Search

Our everyday perceptual experiences are grounded in the integration of information within and across our senses. Due to this direct behavioural relevance, cross‐modal integration retains a certain degree of contextual flexibility, even to social relevance. However, how social relevance modulates cross‐modal integration remains unclear. To investigate possible mechanisms, Experiment 1 tested the principles of audio‐visual integration for numerosity estimation by deriving a Bayesian optimal observer model with perceptual prior from empirical data to explain perceptual biases. Such perceptual priors may shift towards locations of high salience in the stimulus space. Our results showed that the tendency to over‐ or underestimate numerosity, expressed in the frequency and strength of fission and fusion illusions, depended on the actual event numerosity. Experiment 2 replicated the effects of social relevance on multisensory integration from Scheller & Sui, 2022 JEP:HPP, using a lower number of events, thereby favouring the opposite illusion through enhanced influences of the prior. In line with the idea that the self acts like a prior, the more frequently observed illusion (more malleable to prior influences) was modulated by self‐relevance. Our findings suggest that the self can influence perception by acting like a prior in cue integration, biasing perceptual estimates towards areas of high self‐relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current context, despite the pandemic, different activities continue to be carried out in the public sphere, regardless of not knowing exactly when it would end and what its consequences would be. In particular, in the higher education sector, in which the institutional management of the public university is not adequate, the inefficiency of internal governance and social relevance do not comply with social responsibility, having a negative impact on both the students as well as in society. The objective was to analyze the elements of internal university governance and the social relevance of a national university in Lima, Peru in 2020. The methodology was the qualitative method, of an exploratory and interpretive nature and hermeneutical design. The techniques used were open, semistructured interviews, analysis of specialized bibliography and validation of the questions by expert judgment. The results established that Peruvian public universities have an improper organizational system. Those who hold power do not take into account the values and principles, circumstances that prevent university social relevance and, therefore, irresponsibility towards society is established; except, very few exceptions. The conclusion determined that it is necessary, as a priority, to manage personal and institutional change at the management level and to carry out feasibility studies developed for our context, with the purpose of building a convenient paradigm for higher education in our country where responsibility social university (RUS), covers the population as the primary objective of university work with the aim of generating public value in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality of Work Life (QWL) methods entail acquiring, developing, training, evaluating, and motivating people to attain the best outcomes possible by the organization's goals. The current study has an impact on the dimension composed of Core components in terms of sustaining and developing QWL. The QWL refers to a workplace's favorable circumstances and surroundings that provide and foster employees by offering benefits, job security, and opportunities for advancement. A total of 500 samples were gathered using a structured questionnaire and a convenience sampling method. The Spearman correlation test was used to look at the relationship between social relevance and social integration. The QWL in dimensions, according to the findings, comprises an examination of the correlation coefficient between social integration and social relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Par excellence, university campuses are spaces to promote research, develop science and technology, giving rise to the social progress of the human species. In the current context, the university serves as a space for innovation, the universalization of knowledge and new ways of interpreting reality. However, this investigative activity cannot be carried out with its back to society, since science has a specific social purpose, which cannot be separated from the search for the common good, the scope of knowledge and collective benefit. In this sense, the article aims to analyze the interrelation between science, the university and society, taking into account the following elements: 1. The role of universities in human historical development. 2. The social relevance of the research carried out in universities in the 21st century, understood as a collective practice, whose purpose is the benefit of all. 3. The necessary role of science, research and the university to promote the transformation of society, increasing the quality of life of individuals, benefiting communities, expanding the scope of social justice. It concludes in the urgency of transformation of the university from within, with the purpose of restoring its connection with the social, expanding its scope, turning it into a tool for progress and for the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialog around the theme Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research (inspired by the title of the commentary by Babalola and van Gils). These editors, considering the diversity of empirical approaches in business ethics, envisage a future in which quantitative business ethics research is more bold and innovative, as well as reflexive about its techniques, and dialog between quantitative and qualitative research nourishes the enrichment of both. In their commentary, Babalola and van Gils argue that leadership research has stagnated with the use of too narrow a range of perspectives and methods and too many overlapping concepts. They propose that novel insights could