This book focuses on assessing L2 student digital multimodal composing (DMC) competence. It explores key themes, including the conceptualization of L2 student DMC competence, and the development, validation, and utilization of L2 student DMC competence in the tertiary context.

Through a thorough review of the DMC literature, the book furnishes readers with a theoretical framework to comprehensively grasp the underlying constructs of L2 student DMC competence. It also provides a delineation of the process of scale development, i.e., defining constructs, constructing items, and analyzing items, scale validation, i.e., the structural, external, and consequential construct validity of the scale, and scale utilization in students' DMC self- and peer-assessment practices.

This practical guidance equips educators and practitioners with the necessary tools and strategies to effectively assess and enhance L2 students' DMC competence. Scholars and professionals in the fields of L2 writing, language assessment, digital literacy, and technology-enhanced language learning will gain valuable insights from the content.

Officially, Western societies are waging a war on obesity. Unofficially, we are waging a war on fat people. Anti-fat sentiment is pervasive, and fat people suffer a host of harms as a result: workforce discrimination, inferior medical care, relentless teasing, and internalized shame. A significant proportion of the population endures such harms. Yet, that is not typically regarded as a serious problem. Most of us aren't quite sure: Is it really OK to be fat? This book argues that it is.

In Why It's OK to Be Fat, Rekha Nath convincingly argues that conventional views of fatness in Western societies-as a pathology to be fixed or as a moral failing-are ill-conceived. Combining careful empirical investigation with rigorous moral argumentation, this book debunks popular narratives about weight, health, and lifestyle choices that underlie the dominant cultural aversion to fatness. It argues that we should view fatness through the lens of social equality, examining the wide-ranging ways that fat individuals fail to be treated as equals. According to Nath, it is high time that we recognize sizeism-the systematic ways that our society penalizes fat individuals for their size-as a serious structural injustice, akin to racism, sexism, and homophobia.

For additional online material from the author, related to this book, please see rekhanath.net

This book examines the process of information diffusion and the challenges of spreading awareness about maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes in India, with a special focus on Bihar - a state in eastern India.

Investing in the health of women and children results in significant and long-lasting economic and social benefits to society. Analysing the National Family Health Survey data, the volume explores the role that access to information has on the adoption of MCH practices. It also explores regional variations - between Empowered Action Group (EAG) states and non-EAG states and also across EAG states - in the impact of information networks. Using appropriate econometric methods, the authors study the role of peer effects and grass-roots health workers in bringing about a change in attitude within communities. The book looks at the process of information dissemination between the grass-roots health workers and the target women and brings to the forefront the intricacies of patriarchal family dynamics that hinder women from accessing basic maternal and child healthcare needs. Based on grass-roots experiences, the book provides sharp insights from the field for the benefit of researchers, policymakers, and activists.

Rich in empirical data, this book will be of interest to academics and researchers of development economics, public health policy and practice, community health, healthcare administration and management, primary healthcare and family practice, and health and social care.

Aaron Alexander Zubia argues that the Epicurean roots of David Hume's philosophy gave rise to liberalism's unrelenting grip on the modern political imagination.

Eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume has had an outsized impact on the political thinkers who came after him, from the nineteenth-century British Utilitarians to modern American social contract theorists. In this thorough and thoughtful new work, Aaron Alexander Zubia examines the forces that shaped Hume's thinking within the broad context of intellectual history, with particular focus on the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and the skeptical tradition.

Zubia argues that through Hume's influence, Epicureanism-which elevates utility over moral truth-became the foundation of liberal political philosophy, which continues to dominate and limit political discourse today.

Reflecting on the methodological issues involved in researching digital spaces with children, this book shares good practices and delves into the ethics of such research.

Social media has completely redefined how children and young people relate to each other, express themselves, and present their identities and sexualities. Yet researching social media can be a difficult and daunting task given the ephemerality of the content, its contextual hyperspecificity, the complex power relationships between users, celebrity culture, digital capitalism, and the ethical issues that arise from the reimagining of the public/private space. Using digital ethnography and creative digital storytelling workshops with children and young people aged 13-15 and 13-18 on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch, this book studies their interactions, language, codes, the risks they take, and the victimizations they suffer.

