, disputes are spawned and slayed, and seasoned warriors reminisce over worlds and lives that once- were. However, a third type of community is also evident through particular threads crafted within forums specifically for collaborative storytelling (or roleplaying). This paper examines sense of community—a sense of “belonging to, importance of, and identification with a community”—through one particular thread, “The Darkening Grove Tavern” under the forum World’s End Tavern using an adaptation of McMillan and Chavis’ theory and Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce &amp; Taylor’s ethnographic data collection methodology for qualitative analysis of virtual worlds . Findings from players’ story text (or “turns”) suggest that online storytelling forum threads exhibit a linguistically and semiotically branded sense of virtual community.

Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation

Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation Martin Savransky (bio) and Isabelle Stengers (bio) I. Philosophy as a Provocation of Thought Martin Savransky (MS): The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopolitical Proposal” (994), you begin with a question that I think resonates with this. You write: “How can we present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought?” So what I wanted to ask you is, how would you characterize the importance of this challenge of creating concepts that provoke thought, rather than instruct others on how to think? Isabelle Stengers (IS): Well, probably you never know why you do what you do as you do it. I mean, it may be that others are better placed to answer this. But to me, this cannot be disentangled from the reason I did become something called “a philosopher.” In fact, at the beginning, I did not even know about philosophy. When I left chemistry, I knew that in chemistry there were “good questions,” concerned with advancing knowledge, and any other question would not be considered serious. And to me, philosophy was just the place where I could learn to craft my own questioning path, a place where nobody could tell me “but this is not philosophy!” just as I had been told “but this is not science!” Now, the wish to craft your own path may be very dangerous if you entertain the ambition to instruct others! It is all the more dangerous if, as an ex-scientist, you feel that you have a “mission,” that what you are to craft is what is lacking either to scientists or to philosophers, or even to both. Happily, I rather felt as a “refugee” having to learn what my new country enabled me to become. And it is when I discovered the texts of Deleuze, first, and then of Whitehead, that I experienced questions that provoke thought rather than demand answers; or, in other words, that I experienced philosophy as an adventure that I did not know existed. It was no longer a matter of asking “my questions” but of engaging with [End Page 130] questions that get me. [Laughs.] And my loyalty as a philosopher is to such questions. So, if I dislike it when the concepts I create end up being used with a kind of authority that makes them an answer without the insistence of a thought-provoking question, it’s simply because the reason I became a philosopher was precisely to resist that! [Laughs.] This is also the reason why I don’t usually spend a lot of my time criticizing others, because that is still to engage in a certain kind of authoritative gesture. You cannot criticize such ways of doing philosophy without, in fact, entering into the same kind of game. For me, it is better to just avoid them. Or else, to attack, but then it is because you feel something ugly is entering the world and you need to put this threatening ugliness into words. For instance, I feel that there is something ugly in the current Anthropocene fashion, when suddenly the trouble with the climate is turned into an academic opportunity. But mostly, I try to never separate a proposition from the problematic path from which it resulted, situating it in an open-ended story, not concluding it. In a way, I am continuing an experience I had when I was very young. I always felt stories were too short, or too poor. What happens then? The first response was to feel sad, alone in an environment that was too easily satisfied. But now I ask: who is killing those stories? How do they kill them? In this way, you may criticize the operation of authority but from the point of view of what it is doing. So, it is a pragmatics of making stories more risky, interesting, shareable...

‘Dramatic tone’ as the emotional core of a screenplay: The case of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

Abstract This article delves into the topic of the central emotion within a screenplay, and the extent to which it can grant the work coherence. It will demonstrate that the emotional core of the story consists in the profound, extended emotion that stems directly from its main theme. It will make these arguments by analysing the screenplay for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving bell and the Butterfly (2007), the screen adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir regarding his experience of ‘locked-in’ syndrome. As Ronald Harwood’s screenplay changes the thematic focus of the original novel, comparing the two texts reveals how different themes invoke different fundamental emotions. The article, drawing especially on the narrative theory developed in the screenwriting textbooks by Robert McKee (1997) and John Truby (2007), elaborates on an issue that has been ignored by other analyses of the movie: from the open-ended story of self-reflection that is told in the book, Harwood gets a closeended story of rebirth. The article highlights how the tension towards the protagonist’s internal goal determines the emotional nucleus of the plot. It also suggests that the emotional core is informed by ‘dramatic tone’ and argues that it consists in the ‘desire of justice’ regarding the main character’s destiny.