be achieved by investigating the lived experience of leadership (through interviews, document analysis, archival data); by focusing on topics of concern to society; by employing different personal, philosophical, or cultural perspectives; and by turning the lens on the heroic leader (through "dark-side" and follower studies). Taking a provocative stance, Bal and Garcia-Lorenzo argue that we need radical voices in current times to enable a better understanding of the psychology underlying ethical transformations. Psychology can support business ethics by not shying away from grander ideas, going beyond the margins of "unethical behaviors harming the organization" and expanding the range of lenses used to studying behavior in context. In the arena of finance and business ethics, Guedhami, Liang, and Shailer emphasize novel data sets and innovative methods. Significantly, they stress that an understanding the intersection of finance and ethics is central to business ethics; financial equality and inclusion are persistent socio-economic and political concerns that are not always framed as ethics issues, yet relevant business policies and practices manifest ethical values. Finally, Charles Cho offers his opinion on the blurry line between the "ethical" versus "social" or "critical" aspects of accounting papers. The Journal of Business Ethics provides fertile ground for innovative, even radical, approaches to quantitative methods (see Zyphur and Pierides in J Bus Ethics 143(1):1–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3549-8, 2017), as part of a broad goal of ethically reflecting on empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bio-grafía. Escritos Sobre la Biología y su Enseñanza is the property of Universidad Pedaggica Nacional and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Keywords: Research; Social relevance; Epistemological challenges; Academia and community; Diversity; Jewish identities EN Research Social relevance Epistemological challenges Academia and community Diversity Jewish identities 241 244 4 10/31/22 20220601 NES 220601 After a long-lasting period, we have gathered to celebrate science and knowledge and the many sources and inputs that converge in advancing the routes of reason. The ASSJ is honored to present the Berman Service Award 2020-2021 to Joseph Neubauer and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer and Allan Cooperman to acknowledge the seminal contributions made to our field through the Pew Research Center's studies of Jewish Americans in 2013 and 2020 and Israeli Jews in 2015. [Extracted from the article]

Academics are often accused of being secluded in their "ivory towers", focused on research and teaching but uninterested in, or unable to engage with, the public debate. If this is actually the case, under what conditions and at what particular moment is this likely to change? Following on three relevant dimensions—the visibility of political scientists, their partisanship and their impact in the public sphere—and combining press analysis with original survey data, this article has two main aims: first, to assess Italian political scientists' (IPSs) social relevance in a period of huge political and institutional conflict such as the constitutional referendum held in December 2016; second, to explore the potential factors leading IPSs to be more or less present in the public debate. For the former, we focus on the public visibility of IPSs during the referendum campaign, as well as on the content of their public interventions, both concerning their neutral/partisan stance and their attitudes towards the constitutional reform. For the latter, we empirically test a few personal and institutional factors that are likely to influence individuals' participation in the referendum debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social relevance has become a key element to assess the social legitimacy of an academic discipline. This contrasts with a widespread sentiment among political scientists about the existence of a relevance gap. The context of multiple crises Europe has experienced since the late 2000s has provided political scientists with a multitude of opportunities to demonstrate the social relevance of their work and the usefulness of the discipline. This introductory article to the special issue aims to offer an explorative framework and a preliminary discussion of empirical examples to assess the phenomenon of political scientists' relevance in the public sphere during recent turbulent times. The framework (which emphasises three basic dimensions of social relevance – partisanship, visibility, and impact) is used to interpret the main results of the five case studies included in the special issue. Results show that contextual factors (salience of the issue, political and media contexts) influence political scientists' engagement in the public sphere, the role they adopt and their visibility. The article ends emphasising the importance of collective action within the discipline as an instrument to enhance its social relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to identify the underlying social representations of business administration students regarding the concepts of the graduate profile, professional training, and business engineer to subsequently interpret and contrast them with the stated graduate career profile and to review the social relevance thereof. This research study has a cross-sectional design and is descriptive in nature, based on qualitative methodology using the natural semantic networks technique, and the applications were developed in group form. The results show that the concept of the graduate profile does not appear to have been considered in-depth, with participants focusing on peripheral traits and setting aside a large part of what the profile establishes regarding innovation and problem-solving skills in a citizenship education context. With regard to professional training, the concepts associated with this construct are mainly ethics, responsibility, and knowledge, with no mention of the knowledge and skills that are more apposite