Researching Social Media with Children will be of use to social scientists conducting online research, and to students and scholars of media studies, digital criminology, psychology, and sociology.

[The authors draw on experiences from studies carried out in Spain on children and social media by the Knowledge-Research Group on Social Problems at Universidad Europea de Madrid.]

With The Sentimental State, Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century "culture of sentiment" to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, nineteenth-century sentimentalism hinged upon human emotional responses and the public's capacity to feel sympathy to establish morally based truth and build support for improving the welfare of women and children.

Sentimentalism marched right alongside women's steps into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the "fall" of young women intertwined with sentimentalism to elicit public action in the formation of the American welfare state. The work of voluntary and paid female reformers during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries shaped what would become lasting collaborations between grassroots voluntary organizations and the national government.

Women saw a social need, filled it, and cobbled together a network of voluntary organizations that tapped state funding and support when available. Their work provided safeguards for women and children and created a network of female-oriented programs that both aided and policed women of child-bearing age at the turn of the twentieth century. Through an examination of these reform programs, Masarik demonstrates the strong connection between nineteenth-century sentimental culture and female political action, advocating government support for infant and maternal welfare, in the twentieth century.

Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girlhood, tracing how and why representations of disabled girls emerge with frequency in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. It uncovers how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. In paying critical attention to disabled girlhood, the book uses feminist disability studies to rupture the unwitting assumption in girls' studies that girlhood is necessarily non-disabled.

By closely examining the ways that disabled girls represent themselves, Anastasia Todd goes beyond a critique of the figure of the privileged, disabled girl subject in the national imagination to explore how disabled girls circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. In analyzing a range of cultural sites, including YouTube, TikTok, documentaries, and GoFundMe campaigns, Todd shows how disabled girls actively upend what we think we know about them and their experience, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds in their own terms. By analyzing disabled girls' self-representational practices and cultural productions, Todd shows how disabled girls deftly theorize their experiences of ableism, sexism, racism, and ageism, and cultivate communities online, creating archives of disability knowledge and politicizing other disabled people in the process.

From Empire to Revolution is the first biography devoted to an in-depth examination of the life and conflicted career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785). Greg Brooking uses Wright's life as a means to better understand the complex struggle for power in both colonial Georgia and the larger British Empire.

James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity afforded him. He earned numerous important government posts and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over GBP100,000 sterling. An England-born grandson of Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, following his father's appointment as the chief justice of that colony. Young James served South Carolina in a number of capacities, public and ecclesiastical, prior to his admittance to London's famed Gray's Inn to study law. Most notably, he was appointed South Carolina's attorney general and colonial agent to London prior to becoming the governor of Georgia in 1761.

Wright's long imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers a new perspective on loyalism and the American Revolution. Through this lens, Greg Brooking connects several important contexts in recent early American and British scholarship, including imperial and Atlantic history, Indigenous borderlands, race and slavery, and popular politics.

The sixth edition of The Sixties is a provocative account of a transformative era in American history, exploring the significant political, social, and cultural changes that many citizens found to be not only necessary, but mandatory.

The book explores the 1960s both chronologically and thematically, from the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins and presidential election to the early 1970s and the fight for women's liberation and withdrawal from Vietnam. It examines the unique social movements that merged during and after 1968 to form a "sixties culture" that advocated for empowerment and liberation. The final chapter on legacies and the section of additional reading have been revised and updated for the sixth edition, now including more recent material to reinforce the book's themes and explore the impacts of the sixties that are still felt today. Additional coverage of women and the LGBTQ and Latino/a communities paints a richer portrait of the decade of tumult and change.

Lucid and engaging, The Sixties is a stimulating text ideal for students and general readers interested in one of the most significant eras in American history-the 1960s.

This classic text, originally from the noted logician Elliot Mendelson, is intended to be an easy-to-read introduction to the basic ideas and techniques of game theory. It can be used as a class textbook or for self-study.

