Engaging Students in the Learning Process: The learning journal

This paper explores the usefulness of the learning journal as a means of actively engaging students in the learning process, based on a case study of a third-year undergraduate geography course. After briefly reviewing the literature on journal writing in different contexts, the paper outlines the approach adopted in the new geography course, in which students were given guidelines on how to write a journal that would be assessed as part of the course. Extracts from students' journals for this course are used to illustrate how they approached the task, and how they viewed the experience. It is concluded that the learning journal has good potential to increase student interest in and engagement with course material, to encourage and empower students to take more responsibility for their own learning, to be more reflective in their study, and to allow them to have a voice and provide valuable feedback to the teacher.     

Beyond the Learning Region: A New Direction for Conceptualizing the Relation between Space and Learning

The learning region has been unsuccessful in delivering its main ambition of conceptualizing the relation between space and learning. Taking the region as the level of analysis biased the learning region towards learning in regional networks up to the point where it conflates regions with networks. As learning is a process of social interaction between individuals, innovation networks of individuals are suggested as the alternate level of analysis. The spatial dimension of innovation networks is two-fold. Their reach may vary between the local and the global. Second, regional social capital and norms and values affect learning as they are brought into the networks by spatially sticky individuals.     

Adaptive Management for Water Quality Improvement in the Great Barrier Reef Catchments: Learning on the Edge

This paper proposes using an adaptive management approach to achieve water quality improvement in large catchments with multiple diffuse pollutant issues. Adaptive management involves attention to process, and commitment to continually improving knowledge and practice. It also requires an appreciation of differences in understanding of various stakeholders and an ongoing commitment to learning. Based on research with the Burdekin Dry Tropics regional Natural Resource Management group, the paper shows how the acquisition of knowledge about Water Quality Management can be an aim in itself, rather than an activity peripheral to the planning process. To this end, the paper describes the methods used to elicit stakeholders’ understandings, explores the variation in understandings between key stakeholders, and describes a process used to incorporate the various views in an adaptive management framework for managing water quality. The research findings reveal the importance of process and participation for adaptive management and suggest that success can be judged in terms of learning outcomes.     

Interest Groups,Federalism, and Water Quality in the Great Lakes: Chasing a Moving Target

Federalism often creates additional decisions for interest groups in determining how best to advocate for their policy recommendations in the legislative process. Should they focus their advocacy at the local, state, or national level of government? This article examines interest group behaviors in water quality policy in the Great Lakes region from 1960 to 2000. I evaluate the reasons for interest group decisions about which level of government to target, using historical analysis of Great Lakes water quality policy in the United States and Canada. The results of this analysis show that in many cases groups are influenced in their decision-making based on the level of government that has the greatest jurisdiction over the policy, supporting a neoinstitutional argument.     

Beyond Moran's I: Testing for Spatial Dependence Based on the Spatial Autoregressive Model

The statistic known as Moran's I is widely used to test for the presence of spatial dependence in observations taken on a lattice. Under the null hypothesis that the data are independent and identically distributed normal random variates, the distribution of Moran's I is known, and hypothesis tests based on this statistic have been shown in the literature to have various optimality properties. Given its simplicity, Moran's I is also frequently used outside of the formal hypothesis-testing setting in exploratory analyses of spatially referenced data; however, its limitations are not very well understood. To illustrate these limitations, we show that, for data generated according to the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model, Moran's I is only a good estimator of the SAR model's spatial-dependence parameter when the parameter is close to 0. In this research, we develop an alternative closed-form measure of spatial autocorrelation, which we call APLE , because it is an approximate profile-likelihood estimator (APLE) of the SAR model's spatial-dependence parameter. We show that APLE can be used as a test statistic for, and an estimator of, the strength of spatial autocorrelation. We include both theoretical and simulation-based motivations (including comparison with the maximum-likelihood estimator), for using APLE as an estimator. In conjunction, we propose the APLE scatterplot, an exploratory graphical tool that is analogous to the Moran scatterplot, and we demonstrate that the APLE scatterplot is a better visual tool for assessing the strength of spatial autocorrelation in the data than the Moran scatterplot. In addition, Monte Carlo tests based on both APLE and Moran's I are introduced and compared. Finally, we include an analysis of the well-known Mercer and Hall wheat-yield data to illustrate the difference between APLE and Moran's I when they are used in exploratory spatial data analysis.     

