Intercultural bilingual education

Intercultural bilingual education "(Educación bilingüe intercultural)" is a language-planning model employed throughout Latin America in public education, and it arose as a political movement asserting space for indigenous languages and culture in the education system. IBE is designed to address the educational needs of indigenous communities, and consists of various bilingual curriculum designs.
Since the late 20th century, IBE has become an important, more or less successful instrument of governmental language planning in several Latin American countries. These include bilingual education in Mayan languages in Guatemala, and , and Mayan in Mexico.
Types of education in bilingual and bi-cultural contexts.
As language planning became more intentional due to indigenous rights movements, theorists adopted standard terminology to classify different types multilingual educational programs. Terminology from bilingual education models, such as Colin Baker's model, has been employed in IBE policy and parallels future models on intercultural bilingual education. Below are the five main types of Intercultural Bilingual Education.
Linguistic input.
Submersion models prioritize teaching in the majority language and conduct all instruction in the majority language, although the students speak a minority language as their native language. These schools prohibit or discourage students from communicating in their first language during class hours and have traditionally employed school-wide policies punishing children for speaking in the minority language during the school day between each other. Transition models, in contrast, do use the student's first language initially as a bridge to monolingual instruction, but ultimately also seek to shift the state to a monolingual and monocultural society. Proponents of these models claim that children may be stigmatized for speaking an indigenous language and that Spanish provides more upward mobility. However, educators in IBE see intercultural education as a way to challenge racism and validate indigenous identities. Children in IBE programs that encouraged multilingualism in Bolivia were found to develop a higher self-esteem on average than children in submersion programs. Submersion and transition programs are associated with the highest drop-out rates.
In contrast, immersion, enrichment and maintenance models seek to cultivate bilingual and biliterate students. Immersion and maintenance schools seek to value and teach in both indigenous and national culture, and they exhibit the highest graduation rates out of the four models. Immersion programs generally seek to strengthen the minority language in communities where it may be disappearing, whereas maintenance programs serve minority-language speakers. In a 2008 paper, cited by a POEIBE working paper, Mejía instead groups maintenance and immersion systems together as they are not in widespread use, and excludes them from their typologies; however, there are some immersion schools in use. While theoretically immersion and maintenance schools correspond to the students' first language, in practice this distinction may not be as clear in communities that are undergoing language shift. Such communities may have both children who are bilingual before school, as well as those who speak only the majority or minority language. Mejía also distinguishes enrichment education as a distinct category of IBE in which bilingualism is sought beyond indigenous communities in the greater population.
It is important to recognize the widespread yet false belief that any minority language heritage language instruction will detract from learning and communication in majority language. Studies from the early twentieth century that purported to find an academic disadvantage for bilingual children often lacked controls for socioeconomic class and fluency during testing.
Intercultural aspect.
With this observation in mind, IBE models plan not just the linguistic input in the student's education, but also the cultural input. Intercultural education presents different “systems of knowledge, civilizational patterns, cultures and languages … in complementary distribution.” Immersion, maintenance, and enrichment models promote this method of learning. Submersion and transition models intend to assimilate indigenous communities into the mainstream culture.
There are disconnects between this theoretical model and how it is implemented pedagogically and politically. For example, teachers may have been personally educated in a submersion or transition model, as these are the oldest models, and may carry these elements into immersion or maintenance education. Additionally, some researchers question whether some IBE teachers have access to training in intercultural teaching or communicative-focused L2 instruction. While many Latin American universities have designed and support certification programs, training of IBE teachers in immersion or maintenance models is an ongoing challenge, as discussed below. Beyond this disconnect between the ideal model and its implementation, IBE also assumes that children are monolingual when they enter the education system. In areas such as the Mosquito Coast, children often are acquiring multiple languages before school begins as discussed in Intercultural Bilingual Education in Latin America: Political Debates and Criticisms by Countries. IBE's lack of power divisions between minority languages, and focus on bilingualism when more languages are present, may not serve the community's needs appropriately.
History in Latin America.
The immense linguistic diversity in Latin America is what in part gave rise to demand for programs that would integrate indigenous languages into educational policy. Brazil, for example, has the largest number of indigenous languages with approximately 180. Additionally, in some nations, the majority of speakers natively speak one or more indigenous languages that are not the prestige language.