to the profession. Finally, and in terms of the business engineer stimulus, we note that there is a better understanding of the concept, coinciding more precisely with the business engineering profile UC Temuco wishes to achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amygdala is present in a diverse range of vertebrate species, such as lizards, rodents, and primates; however, its structure and connectivity differs across species. The increased connections to visual sensory areas in primate species suggests that understanding the visual selectivity of the amygdala in detail is critical to revealing the principles underlying its function in primate cognition. Therefore, we designed a high-resolution, contrast-agent enhanced, event-related fMRI experiment, and scanned 3 adult rhesus macaques, while they viewed 96 naturalistic stimuli. Half of these stimuli were social (defined by the presence of a conspecific), the other half were nonsocial. We also nested manipulations of emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative) and visual category (faces, nonfaces, animate, and inanimate) within the stimulus set. The results reveal widespread effects of emotional valence, with the amygdala responding more on average to inanimate objects and animals than faces, bodies, or social agents in this experimental context. These findings suggest that the amygdala makes a contribution to primate vision that goes beyond an auxiliary role in face or social perception. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of stimulus selection and experimental design when probing the function of the amygdala and other visually responsive brain regions., (© Published by Oxford University Press 2024.)

The rapid development of social networking platforms in recent years has made it possible for scholars to find partners who share similar research interests. Nevertheless, this task has become increasingly challenging with the dramatic increase in the number of scholar users over social networks. Scholar recommendation has recently become a hot topic. Thus, we propose a personalized scholar recommendation approach, Mul-RSR (Multi-dimensional features based Research Scholar Recommendation), which improves accuracy and interpretability. In this work, Mul-RSR aims to provide personalized recommendation for academic social platforms. Mul-RSR uses the Doc2Vec text model and the random walk algorithm to calculate textual similarity and social relevance to measure the correlation between scholars. It is able to recommend Top-N scholars for each scholar based on multi-layer perception and attention mechanism. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conduct a series of experiments based on public and self-collected ResearchGate datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach improves the recommendation hit rate, and the hit rate reaches 59.31% when the N value is 30. Through these evaluations, we show Mul-RSR can provide a more solid scientific decision-making basis and achieve a better recommendation effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of a pluralistic perspective on research design, processes of data collection and analysis and dissemination of findings, has the potential to enable psychotherapy research to make a more effective contribution to building a just society. A review of the key features of the concept of pluralism is followed by a historical analysis of the ways in which research in counselling, psychotherapy and related disciplines has moved in the direction of a pluralistic position around knowledge creation. Core principles of a pluralistic approach to research are identified and explored in the context of a critical case study of contemporary research into psychotherapy for depression, examples of pluralistically oriented research practices, and analysis of a pluralistic conceptualisation of the nature of evidence. Implications of a pluralistic perspective for research training and practice are discussed. Pluralistic inquiry that emphasises dialogue, collaboration, epistemic justice and the co-existence of multiple truths, creates opportunities for individuals, families and communities from a wide range of backgrounds to co-produce knowledge in ways that support their capacities for active citizenship and involvement in open democratic decision-making. To fulfil these possibilities, it is necessary for psychotherapy research to be oriented towards social goals that are sufficiently relevant to both researchers and co-participants to harness their passion and work together for a common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of a pluralistic perspective on research design, processes of data collection and analysis and dissemination of findings, has the potential to enable psychotherapy research to make a more effective contribution to building a just society. A review of the key features of the concept of pluralism is followed by a historical analysis of the ways in which research in counselling, psychotherapy and related disciplines has moved in the direction of a pluralistic position around knowledge creation. Core principles of a pluralistic approach to research are identified and explored in the context of a critical case study of contemporary research into psychotherapy for depression, examples of pluralistically oriented research practices, and analysis of a pluralistic conceptualisation of the nature of evidence. Implications of a pluralistic perspective for research training and practice are discussed. Pluralistic inquiry that emphasises dialogue, collaboration, epistemic justice and the co-existence of multiple truths, creates opportunities for individuals, families and communities from a wide range of backgrounds to co-produce knowledge in ways that support their capacities for active citizenship and involvement in open democratic decision-making. To fulfil these possibilities, it is necessary for psychotherapy research to be oriented towards social goals that are sufficiently relevant to both researchers and co-participants to harness their passion and work together for a common good.