The Viral Creep

Across the world, elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus is increasingly killing elephant calves and threatening the long-term survival of the Asian elephant, a species that is currently facing extinction. This article presents three open-ended stories of elephant care in times of death and loss: at places of confinement and elephant suffering like the zoos in Seattle and Zurich as well as in the conflict-ridden landscapes of South India, where the country's last free-ranging elephants live. Our stories of deadly viral-elephant-human becomings remind us that neither human care, love, and attentiveness nor techniques of control and creative management are sufficient to fully secure elephant survival. The article introduces the concept of to explore the ability of a creeping, only partially knowable virus to rearrange relations among people, animals, and objects despite multiple experimental human regimes of elephant care, governance, and organization. The viral creep exceeds the physical and intellectual contexts of human interpretation and control. It reminds us that uncertainty and modes of imaging are always involved when we make sense of the world around us.

Creativity in students’ writing of open-ended stories across ethnic, gender, and grade groups: An extension study from third to fifth grades

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine students’ creativity when writing open-ended stories—across ethnicity, gender, and grades. Participants were 139 students, including 67 males and 72 females, from urban and rural areas of the southwestern United States. The students were in third, fourth, and fifth grades and included three ethnicities: White, Mexican American, and Navajo. Written stories were selected from the Discovering Intellectual Strengths and Capabilities while Observing Varied Ethnic Responses (DISCOVER) project’s archives. Creative products were scored by using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) by five experts. No significant differences were found between boys and girls; also, no significant differences were found across the three grade levels. The differences among the three ethnic groups were significant: the White students were more creative. Future researchers should focus on implementing comprehensive teaching methods to meet all students’ needs (e.g., the DISCOVER project). Teachers who work at schools with minority students should establish an early childhood program for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to help young students use the language and adapt to the culture.

Using Open-Ended Story Technique in Improving Saudi University Students’ Short Story Writing Skills

This study aimed at examining the impact of using the open-ended story technique on improving Saudi university students’ short story writing skills in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The study addressed the following questions: (1) What are the short story writing skills that university students need in EFL? and (2) What is the impact of using the open-ended story technique on improving Saudi university students’ short story writing skills in EFL? The researchers developed a pre-post short story writing test to measure performance of the study’s sample, which consisted of 56 English major students, and reveal effectiveness of the open-ended story technique in improving the learners short story writing skills. Findings of the study showed a positive impact for the open-ended story technique on performance of the experiment group on the post short story writing test.

Marvelous Plasticity and the Fortunes of Species in The Water-Babies

In Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies , the wild, wicked child who matures into a man of science appears to “recapitulate” the story of the human rise to preeminence in the animal kingdom. Yet Kingsley uses evolutionary thought precisely to attack the notion of biological/ social progress and the suffering it causes. He does so by identifying the impact of the social and physical environment on individual development and inviting us to consider how the physical interaction between developing mind and developing world affects broader patterns of human behavior. Playfully evoking the evolutionary dynamics involving organism, culture, and species-level traits, Kingsley points to a form of extragenetic inheritance prompted by open-ended stories.

Regulação de emoções na pré-adolescência e influência da conversação familiar

Esse estudo analisa a relação entre regulação de emoções no pré-adolescente e conversação familiar sobre emoções. Participaram do estudo 74 pré-adolescentes (10 a 13 anos) de famílias de classe média que formaram dois grupos, o que conversa sempre em casa e o que não tem esse costume. Para acessar a regulação de emoções foram usadas duas histórias com final aberto que permitiram comparar os grupos quanto às estimativas de duração de emoções e estratégias para regulá-las e à presença de reavaliações cognitivas. Há diferenças significativas na ocorrência de reavaliações cognitivas para lidar com a raiva, que surgiram apenas no grupo que costuma conversar. Os resultados sugerem que conversação familiar sobre emoções pode auxiliar a desenvolver habilidades diferenciadas para regular emoções.

When Schwann Cells Conspire with Mitochondria, Neighboring Axons Are under Attack by Glia-Derived Neurotoxic Lipids

In this issue of Neuron, Viader etal. (2013) report on the production of toxic lipids by Schwann cells deficient in mitochondrial respiration, which are capable of destroying neighboring axons. This may have implications for understanding the neurobiology and treatment of mitochondrial neuropathies.