Original Essays Research Articles

Gender differences in students’ argumentative essay writing, peer review performance and uptake in online learning environments

ABSTRACT This study adopted a pre-test–post-test design to explore gender differences in argumentative essay writing and peer review performance and uptake within a higher education context. To do this, as part of a bigger project, 101 students were asked to individually write an argumentative essay, engage in peer review activities and revise their original essay based on the received reviews from peers. The findings showed that female students perform better than male students in argumentative essay writing in terms of taking a position on the topic. Gender differences were also found in peer review performance, where females provided better justifications for identified problems in peer review, more constructive reviews and higher quality peer review than males. The findings also revealed that although there was no gender difference in overall peer review uptake, females uptake of peer review resulted in improvement of their arguments against the position in the revised essay. These findings suggest that gender plays a significant role in argumentative essay writing, peer review performance and uptake of the received reviews from peers. Recommendations for future research along with how to deal with these gender differences in educational practice in online settings are provided based on the findings.

A Pilot Study of Analysis of Students Cognition and Affection Styles in Strengthening Essay Writing Malay Language in Primary Schools

This study aims to analyze the cognition style and affections of students in writing Malay essays. The study sample involved 52 students Year 5 and 2 teacher to be interviewed. A total of 40 original essay texts were studied and analyzed and 12 students were interviewed to obtain data and transcribed into research texts. The text of this study was analyzed using Hermeneutic methods to interpret the findings of the study. Findings show that excellent and average students can apply cognition style, affective and past experience in essay writing while weak students face difficulties in practicing cognition style, affective and past experience

Flowers Blooming on a Withered Tree: Giun's Verse Comments on Dōgen's by Steven Heine

Reviewed by: Flowers Blooming on a Withered Tree: Giun's Verse Comments on Dōgen's by Steven Heine Zuzana Kubovčáková (bio) Flowers Blooming on a Withered Tree: Giun's Verse Comments on Dōgen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. By Steven Heine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 279. Hardcover $83.99, ISBN 978-0-19-094134-5. Flowers Blooming on a Withered Tree, the most recent addition to Steven Heine's outstanding body of publications on doctrinal, historical, and textual studies of the meditative school, introduces a genre of Zen writings that has previously been largely neglected in the West. It presents annotated translations, interpretative explanations, and additional illuminating chapters relating to Verse Comments on the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye written by monk Giun 義雲 (1253–1333 CE), the fifth abbot of Eiheiji temple, which was established a generation prior by Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253 CE), founder of the Japanese Sōtō school 曹洞宗 in the remote province of Echizen, present-day Fukui prefecture. Giun, who was born in the year of Dōgen's passing and served as the abbot of his temple from 1314 CE until his own death in 1333, provided in Verse Comments a poetic commentary on the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, or Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵, Dōgen's magnum opus. Giun's Verse Comments, written in 1329 CE and published a century later in 1421, was one of two commentaries on Dōgen's masterwork that was composed during the medieval Kamakura era. The other commentary on the Treasury from this period, Transcribed Comments on the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō kikigakishō 正法眼蔵聞書抄), more commonly known as Goshō 御鈔 in Japanese, is a prose text composed by monks Senne 詮慧 and Kyōgō 経豪 between 1283 CE (or alternatively as early as 1263) and 1308. For reasons that Heine closely explains in the monograph, Giun selected the 60-volume edition of the Treasury--unlike the 75-fascicle edition used for the prose comments of Senne and Kyōgō in the Goshō--and wrote the Verse Comments in Chinese-style kanbun poetry, each poem celebrating one of Dōgen's original essays. In addition, Giun included a summarizing, if at times baffling, four-character capping phrase (著語 jakugo) to epitomize his verses. To further enrich the translations, Heine has chosen to supplement Giun's poetic depictions of the Treasury fascicles with additional capping phrases by Katsudō Honkō 活動本興, an Edo-period Sōtō school commentator, thus introducing Zen [End Page 1] poetry from across centuries. All of Giun's poems as well as Honkō's capping phrases are presented not only in English rendering, but also in original kanbun script, which adds an intriguing linguistic layer to the entire volume. The translations are supplemented with interpretative comments by Heine serving to illuminate some of the creative Zen imagery and expressions, references to which are abundant both in Giun's and in Honkō's lines. As Giun's lines attest and as is shown in the volume, Verse Comments represent one example in a long tradition of Sōtō Zen poetry. For those acquainted with the Sōtō founder's life and work, it will come as no surprise that Dōgen would have established and supported a legacy of poetic expression within the school, yet from Heine's meticulous research we learn that the tradition of poetry composition was greatly encouraged by Dōgen's teacher Rujing 如淨 as well as by earlier Caodong masters. Besides relating Giun's poetry to the theory of Five Ranks of the Caodong founders Dongshan 洞山(807–869 CE) and Caoshan 曹山 (840–901 CE), Heine further introduces the literary pursuits of the Wanshi (Hongzhi in Chinese)-ha school, which was studied and emulated in Japan during the first half of the thirteenth century. The school's aim was to express an understanding of dharma by means of poetry, a practice derived from the Chinese master Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157 CE, Wanshi Shōgaku in Japanese), who with over fifteen hundred poems to his name is considered one of the finest and most prolific Chan poets. Since Giun himself never travelled to mainland China, he strived...