With the rise of indigenous activism in the 1970s, and controversy about multilingualism and previous bilingual education projects, a new education model of language maintenance and development emerged. This included an embrace of cultural aspects that were not exclusively linguistic: teaching aspects of everyday life culture, traditions, and world concepts. From the beginning of the 1980s, bilingual intercultural education was being developed in Latin America.
Influences.
Government.
After the nation states gained independence in Latin America at the beginning of the 19th century, the elites imposed a model of unification based on the Criollo culture and Spanish or Portuguese language as used by the colonial rulers. This system reached only the privileged classes and those parts of the mestizo population speaking Spanish or Portuguese. The bilingual programs were all developed to be transitional, in order to prepare pupils for unilingual secondary and higher education in the dominant language. They contributed to a more widespread use of Spanish as common language. These were experimental projects of limited extension and duration, enabled by international aid, such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) or the United States Agency for International Development (US-AID).
In the 20th century, governments' attempts to educate the whole population in each country was based on a goal of assimilation, or increasing attempts to offer school education to the whole population had the explicit goal of hispanization (castellanización) of the indigenous peoples. Spanish was used as a language of instruction for learner groups although few among more isolated indigenous communities understood it. Students did not have much success in learning, and there were high rates of class repetition or dropouts. The speakers of indigenous languages left school as illiterate and stigmatized as uneducated indios. The use or even knowledge of an indigenous language became a social disadvantage, so many people stopped speaking these languages, but had sub-standard Spanish. Because of such language issues, for instance among indigenous peoples who moved to cities, they became uprooted, belonging fully neither to the indigenous or to the dominant culture.
Since the 1980s, many countries have passed laws recognizing linguistic and cultural rights. In countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, constitutional reforms were realized that recognized indigenous languages and cultures. In most Latin American countries, IBE is under control of the Ministry of Education.
In most countries, such bilingual/cultural education does not reach the majority of the indigenous population, who often live outside the major cities, or in more isolated urban communities; in addition, it is applied only in primary education. Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico have passed laws directing such education of all indigenous speakers, and Paraguay intends for the entire student population to receive bilingual training.
NGOs.
Many Non-government organizations aided in the development of intercultural bilingual programs throughout Latin America with varying levels of involvement and different motives. These included the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) as well as USAID and the World Bank's PEIA.
SIL.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an evangelical institution based in Dallas, Texas, was the first institution to introduce bilingual education in Latin America for indigenous peoples. It had goals both of evangelization and aiding in the creation of intercultural bilingual programs. The first bilingual education programs of SIL started in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1930s, in Ecuador and Peru in the 1940s, and in Bolivia in 1955.
GTZ.
The German Agency for technical cooperation (GTZ) played a key role in supporting the creation of experimental bilingual education programs both at the primary school level and at the university level in Peru and Ecuador in cohesion with local governments in the late 1970s into the 1990s. More specifically, GTZ helped in the development of these programs at the level of training for primary school teachers, which supported a bilingual project with Spanish and Quechua or Aymara. In Guatemala between 1995 and 2005, an indigenous teacher training program supported the national reform of pre-service and in-service teacher training. The Puno bilingual education project (1979-1990) was one of the most important contributions of the German Technical Cooperation Agency to the development of indigenous intercultural bilingual education in Peru and PROEIB Andes (Programa de Formnación en Educación Intercultural Bilingüe para los Países Andinos), that started in 1996 is the most important effort made in the professional development of Indigenous teachers and Ministry of Education officers of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Argentina.
Like in many other Latin American countries the movement towards IBE didn't gain momentum in Argentina until the 1980s and 1990s especially considering the political environment it was in (see Dirty War). After democracy was restored in the country, there was a new initiative within the country to make ethnic minorities more visible which led to the development and implementation of IBE. According to their last census, Argentina possess 20 indigenous groups with 14 indigenous languages. The total indigenous population however is a small percentage of the total population especially in comparison to surrounding countries as it sits at less than 10%. After the overthrow of the dictatorship and the reestablishment of democracy in the country, these indigenous populations in theory should have gained more agency and representation when legislation created during this time recognized their existence within the country and outlined the rights they had as citizens of it.