While project-based funding in public R&D investments has grown in importance in all European countries over the last two decades, there is widespread concern among decision-makers about the actual orientation of project funding instruments to promote societal well-being. The capability of public R&D investment to improve the quality of citizens' lives implies the pursuit of “relevant” social objectives related to existing or emerging problems affecting individuals’ lives and society. Particularly, when referring to project-funded research, the question of “relevance” in research objectives recalls the never-ending debate over how to translate policymakers’ request for producing value from public investments in research activities into “usable results”. The manuscript explores, using recent data collected at European level on public R&D funding, the portfolio of research project funding policy instruments of various public research funding organizations (RFOs) in order to shed light on how and to what extent it is oriented to address socially relevant issues. The authors examine the characterization of the single project funding instruments, which are intended to incorporate the motivations and targeted goals of public action, and the RFOs that manage them. They specifically assume that the actual orientation of funding instruments, beyond the declared objectives, is influenced by some features related to their implementation operated by the RFOs, such as the importance given to specific evaluation criteria and the composition of the evaluation panels in the selection process of the funding beneficiaries.

A socially relevant curriculum connects learning to the needs of students as members of families, communities and society. Curriculum as place is concerned with experience; how the curriculum nurtures students' learning, growth and development and how they in turn make meaning of what they are learning given their situatedness. This study, therefore, sought to explore students' views on how their school curriculum influenced their engagement at the personal, family and community levels thereby making it socially relevant. Data from interviews of 27 high school students provide thick descriptions of participants shared views and are used to theorise about how the curriculum influenced students' engagement. The main findings indicated that students' perception of what curriculum is, influenced their interpretation of how their curriculum experiences facilitated their engagement and this interpretation was linked to their situated agency. The findings also underscored the role of the curriculum as a critical tool for creating social consciousness and destroying coloniality of knowledge. Using the findings of the study, the author argues that for society to change and for curriculum to be socially relevant the purposes of the curriculum must facilitate agency and social consciousness at three levels; personal; family and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the founding of the first universities in the Middle Ages to the modern university in the period of globalization, universities have been created according to the prevailing social, cultural, economic and political conditions.Contemporary universities are faced with numerous demands from the external environment which expects social problems to be solved through education. In this context goals of education are also subject to constant redefinition and alignment with the needs of new social realities. The aim of the paper is to examine the implications of a socially relevant university from the perspective of two approaches: (a) concerns about the future of the university, the very idea of the university itself, and the reduction of the role of universities as critics of society; (b) the importance and necessity of opening a university to the community in order to contribute to society. Both approaches have been permeated within the analytical approach to the challenges facing the modern university, as well as within the study of the social relevance of the university which is linked to the third mission of the university. We then present the current initiatives that advocate the opening of universities towards the environment, the project Institutional Framework for the Development of the Third Mission of the University, as well as the Strategy for the Development of Education in the Republic of Serbia until 2020. Through elaboration of the relevant literature, we also present the pedagogical implications of a socially relevant university. In conclusion, we emphasize that the pluralism of analytical and critical approaches is the only adequate way to consider the relation of the university and its environment as a whole.

