Madeleine Thien's Chinese Encyclopedia: Facts, Musics, Sympathies

This article explores the “encyclopedic” properties of Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), seeking to define the novel as inherently comparative—that is, providing, in Edward Said's words, “a comparative or, better, a contrapuntal perspective” on the world with no need for a second counterpart text to draw cross-literary parallels. Written from a transpacific narratorial stance of a millennial Vancouver-based daughter of Chinese immigrants, the narrative communicates her secondhand knowledge about the traumatic twentieth-century history of the People's Republic of China, accumulated in multiple alternating substories of ordinary individuals’ “practical past” as opposed to official historiography. The article likens Thien's patchwork storytelling to Jorge Luis Borges's apocryphal “Chinese” encyclopedia and novel, to the premodern equation between language and reality discussed in Michel Foucault's “archaeology of knowledge,” to classical Chinese novels as described by Goethe and Franco Moretti, and to J. S. Bach's polyphonic layout of the Goldberg Variations. Constructing sympathetic networks of music and literature, Do Not Say We Have Nothing facilitates readerly immersion, yet its fictional storyworld may not feel universally plausible. Sharing its writer's experience of teaching Thien in Hong Kong, the article suggests that a critique of the novel's Western, nearly Orientalist standpoint with respect to sensitive issues of recent Chinese history does not dismiss the contrapuntal outlook Thien's readers are invited to adopt beyond their experiential backgrounds. Reading Thien, one learns to hear the world's polyphony. That, and not a comprehensive multitude of facts summarizing a national mentality and coherent knowledge about the world, makes Do Not Say We Have Nothing encyclopedic.

How individual experiential backgrounds are related to the development of employability among university students

University students have different backgrounds and varied experiences. This diversity has frequently been examined with regard to performance in Higher Education. However, much less attention has been paid to its significance concerning employability. The investigation of this potential relationship is the focus of this study. In this research, 429 students at a German university were assessed on the strength of their employability, which here is defined as a multi-factorial construct. The Career Resources Questionnaire (CRQ) was used (Hirschi et al., 2019) which is a comprehensive instrument that analyses the self-assessed strength of twelve essential career resources amongst respondents. The results were then related to several individual preconditions: existing or non-existing commitment to voluntary work, sporting activity or sporting inactivity and being a first-generation student (FGS) or a continuing-generation student (CGS). These characteristics were chosen, because they are commonly represented in the student population. In addition, some socio-economic implications are discussed. Significant differences were found between the participant groups. Some results correspond with the findings of existing studies, others lead to new explanatory approaches. Based on the overall findings, recommendations for career counselling as well as for seminars in career orientation are given. For example, students' experiences outside the university environment can be used in career counselling to strengthen perceived employability or a supportive approach to first-generation students can lead to the development of career-related strengths.

Searching for Paralympians: Characteristics of Participants Attending “Search” Events

Initiatives have been designed to attract novice athletes and to enable transfer for experienced athletes. However, the authors have very little knowledge of the effectiveness of these programs. To further improve our understanding, this study explored the demographic and sporting careers of 225 participants attending one of the 10 Paralympian Search events held between 2016 and 2018. The sample consisted of participants with a wide range of impairments and sport experiential backgrounds. The majority of the participants reported having some experience in sports, suggesting that either the promotions reached athletes involved in sports already or the advertising appealed especially to this cohort. Athletes with impairments acquired at various stages of their lives (congenital, before adolescence, adolescence, early adulthood, and adulthood) displayed differences in their sporting trajectories, suggesting considerations for current developmental models. Furthermore, it should be considered to vary the testing locations of future events to increase the reach to rural areas and implement new methods to attract novice participants.

Collaboration in Teaching-Learning: Honoring the Wisdom of Diverse Perspectives

As complexity challenges healthcare providers across disciplines, calls arise for greater collaboration across settings and disciplines. In this column, the importance of honoring the wisdom of the diverse perspectives of collaborators with varying educational and experiential backgrounds is explored. For authentic collaboration to be possible, collaborators must have a solid theoretical, scientific, and experiential foundation within their particular discipline. The challenge for nurse faculty is to prepare students for collaboration by providing teaching-learning opportunities for building a solid foundation in the discipline, being clear about the distinctions across disciplines as well as the distinctions among the many degree levels within nursing.

Argumentation in participant-driven photo interviews: A case in ICT for development in Mozambique

Argumentation is essentially dialogical, hence based on verbal disputation. Nonetheless, other semiotic resources than language may play a substantial role in argumentative circumstances. In this article, different argumentative functions played by photographs are explored, based on an unusual corpus for the field. People working in Mozambican Community Multimedia Centers (CMCs) were interviewed, in order to reconstruct the social meaning they confer to such places. To facilitate the exchange of meanings between interviewees and interviewers, who had different cultural and experiential backgrounds, interviewees were requested to take pictures of something they liked, something they didn’t like, and something they perceived as particularly representative of their CMC. Pictures were then presented and commented by participants during their interview. By means of analytical reconstructions, the major argumentative roles played by photographs in the interviews were identified, as well as their semiotic function in respect to interviewees’ words. Argumentative analysis also broadened and enriched the method of photo-driven interviews, and added a further interpretative access to analysis of social representations.

Online Teaching Partnerships in Diverse Socio-Cultural Institutions

In this chapter, the authors present the case of an inter-institutional online teaching partnership. The partnership has allowed faculty and students from racially and socio-economically diverse institutions to interact with each other through synchronous and asynchronous distance learning technologies. Courses were developed and team-taught by faculty from the three partner institutions. Faculty who were new to the online teaching environment collaborated with and were mentored by experienced online instructors. These instructors became more experienced in teaching a diverse student population and more comfortable and competent within technology-mediated teaching environments. Students from diverse socio-economic, racial and experiential backgrounds engaged in a more heterogeneous learning environment and learned how to be more effective online learners. Cross-discipline partnerships resulted in new courses being added to the curriculum. The inter-institutional online teaching partnership is a way to provide teaching and learning that is socially accessible, technologically adaptable, economically viable, and politically agreeable.

Reducing Bias in Language Assessment

One potential solution to the problem of eliminating bias in language assessment is to identify valid measures that are not affected by subjects' prior knowledge or experience. In this study, 156 randomly selected school-age boys (31% majority; 69% minority) participated in three “processing-dependent” language measures, designed to minimize the contributions of prior knowledge on performance, and one traditional “knowledge-dependent” language test. As expected, minority subjects obtained significantly lower scores than majority participants on the knowledge-dependent test, but the groups did not differ on any of the processingdependent measures. These results suggest that processing-dependent measures hold considerable promise for distinguishing between children with language disorders, whose poor language performance reflects fundamental psycholinguistic deficits, and children with language differences attributable to differing experiential backgrounds.