The implementation of the IBE program has been portrayed as one that would combat the ethnic divisiveness the country experienced before and during the political unrest of the 1970s. It was presented as a method and education policy that would do away with stereotypes and help appreciate and tend to the sociocultural diversity of the nation. However the placement of IBE under the supervision of the National Office of Compensatory Programs at the Department of Equity and Quality, and not under the Ministry of Education in 2004, gave the impression to some that these education policies were not seen as important to core instruction for the nations which undermines the struggles that indigenous populations have experienced in attaining educational policies that are tailored to their needs. In 2007, IBE was reassigned to the National Office of Curricular Management and Teacher Training at the Ministry of Education, which for many within the country is promising to the future of IBE although there is yet to be any data that would support any claims of improvement. Further concerns arose about education; especially from those in IBE when there was a decentralization of education in the nation, meaning provinces now help control the education sector. However, for many this only widened the education and achievement gap because federal spending decreased across the board and funding came from the individual province. This meant that IBE schools and programs received much less funding overall because they tended to be situated in less economically powerful provinces given that the indigenous populations of Argentina are among the poorest in the nation.
Argentina has also encountered the problem of providing sufficient education and levels of education consistent with the IBE method. The Argentinian education system is structured with four levels: preschool, elementary, high school, and higher education. Among those levels it also offers categories under which a student can study. For example, students can choose artistic education, rural education, special education and IBE along with other options. However, there are fewer and fewer options and opportunities for those on the IBE path as the levels progress with no official source of higher education within the IBE category.
Bolivia.
A goal of the National Revolution in Bolivia in 1952 was to end discrimination of the indigenous people by integrating them into the majority society. Education in schools was emphasized, to be adapted to the linguistic situation. The government of Víctor Paz Estenssoro assigned education and hispanization in the eastern lowlands to the SIL, granting them at the same time the right to evangelize. Instruction in the first two grades of primary school took place in the indigenous languages to facilitate acquisition by students of Spanish. By the beginning of secondary school, the only language of instruction was Spanish.
In the early 21st century, Bolivia and some other countries have begun to promote a two-way IBE for the whole population. Under such proposals, all Spanish-speaking pupils and students are to learn at least one indigenous language.
Chile.
Compared to other countries in the region the indigenous population in Chile is relatively small. This leads to different obstacles when establishing an IBE model in the country. IBE became a significant model in the educational policies since Law 19.253 was passed in 1993 and established IBE in Chile.
Due to the small populations and the low number of qualified teachers to implement the IBE model, Chile has had some difficulties in establishing a successful long term program equipped with not only enough teachers but also enough students. For example, the Mapuche people of Chile now exist as a mostly urban population. Although this could provide better opportunity for education this does not mean that the education they receive is tailored to their cultural or linguistic needs. This is also problematic considering that the majority of schools were commissioned in rural areas.
Ecuador.
The system of IBE in Ecuador was more of a 'bottom-up' approach in that it was initiated by indigenous persons. Unlike many other countries, IBE in Ecuador has been administered by indigenous organizations that are members of ECUARUNARI and CONAIE since 1988. This followed an agreement between the government and the indigenous movement, leading to the establishment of the national IBE directorate DINEIB (Dirección Nacional de Educacion Intercultural Bilingue). Indigenous representatives appointed teachers and school directors, designed curricula, and wrote text books.
Guatemala.
Guatemala has one of the most extensive systems of intercultural bilingual education with one of the highest percentages of indigenous peoples in Latin America at 39.9% and a very high level of monolingualism among the indigenous population. Intercultural bilingual education in Guatemala is specifically mandated for regions with high numbers of indigenous peoples.
Mexico.
Since the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s strong nationalist movements have enveloped the country until the late 1980s and early 1990s when the indigenous communities of Mexico received more recognition and amendments to the constitution stated that these communities had the right to learn and maintain their language and culture through education. Large indigenous Communities in the Yucatán Peninsula and in the State of Chiapas were the first to begin implementing an IBE model during this time period.
The General Directorate for Education of the Indigenous (DGEI) in Mexico was created in 1973, scheduling the use of 56 officially recognized indigenous languages. The Federal Education Law of 1973 ascertained that instruction in Spanish must not take place at the cost of cultural and linguistic identity of indigenous Spanish-learners. Throughout the 1970s, there was a shift from merely bilingual educational programs to intercultural bilingual programs. Additionally the government pushed that all children needed to participate in interculturalism—not merely those who were part of an indigenous people group. In this case the demand for an IBE program came mostly from the government rather than large scale demand by indigenous persons. IBE programs focused on creating bi-literacy and bilingualism in indigenous languages and Spanish. These programs extend beyond basic education and are now leading to the creation of bilingual/bicultural universities in Mexico.
Peru.