Copyright of Revista Lusofona de Educacao is the property of Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, CEIEF and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espacios is the property of Talleres de Impresos Oma and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mendive - Revista de Educacion is the property of Universidad de Pinar del Rio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article uses the prime-time drama Peyton Place (ABC, 1964–67) to examine the challenges of racial integration in the serial narrative. Peyton Place broke ground as a prime-time serial, but declined in popularity by its fourth year on the air. An African-American family was added to the story canvas as part of a strategy to revive audience interest by exploring stories with social relevance. I use the archived papers of the show's writers and producers to examine the negotiations behind the racial integration of a continuing drama that established its success with a white cast of characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Virtual Universidad Católica del Norte is the property of Revista Virtual Universidad Catolica del Norte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Brasileira de Historia is the property of Associacao Nacional dos Professores Universitarios de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The future of the study of religion/s cannot be aptly discussed without considering the future of all academic studies (the humanities, social and natural sciences). Based on my experience as a board member of the Science Council of Japan, I argue that there are two major urgent challenges that are shared by, but not unique to, academic studies conducted in Japan: namely, how and to what degree to meet demands for social relevance; and what to do with the Euro-Western model of modern sciences. I will focus on the former, which stems from the relationships between scholarship and state governance. Scholars of religion/s may miss opportunities to contribute to interdisciplinary debates if they continue identifying applied studies primarily with theology or interfaith enterprises, while being satisfied with neo-empiricism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How Charlemagne was remembered and to which effect at the Carolingian courts in the last third of the ninth century. Surprisingly, fashion and dress serve as a prism to highlight the former emperor's assumed virtues and indicate the way social values are negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of social networking platforms in recent years has made it possible for scholars to find partners who share similar research interests. Nevertheless, this task has become increasingly challenging with the dramatic increase in the number of scholar users over social networks. Scholar recommendation has recently become a hot topic. Thus, we propose a personalized scholar recommendation approach, Mul-RSR (Multi-dimensional features based Research Scholar Recommendation), which improves accuracy and interpretability. In this work, Mul-RSR aims to provide personalized recommendation for academic social platforms. Mul-RSR uses the Doc2Vec text model and the random walk algorithm to calculate textual similarity and social relevance to measure the correlation between scholars. It is able to recommend Top-N scholars for each scholar based on multi-layer perception and attention mechanism. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conduct a series of experiments based on public and self-collected ResearchGate datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach improves the recommendation hit rate, and the hit rate reaches 59.31% when the N value is 30. Through these evaluations, we show Mul-RSR can provide a more solid scientific decision-making basis and achieve a better recommendation effect.

Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elicits activation in the brain’s reward circuit. Although smiling faces are often used as social rewards in research, it is firstly unclear whether familiarity and social relevance modulate the processing of faces differently, and secondly whether this processing depends on the feedback context, i.e., if it is different when smiles are delivered depending on performance or in the absence of any action (passive viewing). In this preregistered study, we compared pupillary responses to smiling faces differing in subjective familiarity and social relevance. They were displayed in a passive viewing task and in an active task (a speeded visual short-term memory task). The pupils were affected only in the active task and only by subjective familiarity. Contrary to expectations, smaller dilations were observed in response to more familiar faces. Behavioural ratings supported the superior rewarding context of the active task, with higher reward ratings for the game than the passive task. This study offers two major insights. Firstly, familiarity plays a role in the processing of social rewards, as known and unknown faces influence the autonomic responses differently. Secondly, the feedback context is crucial in reward research as positive stimuli are rewarding when they are dependent on performance.