Through Hell and High Water: New Orleans, August 29-September 15, 2005

Abstract: In October of 2005 the Historic New Orleans Collectioninitiated an oral history project entitled "Through Hell andHigh Water: New Orleans, August 29–September 15, 2005."The intent of the project was to capture the stories of firstresponders who worked in the New Orleans metropolitan area duringthe storm and the weeks that followed. The interview processhas been linked with the after-action studies done by some ofthe local first-responding agencies and has provided a much-neededoutlet for first responders. To date over three hundred subjectshave been interviewed, and our work thus far has shown us thattop-down methods of documentation do not work with an eventlike Katrina. The almost total loss of communications made itimpossible for high-ranking members of the different agenciesto control or even know what lower-ranking members were doing.As a result it will be necessary to cast a wide net in our documentationeffort.     

Beyond Revolution,Beyond the Law: Christian Anarchism in Conversation with Giorgio Agamben

ABSTRACT

The Christian anarchist tradition and the work of Giorgio Agamben fit within a subversive trajectory of political theology that critiques the state paradigm, while also operating at a distance from it in their creation of a newly imagined political community. This research asks what it could look like to conceive of a political community beyond the state, imagined from the subject position of the marginalized. It also seeks a mutually informed path towards the practical formation of such communities, as elaborated through a case study of the Anabaptist tradition. Agamben’s concepts provide a renovation of the political themes of Christian anarchism, including the ideas of moving beyond revolution, voluntary exile through the abdication of rights, and messianic vocation. As the space for political praxis within Agamben’s work continues to evolve, the Anabaptist tradition provides helpful practices to imagine a withdrawal from the governmental machine as a community of voluntary exiles.     

Engaging with place: artists,site-specificity and the Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail

This paper traces the creative processes employed by artists participating in the 2004 Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail and examines relationships between place, art and site-specificity. The Trail is a popular, temporary annual local arts event that invites international artists, students and community art groups to create and exhibit site-sensitive sculpture within Hardcastle Crags in Yorkshire, England. We consider some of the multiple ways in which artists mediate relationships between ‘site’ and artwork. We connect geographical concepts of place that highlight location, locale and sense of place, with mobile understandings of site as porous and flowing. The paper positions geographical research of art, opening out art and site in a non-urban environment through comparative discussion of concepts of ‘place’ and three ‘paradigms’ in site-specific art (phenomenological, social/institutional and discursive, Kwon 2002 Kwon, M. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Three elements of site-specificity – histories, natures, interactions – are then explored through fourteen artists' creative practices and our documentation of the installation of their artwork in the Trail. We highlight the juxtaposition of ‘sites’ within the Trail, the over-lapping of ‘paradigms’ within individual artworks, and transitory aspects of ‘site’ to suggest that ‘time’ holds great significance in understanding site-specificity, place and art outdoors.     

Beyond the Home: Space and Agency in the Experiences of Female Service in Early Modern England

This article reconfigures our understanding of female service in early modern England by examining the roles and spaces female servants occupied not only within their employers homes but outside and within the wider community. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to categorise and analyse the spaces in which female servants were recorded in church court depositions from the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1550 and 1650, it argues that female servants were not confined to the domestic sphere either in their work or their social interactions. And further, it shows that female servants' links to the wider community gave them power and agency – limited perhaps, but significant nonetheless - in their dealings with their employers.     

Engaging the Non-Flat World: Anarchism and the Promise of a Post-Capitalist Collaborative Commons

This paper challenges the use of a geographically site-centred, flat ontology to justify contemporary anarchists’ predisposition to espouse exclusively prefigurative forms of action. By considering the anarchist, post-capitalist potential of a technologically enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement, the case is made for the need to acknowledge and engage the higher-order (emergent) nexuses between state apparatuses and capitalist flows. Doing so, it is argued, makes envisioning the process of creating anarchist oriented, post-capitalist futures significantly more tangible and convincing.     