How did support systems in Western countries transform and adapt to meet underserviced and marginalized migrants' needs? A scoping review

Prior studies on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrants with precarious immigration status (refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants who arrived in a host country fewer than five years ago) have shown that they have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic because of their migration and socioeconomic status. Across the world, support systems for these marginalized migrants at local levels had to be reinvented to face the pandemic and ensure continuity of services. The objective of this systematic review was to provide a portrait of the interventions that were set up to address underserviced and marginalized migrants’ needs in Western countries during the pandemic and to categorize them by area of intervention. We identified peer-reviewed papers published in English and French between March 2020 and February 2022 in MEDLINE, Embase, PubMed and Web of Science. We included original research studies, commentaries, essays and editorials. For grey literature, we searched in Google Scholar and the websites of major health organizations and institutions that worked with underserviced and marginalized migrants. We also consulted the articles’ list of references. We included 31 publications: 15 peer-reviewed articles and 16 grey literature documents. Our results indicated that in order to address vulnerable newcomers’ needs, support systems intervened in the following areas: immigration, health and social services; raising awareness about COVID-19, food security, primary and secondary basic needs; and mental health and control of COVID-19 infection in settings with high concentrations of underserviced and marginalized migrants. Selected interventions adopted a collaborative approach between actors in different sectors. Most of the interventions were carried out by community-based organizations. Our scoping review highlights the role of community-based organizations in improving the living conditions of migrants with precarious immigration status during the pandemic and emphasizes the relevance of intersectoral collaboration as a strategy to respond effectively to the needs of underserviced and marginalized migrants in times of crisis.

Without mandate: James Bernauer from the ethics of thought to historical memory

This special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism is dedicated to James Bernauer, S.J. on the occasion of his retirement from full-time teaching. It contains original essays from Bernauer’s students, friends, and fellow travelers that were commissioned for the purpose of commemorating this occasion. These essays provide readers with an opportunity to reflect upon Bernauer’s contributions to fields of academic inquiry as diverse as Arendt and Foucault studies, the philosophy of religion, and Holocaust studies. Since our purpose was to honor the life and work of James Bernauer, and not simply comment on it, the contributors to this volume have each attempted to develop and extend, rather than simply rehash and recapitulate, the concerns they find articulated in Bernauer’s publications.

