Class (philosophy)

About: Class (philosophy) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 821 publications have been published within this topic receiving 28000 citations.

Service as Text: Making the Metaphor Meaningful.

Abstract: From a faculty perspective one of the most constructive ways to conceptualize service-learning is to refine the pedagogically purposeful metaphor "service as text" (Morton, 1996; Varlotta, 1996). Unfortunately, service-learning's own theory is insufficiently developed to explicate this metaphor. Therefore, a related theoretical framework--interdisciplinary theory--is, for two reasons, an appropriate choice: (2) 1. Interdisciplinary theory introduces an assortment of terms--"partial," "full," "narrow," and "broad"--that can help faculty contemplate and, ideally, answer the question: What type of service text should be utilized in this course? Faculty may assign, for example, a one-time or short-term project, dubbed a "partial" text; or, they may expect students to uphold an ongoing service commitment, labeled a "full" text. Additionally, faculty may require a "narrow" service text in which all students work on related projects at the same agency, or "broad" texts in which each student works on a unique service project. 2. Interdisciplinarians utilize terms like "multidisciplinary," "crossdisciplinary," and "interdisciplinary" to describe and differentiate various types of disciplinary integration. Because service itself is not a discipline, interdisciplinarity's terminology--one that reflects the integration of disciplinary perspectives--is not completely transferable to service-learning. When service is configured as a text, however, the prefixes of interdisciplinarity's terminology ("multi," "cross," and "inter") can be affixed to the root word "text" to answer the question, How will the service text be meaningfully integrated with other course texts (e.g., films, books, journal articles)? A cross-textual course, for example, will integrate the service text more fully than a multitextual course but less fully than an intertextual one. This paper does more than simply raise the pedagogical questions that too few have posed. It uses interdisciplinarity to offer viable answers. What Types of Service Texts are Feasible? Interdisciplinary theory can help faculty conceptualize at least four types of service texts. Two types of service texts may be described by invoking the "broad" and "narrow" rhetoric of interdisciplinarians Van Dusseldorp and Wigboldus (1994), the other two by employing the "full" and "partial" terminology of William Newell (1998). Broad or Narrow Service Texts For Van Dusseldorp and Wigboldus (1994), a "broad" interdisciplinary course pulls together a wide range of disciplines. An example of such a course is one that draws from a liberal arts discipline like philosophy, a natural science like chemistry, and a social science like anthropology. Such a diversity of disciplines entertain a broad range of inquiries, coin and utilize a broad variety of terms, and construct a broad assortment of arguments. A "narrow" interdisciplinary course, on the other hand, pulls together a more related set of disciplines. An example of this type of course is one that draws from three natural sciences, e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics. Though service itself is not a discipline, interdisciplinary terminology can provide service-learning instructors with two important options in course design. First, faculty may choose to design and teach a "broad" service-learning class in which individual students or student groups are engaged in very different types of projects. In a broad class, faculty may allow each student to choose a unique service-learning project, or cluster students in groups and assign a different project to each group (e.g., one group of students may be working with homeless men at a local shelter, a second may be volunteering at a YWCA's outreach program that assists survivors of domestic violence, and a third group may be supervising after school programs at a junior high school). To determine whether or not to use a broad approach to service-learning, faculty might consider some of the pros and cons associated with this approach. …

Pedagogical Translanguaging and Its Application to Language Classes

Abstract: Pedagogical translanguaging refers to the use of different planned strategies based on activating students’ resources from their whole linguistic repertoire . The aim of this article is to examine the theoretical foundations of pedagogical translanguaging and its application in the classroom. The core characteristics of pedagogical translanguaging will be discussed in relation to the languages, students and programmes. Pedagogical translanguaging embraces different practices, but they all share the characteristic of being planned by the teacher with a pedagogical purpose and using resources from the students’ whole linguistic repertoire. In this way it is different from spontaneous translanguaging. Translanguaging practices aim at activating the students’ multilingual and multimodal repertoires so that they can benefit from their own multilingualism. Translanguaging practices can have strong or weak forms depending on the degree of pedagogical intervention that takes place in the process of learning and the use of two or more languages in the same class session. Some strong translanguaging practices use resources from different languages in the same class so as to develop metalinguistic awareness, while other weaker forms are based on the cross-linguistic coordination of activities carried out in different classes. The article will also discuss the challenges that the implementation of pedagogical translanguaging poses for language teachers.

Learning a Subclass of Linear Languages from Positive Structural Information

Abstract: A method to infer a subclass of linear languages from positive structural information (ie skeletons) is presented The characterization of the class and the analysis of the time and space complexity of the algorithm is exposed too The new class, Terminal and Structural Distinguishable Linear Languages (TSDLL), is defined through an algebraic characterization and a pumping lemma We prove that the proposed algorithm correctly identifies any TSDL language in the limit if structural information is presented Furthermore, we give a definition of a characteristic structural set for any target grammar Finally we present the conclusions of the work and some guidelines for future works

Hashing-Based Undersampling Ensemble for Imbalanced Pattern Classification Problems.

Abstract: Undersampling is a popular method to solve imbalanced classification problems However, sometimes it may remove too many majority samples which may lead to loss of informative samples In this article, the hashing-based undersampling ensemble (HUE) is proposed to deal with this problem by constructing diversified training subspaces for undersampling Samples in the majority class are divided into many subspaces by a hashing method Each subspace corresponds to a training subset which consists of most of the samples from this subspace and a few samples from surrounding subspaces These training subsets are used to train an ensemble of classification and regression tree classifiers with all minority class samples The proposed method is tested on 25 UCI datasets against state-of-the-art methods Experimental results show that the HUE outperforms other methods and yields good results on highly imbalanced datasets