Introducing Game Theory and its Applications, Second Edition presents an easy-to-read introduction to the basic ideas and techniques of game theory. After a brief introduction, the authors begin with a chapter devoted to combinatorial games--a topic neglected or treated minimally in most other texts. The focus then shifts to two-person zero-sum games and their solutions.

Here the authors present the simplex method based on linear programming for solving these games and develop within this presentation the required background. The final chapter presents some of the fundamental ideas and tools of non-zero-sum games and games with more than two players, including an introduction to cooperative game theory.

The book is suitable for a first undergraduate course in game theory, or a graduate course for students with limited previous exposure. It is useful for students who need to learn some game theory for a related subject (e.g., microeconomics) and have a limited mathematical background. It also prepares its readers for more advanced study of game theory's applications in economics, business, and the physical, biological, and social sciences.

The authors hope this book breeds curiosity about the subject as its design is meant to to satisfy the readers. The book will prepare readers for deeper study of game theory applications in many fields of study.

Verbal and nonverbal communicative acts mark the links within our discourse, help us to exchange turns and give backchannel in conversation. This book analyses the communicative system of gaze in depth, investigating its structure and functions the same way that words and gestures are studied, and shows how to do so by establishing a phonology, a morphology and a semantics of eye communication, before finally outlining a lexicon of gaze.

Poggi provides a detailed semantic analysis of lexical items, highlights the role of gaze in multimodal communication, and illustrates its uses in everyday life, politics, education and musical performance. The meanings we communicate by gaze are intertwined with the multimodality of our communication, thus integrating, complementing, sometimes contradicting, whether deliberately or inadvertently, what we say with words or gestures.

Starting from a robust theoretical framework, this book also provides an overview of the methods that can be exploited to study gaze, ranging from ethno-semantics to observation and simulation, and provides examples of their use.

A timely and original contribution that is essential reading for advanced students, scholars and researchers of multimodal communication, pragmatics, social psychology and related areas.

How to Augment Language Skills outlines ways in which translators and language providers can expand their skillset and how translation technologies can be integrated into language learning and translator training.

This book explains the basics of generative AI, machine translation, and translation memory suites, placing them in a historical context and assessing their fundamental impacts on language skills. It covers what to teach in a specific context, how to teach it, how to assess the result, and how to set up lively class discussions on the many problematic aspects. The exploratory empirical approach is designed to reach across several divides: between language education and translation studies, between technology designers and users, between Western and Asian research, and between abstract ideas and hands-on practice.

Features include:

• Fifty-seven technology-related activities for the language and/or translation class.
• Recent research on the capacities of generative AI.
• Examples of how to conduct a needs analysis in the Higher Education context.
• Comparisons of the main teaching methods.
• Ways to assess the use of technologies.
• Examples in Chinese, Spanish, Catalan, French, and German.
• A full glossary explaining the key terms in clear language.

Drawing on years of classroom experience, Pym and Hao illustrate how these skills can be taught in a range of classroom and online activities, making this essential reading for teachers and researchers involved in the teaching of languages and the training of translators.

In Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense, contributors engage with epistemological and philosophical questions concerning the conduct of qualitative inquiry in the present moment, and especially as it relates to various understandings of writing in/as inquiry.

Topics addressed include methodological processes, questions of narrative uprootedness, relational inquiry, Indigenous ethico-onto-epistemologies, storytelling, and transformative writing forms and practices. This is a messy, often unruly collection (in the best way possible) of disparate ideas strung tightly together by literal and metaphorical questions of the research act of writing. Contributors from the United States, Australia, Canada, England, and Scotland imaginatively conceive of new qualitative futures-and how we might write ourselves there.

This evocative new book is a must-read for faculty and students alike who are interested in and engaged with questions and ideas oriented toward understanding our current historical present in qualitative research-a moment in which the field is perpetually in motion or in flux, with new theories, methods, and orientations arising, competing, and even contradicting one another.

In Testing Education, Kathy Greeley recounts the impact of education reform from a teacher's point of view. Based on a teaching career ranging nearly forty years, Greeley details how schools went from learning communities infused with excitement, intellectual stimulation, and joy to sterile spaces of stress, intimidation, and fear. In this ultimately hopeful memoir, Greeley asks us to learn from the past to reimagine the future of public education.