The Rocktalog: Scholars Celebrating & Inhabiting Musicians

The Rocktalog brings together scholars’ reflections on a selection of musicians from different styles, along with a range of imagined dialogues and statements from the artists themselves, some remixed and some improvised. Edited by Geoffrey V. Carter, this collection of sixteen works draws on “The Octalog,” a lively panel discussion at the CCCC’s in 1988, later published as “Octalog I” in Rhetoric Review. Reimaginging this original “electric” dialogue as an ongoing conversation between musicians and musical scholars, The Rocktalog asks questions about the roles of remix, conversation, and composition in engaging with music and musical artists. Each reflection features a mix of audio tracks, original essays and transcripts.

A text GAN framework for creative essay recommendation

Automated essay scoring is one of the most exciting tasks in natural language processing, reducing massive workloads and speeding up the learning process and its effectiveness. Many researchers have made momentous efforts in this matter. However, as far as we know, most AES works have concentrated on the AES technique; no relevant paper has been seen on finding creative essays while performing automated scoring. One of the reasons is that creativity is difficult to judge. This paper explores this concern: we assume that a creative essay is more challenging to write than a common essay; if we mask part of a creative essay, then it is difficult to predict or train the masked part of the essay, while a common essay is relatively easy to predict or train. We build a generative adversarial network framework to predict (train) the hidden parts. By calculating the distance between the generated essay and the original essay, the proposed method gives a judgment of whether or not an essay is creative. We developed a small-scale dataset based on the ASAP dataset for creative essay training. The experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible for finding creative essays among the datasets.

Supporting argumentative essay writing through an online supported peer-review script

ABSTRACT This study investigated the impact of an online peer-review script on students’ argumentative peer-review quality and argumentative essay writing. A pre- and post-test experimental design was used with 42 undergraduate students in the field of educational science. Students were randomly divided over 21 dyads and assigned to two conditions (unscripted and scripted peer-review). Students were first asked to write an original argumentative essay about the topic at hand. Then, students in the scripted condition had to review their peer’s argumentative essay based on a peer-review script while students in the unscripted condition reviewed their peer’s essay without the script. Finally, all students had to revise their original essay based on the comments of their peers. Students in the scripted peer-review condition outperformed students in the unscripted condition in terms of quality of their argumentative peer-review and argumentative essay writing. These results are discussed and implications are provided.

“Going Down to the Sea” : le virage maritime de David Ben Gourion et la migration juive vers la Palestine sous mandat britannique, 1933-1948

This article analyzes the original essay “Going Down to the Sea” by David Ben-Gurion, written in 1937. The article studies the historical context of Ben-Gurion’s maritime proclamation and discusses the Zionist Organization’s increasing interest in the sea as a place of power and influence. It demonstrates how a Jewish conquest of the sea influenced the Jewish national movement in general and Labor Zionism in specific. Moreover, it also shows how Zionists propagated a legitimate and national claim to the land and sea of Palestine and counterbalanced Arab and British narratives which questioned free Jewish immigration to the country. Thus, the article examines the Jewish maritime turn which gained influence after the publication of Ben-Gurion’s essay and affected the discourses on Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE TRANSLATION AN ATTEMPT OF A CLOSE READING OF WALTER BENJAMIN'S ESSAY 'THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR' AND PAUL DE MAN'S COMMENTARY ON THIS ESSAY

Walter Benjamin wrote perhaps the most complex, most interesting essay on the process of translation under the title The Task of the Translator in 1923. This very complex work of literary and translation theory has been analysed and referred to by several literary scholars in the past almost 100 years, the Belgian–American literary scholar Paul de Man among them. The present research article makes an attempt to present a comparative analysis based on close reading of the texts between Benjamin’s original essay and Paul de Man’s commentary, figuring out the possible (and necessary) contradictions and ambiguities of the text, trying to find the answer to the question whether or not translation, at least in the successful sense of the word, exist at all. Deconstructionist way of reading literary and theoretical texts may give multiple answers to the questions about translation, and demonstrate the possibility and impossibility of translation at the same time. Keywords: literary translation, translation theory, literary theory, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, deconstruction, close reading.