Copyright of Culturas: Revista de Gestion Cultural is the property of Universidad Politecnica de Valencia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Nobody seems to doubt that working toward a calling is much more rewarding than just working for financial rewards or promotions. Nevertheless, although it is acknowledged that people can experience callings in any activity, up to now, there are few studies on this construct in the context of commercial companies. In this paper we focus on studying calling orientation in employees of a multinational company. We test three hypotheses: 1) the different ways of relating to work (as a job, a career or a calling) is also reported among corporate employees; 2) there are differences in the levels of flow at work in accordance with the different ways that employees relate to their work; and 3) there are differences in the levels of perception that employees have of the social relevance of their work in accordance with the way in which they relate to their work. In order to verify these hypotheses we applied three instruments to a sample of employees of the Latin America brand (279 Argentinean and 193 Ecuadorian employees) of a multinational corporation: The University of Pennsylvania Work Life Questionnaire, the Work Related Flow Inventory and a scale of Social Work Relevance Perception. The results suggest that callings are identifiable among corporate enterprise employees and that employees with a calling orientation have higher levels of flow at work and a greater perception of the social relevance of their work than those employees who just relate to their work as jobs or careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I critically discuss Professor Oladele Abiodun Balogun's reflections on the proper final ends of doing philosophy and related sorts of abstract, speculative, or theoretical inquiry. Professor Balogun appears to argue that one should undertake philosophical studies only insofar as they are likely to make a practical difference to people's lives, particularly by contributing to politico-economic development, or, in other words, that one should eschew seeking knowledge for its own sake. However, there is one line of thought from Professor Balogun, about philosophy being able to make life meaningful, that I argue ultimately--perhaps contrary to his intentions--entails that it can be appropriate to some degree to pursue philosophy that is unlikely to ameliorate poverty and similar social ills. My central aims in this article are to identify Professor Balogun's strongest argument against pursuing any knowledge for its own sake and to argue that an appeal to meaningfulness constitutes a strong, competing reason to seek out some of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first community radios began to emerge in Brazil in the 1980s as a part of the illegal radio broadcasts that occur from the 1970s under the inspiration of the so-called European pirate radios. You are already included in the legislation for broadcasting services; in addition, there are many radios in activity illegally in the country. The work verifies the current panorama of the radio in Brazil evidencing its clandestine appearance and its specificities through the case study of a radio with characteristics of emission that operated clandestinely for almost two decades in the interior of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review some ideas about the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy (CEFR-VL) are critically discussed from a South American perspective. First of all it is observed that the relationship to the visible world should also include nature and ecological issues. As to the concept of 'visual literacy', its linguistic and economic overtones are criticized from the point of view of visual education, as well as for its sociological implications. Finally the notion of competency and sub-competencies are discussed. The origin of 'competency' in an economic and technocratic model of curriculum runs the risk that in visual education the non-measurable might get lost. The CEFR-VL also runs the risk of becoming a rigid, prescriptive format, thus leaving little space for other views. It is hoped for that the professionals in the domain will transform the CEFR-VL into a valuable tool capable of offering multiple ways of seeing. Thus the concept of 'visual literacy' will give space to the notion of 'visual education'. This would be a most welcome metamorphosis of the domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new socio-historical and cultural scenarios pose to universities the challenge of specifying a clear definition of the social value of their research practices and, consequently, their contribution in the process of generation of knowledge that guarantees the sociocultural development of the peoples. Hence, the technical-instrumental and objectifying conception of the subject has no meaning in the scenarios of a university education, which involves the formation of social researchers, committed to the construction, deconstruction and transformation of social realities. In this sense, from a theoretical, qualitative-hermeneutic perspective, reflection is centered on the being and doing of universities as culture, science and technology forgers, propitiating the transformation of their traditional roles in order to adapt to the new times and respond appropriately to the demands of social citizenship, giving meaning to their needs and real problems. Consequently, university research should become the appropriate scenario to articulate academic knowledge with experiential knowledge, build and reconstruct knowledge from the dialogue science-life, revealing new ways of apprehending and transforming reality in its complex, interrelational dynamic and human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigium IRE: Ciencias Sociales y Humanas is the property of Editorial Institucion Universitaria Centros de Estudios Superiores Maria Goretti and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The subject of the present article is to reveal the social representations (SR) of first-year students on the differential education course of a university in the Araucanía Region of Chile, with respect to their professional identity, to interpret them and compare them to the graduate profile of the course. We will also analyse the public social function of the course. The research subjects were first-year students on the course, and the data were collected using interviews and natural semantic networks; these techniques were applied to two participating groups. On the one hand, the results show that the subjects are conscious of the importance of the graduate profile, having greater knowledge about the general competences taught in the course than the specific, and relating the profile with their future role and not with the discipline; on the other, the students' SR are constructed in their initial training in different areas, and the subjects state that the vision of the teaching team has an impact on their understanding of the graduate profile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enhance the leadership of the university in local and regional development. It focuses on its implications for local and regional development and its contribution to social transformations. By examining the practice in Latin American countries, surveying and analyzing documents, the authors referred different criteria of Latin American specialists related to this level of education and its integration to other substantive functions of the university. The modeling of a proposal to strengthen the leadership of the university in local and regional development is the fundamental result of the study.