This book foregrounds postcolonial theory as a lens through which to explore the concept of 'global heritage' and argues that the meso-level spaces of institutional ethos and cultural pedagogy must take an active role in the pursuit of cultural equality.

Through interviews and accounts of observational, empirical data, chapters draw attention to how the cultural capital of Global Majority students is institutionally positioned as a racialised and inferior cultural capital that is constantly required to 'prove itself' in the Western school. Ultimately, the book contributes to international discussion on decolonising education and the spaces within in order to enact change, further the field, and more precisely to recognise the importance of global heritage as vital to a transformative understanding of the West's cultural identity within a globalised world.

This book will appeal to scholars, researchers and post-graduate researchers in the fields of multicultural education, school leadership, management and administration, and education policy and politics more broadly. Those interested in social justice, ideas of cultural and racial equality, and the sociology of education more broadly will also benefit from the volume.

This edited volume combines reflections, methods, and experiences from a globally diverse group of scholars to investigate the meaning, value, and effectiveness of the pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Enquiry (CoPE) - derived from or in conversation with Lipman and Sharp's Philosophy for Children (P4C) - in the context of civic education.

Maintaining that a rich diversity of voices is an important corrective to narrower academic discourses, the chapters in this book bring an array of scholarly thought from across the world working in various political and educational contexts to bear on a common question: How can CoPE help practitioners engage in civic education? The contributions draw on qualitative methods, philosophical literature, and practitioner case studies to explore the benefits, challenges, questions, and methods related to the use of CoPE for the sake of citizenship education in Thailand, Malaysia, Italy, Iceland, Israel, Greece, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Ultimately, the book provides critical reflections and insights into the civic dimension of CoPE (and some CoPE-related practices) across a wide range of pedagogic, cultural, and political contexts.

Addressing the need for a touchstone publication on the interplay between CoPE and citizenship education, the book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophy of education, citizenship education, democratic education, and international and comparative education.

This book offers various perspectives on children's spirituality and its relation to life and values education from diverse socio-cultural and educational contexts. It brings together a collection of select research articles that were published over a period of two decades (1999-2020) in the International Journal of Children's Spirituality (IJCS), to celebrate the journal's 25th anniversary.

Featuring contributions by leading international scholars from U.K., U.S.A., Canada, Hong Kong, China, and Australia, this volume offers a multidisciplinary snapshot of children's spirituality and its relation to life and values education. It highlights the importance of socio-cultural and religious traditions, as well as perspectives on religious education and the spirituality of children shaped by religious, cultural and educational systems in specific societies and contexts. Chapters cover topics including the links between mirror neurons and human empathy and education; the relationship between spirituality and citizenship; the notion of inclusive spiritual education and the perspectives of spiritual education through the conceptual lens of transcendence, raised awareness and spiritualism; how outdoor play spaces can contribute to a child's spiritual development through enriching activities; and approaches to help nurture students' spiritual growth in their aspects of themselves (self), others, the environment, and with a Transcendent Other (transcendence).

This volume will be a key resource for researchers and postgraduate students interested in understanding children's spirituality and its implications for spiritual, life and values education.

As a formal educational instrument, mentorship has received increasing academic and professional interest over the last several decades. Formal or informal mentorship programs are seen as an innovative means of supporting organizational goals and addressing diversity in executive leadership. Most of the attention has been toward mentorship in a professional context, but mentorship also plays a crucial role in the development of both graduate students and faculty members.

This book explores the theoretical and practical insights into the use of mentorships within higher education. The research published here show that mentorship matters because it actively encourages faculty to pay it forward, advancing opportunities for students and faculty, focusing on the development of students, and pushing mentors to consider how mentorship can be used to work in a diverse and changing society. The purpose of this book is to help develop the understanding of mentorship, highlight its importance, and hopefully progress the discussion forward with new actions in the field.

This volume will be of interest to teachers, students, and researchers of education, public policy and public administration. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Public Affairs Education.