Quentin Tarantino’s Cartoon Violence

In this article, the author returns to the study of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘cartoonism’ that appeared in animation 2(2) in 2007. The focus here, as in Chris Pallant’s original essay, is on how filmic live action in Tarantino’s work displays the diegetic conventions of the cartoon, namely, its (1) hyperbolic, (2) graphic novel and (3) comic strip violence. The article adopts Pallant’s interpretive framework in analysing Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time. . . in Hollywood (2019), only this time supplements the analysis with a consideration of the film’s dramatic content. Drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics the author explores whether cartoon violence in Tarantino’s film is inversely related to drama and, more generally, speculates as to whether the cartoon form is inherently non- or anti-dramatic through the ‘private’ and commercial manner of its consumption.

Instructor's Guidelines for Teaching of College Students Paper Writing －Focused on Essays

The purpose of this thesis is to propose “a model of a guideline for instructors that can be referred to” in order for them to effectively teach the information required of their students when it comes to their essay writing. Having done so, we may hope to positively contribute to the overall efficient progress of college students essay writing. By ‘college student essay’ we are referring to a short paper written by a university student, which amounts in length to roughly 5 sheets of A4 paper.<br/>The procedure used to achieve the above purpose is as follows. 1) learn about the definition and types of college student essays, 2) examine the fundamental significance and status of college student essay writing, and 3) present the instructor’s guidelines for the course of college student essay writing.<br/>What is necessary in order to properly establish the learning of college student essay writing is as follows: first, a qualitatively distinct essay task should be assigned to learners, based on the cold judgment of the learner's ability to write an essay. Second, in order not to undermine the opinions of the learners, the instructor’s comments on the contents of the essay should be excluded as much as possible, and hie or her feedback should be provided by paying attention to the formal aspects. Finally, the learner should be encouraged to write and submit a final essay that is better than their original essay, referring to the instructor's feedback.

O przeszłości i jej postrzeganiu, czyli kilka refleksji wokół książki Andrzeja Nowaka O historii nie dla idiotów. Rozmowy i przypadki, Kraków 2019, Wydawnictwo Literackie, ss. 623

The subject of the present review is a book intriguing both by its title and layout. At the same time, its author, Andrzej Nowak, is a historian whose scientific achievement is rich and widely commented on. The first part of the reviewed work comprises ten intriguing conversations with outstanding Polish and foreign historians, held by Andrzej Nowak over the past thirty years, such as Piotr Wandycz, Richard Pipes, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Antony Polonski. The second part consists of Nowak’s original essays written between 2009 and 2019 and devoted to Polish history’s most critical topics, with special emphasis on the history of the twentieth century.

Presidential Address: Memories of Better Times before the Christians Came to Mexico and Guatemala

AbstractThe author presented a draft of this essay as a presidential address at the 2012 meeting of the society in Springfield, Missouri. The theme of the meeting was “the apocalypse,” referring to a popular belief that the Mayan calendar predicted a cataclysmic event to occur in that year. The address proposed that the apocalypse had already occurred in the sixteenth century, when the Maya and many other Indigenous groups of the Americas were devastated by diseases brought by European immigrants. The author examined how the destruction was documented in Spanish surveys called the Relaciones geográficas, which were completed after a major epidemic devastated the Indigenous population of Mesoamerica. The author did not submit the paper for publication at the time. The current pandemic has lent some modest perspective to the many epidemic diseases that have swept through the Americas since the late fifteenth century. The author submitted this revised version of the original essay after editing the content, adding notes, and citing relevant works published since 2012.

Eros and Modernity: Georg Simmel on Love

The text below was originally published under the name “Eros and Modernity: Simmel on Love” in: The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Paper. Franks, D.D. and E. Doyle McCarthy (ed.). Greenwich, CT: JAI press, 1989, pp. 229-247. In the words of its author, the text was written at a time when he was intensely engaged with Simmel, working on his philosophy of history and his hermeneutics. Today, Guy Oakes revisits this text and allows Simmel Studies Journal to republish it for this special issue on love. The text explores in its first part the defining characteristics of erotic love according to Simmel: individuality, reciprocity, immediacy and radicalism. In the second part he concentrates on modernity and how it has had an impact on love relationships.