Beyond Boundaries: Nature,Culture and a Holistic Approach to Domestication in the Levant

The main objective of this paper is to suggest an alternative approach for the investigation of domestication in the Levant. First, basic data regarding domestication in the Levant are presented. Then the various traditional approaches towards domestication in the prehistoric Levant, labeled (1) environmental, (2) social and anthropological, and (3) cognitive, are briefly reviewed. This discussion forms the basis for a proposal of a “holistic approach,” in which domestication is regarded as a long-term, multidimensional and multirelational phenomenon, including many elements—such as plants, animals, humans, material culture and ancestors—with increasing human manipulation of these various constituents. After a presentation of the theoretical framework, a growth metaphor is used to reconstruct the process of domestication (ca. 20,000–6500 B.P.) as a number of phases: (1) germination in the Kebaran; (2) development in the Early Natufian; (3) retreat/dormancy in the Late/Final Natufian; (4) growth in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A; (5) florescence in the Early- and Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B: (6) further development in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B; (7) dispersal in the Final Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and the Pottery Neolithic. In each of these phases, relations between the various elements are dealt with, special attention being paid to symbolical relations, as evidenced by “art” and ritual.     

Channel and Hydrological Controls on Water Quality in a Steep,Bedrock-Confined Stream

Steep, pool-fall channels of the sandstone areas near Sydney, New South Wales, Australia consist of discrete pools of varying sizes separated by bedrock reaches. The pools are linked by low-volume discharges during dry weather. Relatively large in-channel water storage volumes and small dry weather flows result in extended in-channel retention of water, sediments and contaminants and hence delayed delivery to receiving waters. Streams are flushed infrequently by high flow events. Field data and simulation results indicate that the long retention times experienced during dry weather flows are conducive to the attenuation of non-conservative contaminants. Flushing of channels, which occurs approximately once a year, resets the system and transports stored contaminants and sediments to receiving fluvial and estuarine systems. The low frequency of these floods allows the receiving systems time to recover between deliveries of dilute contaminants during high flow events. These findings have important implications for the management of water quality in the Sydney region.     

Beyond the Discontinuity Paradigm: Towards a Pan-African Church History

The purpose of this article is to suggest: (1) That a particular model of writing African church history inherited from the historiography of European mission has influenced the way in which the trans-African history of Christianity in Africa has been presented. It is argued that this model has encouraged an episodic view of the Christian past, through its documentary emphasis on the last two centuries. (2) That this model was both implicit and unchallenged in the theological trends of the post-colonial period, with their programmatic emphasis on indigenization and inculturation. The work of the vast majority of African theologians, and hence of church historians outside Africa, envisaged a model of the 'discontinuous past' premised on the idea that Christianity was to be understood in terms of export and import or 'early' north African and 'later' southern African engagement. This model is here labelled the 'discontinuity paradigm'. (3) That a new model for the writing of church history in Africa should be attempted. An 'adaptive similarities' model is proposed which sees the history of the church in Africa against the template of analogous conversion–adaptation–fissiparation movements in the earlier periods of the church's existence. The essay proposes a pan-African church history 'project' which focuses its work on constructing this model from regional church history efforts (Sundkler) and which attempts to isolate the recurrent themes and patterns of African Christianity (the thematic–chonological matrix) as interpreted within the wider African context (the geographical–cultural matrix).     

Beyond Consumption: Functionality, Artifact Biography, and Early Modernity in a European Periphery

This paper considers the functionality and biographies of artifacts in the context of historical archaeology. It is argued that in order to understand how human life in the recent past unfolded in relation with material culture, artifacts must be recognized to perform various unobvious functions and also be conceived as processes rather than bounded physical objects. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion and then focuses on the post-acquisition life of artifacts and human-artifact relations in the seventeenth-century town of Tornio, northern Finland.     

Water from a Rock: Archaeology,Ideology, and the Bible

In a series of studies over the last decade, Avi Faust suggested that several ideologies of ancient Israel could be identified on the basis of archaeological features (four-room houses, tombs, certain pottery vessels, etc.), namely, egalitarianism, simplicity, unity, and purity. The aim of this paper is to review these studies, asking what ideology is and if it can be retrieved from archaeology. While “there are multiple dangers when walking into the field of ideology” (Vincent 2010:21), avoiding discussion is not an option. In my view, most of the things identified by Faust are not ideologies. To the extent that they have an ideological content, it is based not on archaeological remains, but on a conservative reading of the Hebrew Bible. The identified “ideologies” are described as static, valid for the entire society, and eternal (from the Iron Age I until the end of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah). They turn ancient Israel into an ideal society, a model for our times—but an unrealistic one.