László Gozmány’s annotated essay on the history of Hungarian lepidopterology published in 1949

In 1949, the American Lepidopterists’ Society published an essay of nine entries on the history of Hungarian lepidopterology. The principal author of the short paper was the young, 28 years old Dr. László Gozmány. Access of the essay is difficult as early volumes of the News of the Lepidopterists’ Society are rare in libraries and not available on the world-wide-web. The original essay is reproduced here with 38 supplementary annotations giving more historical clarity. The article is a tribute to Dr. László Gozmány on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth. With one figure.

National and Post-National Performances at the Venice Biennale: Site-specific Seeing through the Photo Essay

This article makes three contributions to research on visuality and international relations. First, it provides a theoretical framework through which sites and their politics can be understood. Sites are places where certain objects and structures are shown and engaged with. Visitors to sites experience them visually and bodily and visiting sites is a social process. Second, the article introduces the format of the photo essay as an epistemology and a method through which the seeing of sites can be captured. Photo essays about site-specific seeing select photos that convey particular, embodied experiences. Photo essays make photos as important to the analysis as text and they adopt a suggestive form of writing that encourages the reader to see and respond to images in specific ways. Third, the article introduces the Venice Biennale as a site where international relations are performed. National exhibitions called ‘pavilions’ are a central part of the Biennale. Some pavilions invoke ‘the national’ as the privileged lens on world politics, other pavilions challenge this lens. The article provides an analysis of the Serbian, Armenian and Icelandic pavilions in the 2015 Biennale and the national and post-national performances they involved. The analysis draws on an original photo essay composed from a research visit and photo shoot in May 2015.

Transnational Law, With and Beyond Jessup

This chapter serves as the introduction to an edited collection of original essays first presented at an international conference at the Transnational Law Institute, King’s College London. The conference had as its focus the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the publication of Philip Jessup’s landmark study, “Transnational Law”, published in 1956. Jessup’s slim book is often associated with having launched an investigation into the role that law can play in the context of border-crossing human and institutional relations. Whatever the relationship between cause and effect, such an investigation is still continuing. But, the context in which Jessup wrote – as an international lawyer, an arbitrator and economic lawyer – is a different one today. And, that is true also for the disciplines that have taken an active interest in what is and isn’t transnational law. The chapter places Jessup’s main findings into a context of global geopolitical change and domestic state transformation. Both render the interdisciplinary investigation into law’s role in a global context ever more crucial. That “transnational law” – as label, concept or methodology – occupies an important place in this undertaking should be seen less as a marker of a new, self-standing doctrinal legal field, than as an important opportunity to think about the foundations of law today in a volatile, deeply divided world. This forms the backdrop for transnational law as a methodological laboratory in which to study law’s relation to other forms of social ordering, its sources and norms, its actors and processes, its regulatory aspirations and democratic (and, other) infrastructures.

Welcome from the Editors

Welcome from the Editors

Santa y Andrés: A dossier

Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (2016) has enjoyed worldwide acclaim as an intimate, dramatic portrayal of the unlikely friendship that develops in rural Cuba between Andrés, a gay dissident writer, and Santa, the militant citizen who has been sent to surveil him. Declared to be extreme and/or inaccurate in its historical depictions, the film was censored in Cuba and was the subject of intense controversy and public polemics surrounding its release in 2016. Debates about the film’s subject matter and its censorship extend ongoing disagreement over the role of art within the Cuban Revolution, and the changing nature of the Cuban film industry itself. This dossier brings together new scholarship on Santa y Andrés and is linked to an online archive of some of the original essays that have been written about the film by Cuban critics and filmmakers since 2016. The aim of this project is to create a starting point for researchers who wish to investigate Santa y Andrés, evaluating the film both for its contentious initial reception, and in terms of its enduring contribution to the history of Cuban cinema.