The first education programs without the explicit goal of hispanisation were developed in the 1960s, among them a pilot program of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in a Quechua-speaking area in the Quinua District (Ayacucho Region, Peru). The university work encouraged the government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado to include bilingual education in its educational reform in 1972. Peru, under Velasco, Peru in 1975 was the first country of the Americas to declare an indigenous language, Quechua, as an official language. Quechua was introduced in schools as a foreign or second language in Lima, but prejudices meant that few ethnic European or mestizo students studied it. Little changed for the Quechua and Aymara speakers in the Andes, as Velasco was overthrown in 1975.
Other relevant intercultural bilingual education projects were carried out in Alto-Napo with Amazonian Kichwa population, in Cuzco with Quechua students (1975-1980), and in Puno (1979-1990) with Aymara and Quechua students. As of the early 1990s various national NGOs, although with international financial support, assumed intercultural bilingual education as one of their main activities particularly in the Andean Southern region between Ayacucho and Puno.
As a result of and intervention of the Peruvian Ombudsman (Defesoría del Pueblo) that in 2010 published a specific report on the situation of the education of Indigenous populations, the Ministry of Education starting in 2011 reinforced the application of EIB in Peru and significantly increased the national budget, trained teachers, produced educational materials and implemented a national teachers' mentoring system to secure the adequate implementation of EIB in over 20.000 schools in the Amazonian Basin and the Andes.
On the other hand, the Peruvian indigenous teachers’ association criticizes the implementation of IBE in Peru as a bridge to castellanization and monoculturalization. It has said that the education of indigenous people should be under their own control and that of their communities.
AIDESEP/ISPL Program.
In the early 1980s, AIDESEP, an indigenous rights group in Peru, got involved with ISPL, another group, and the University of Iquitos to create a research project related to creating a model for intercultural bilingual education. The program had 2 primary concerns: improving mastery of Spanish for those who spoke other languages at home, and to revitalize what they viewed as a loss of indigenous knowledge due to the prestige placed on "white people's knowledge". They faced many challenges such as internalized views of prestige of native culture and language by the children themselves as well as the typical challenges of bilingual education such as language domains.
Other similar models.
Colonization that gives rise to systems of language inequality is not exclusive to Latin America and various other areas around the world have attempted to implement similar programs to the Intercultural Bilingual Education model. These programs would allow non-prestige languages to be taught in the school system alongside a majority language. These programs did not reach the scope of implementation that IBE did in Latin America.
North America.
In the U.S. and Canada there are an estimated 184 living indigenous languages—however, only 20 of these 184 are currently learned in a naturalistic environment by children (that is to say, learned at home through immersion with family and community). Many of these minority languages are part of the various Native American tribes which, through the history of reservation creation and racism by the dominant society, have come close to extinction. Similarly to the case with the Hispanicization of Latin America, the prevailing idea that English is a prestige language associated with opportunity and literacy led to an ambivalence towards sustaining various tribal languages—despite the important role they play in tribal community and ethnic identity.
Hualapai.
One attempt to integrate non-prestige culture and language into education systems can be found in the program in Peach Springs, Arizona called The Hualapai Bilingual Academic Excellence Program (HBAEP). The Hualapai tribe lives in northwestern Arizona and their language, Hualapai, was an oral language with no formal writing system prior to the creation of the bilingual school program in 1975. The school was founded by Lucille Watahomigie who was herself Hualapai. The goals of the program were to create biliteracy in both Hualapai and English as well as encourage equality for the indigenous language and teach cultural tribal history in addition to typical American English curriculum. The creation of a phonetic-based writing system proved to be a challenge but resulted in a successful biliteracy program and helped the children to acquire English reading proficiency as well.
Navajo.
The Navajo language has the most speakers of any indigenous language in the U.S. The Rock Point school was created in an attempt to improve student achievement among the Navajo people in Rock Point, New Mexico as well as improve self-image of individuals who did not speak the prestige language. Navajo is the primary language spoken by the majority of people in this area and children were not doing well due to low English proficiency, which in turn resulted in low reading and math scores. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a bilingual-bicultural program created for kindergarten through 6th grade. The classroom time was jointly taught in English and Navajo with a heavier dependence on Navajo in the earlier years. Despite this program, Navajo has fewer and fewer children entering kindergarten fluent each year, which may suggest the need for future programs.
Hawai'i.
After the annexation of Hawai'i by the United States in 1898, the government banned the use of the Hawaiian language in education. Prior to this ban, Hawaiian been the medium for public education. By the 1980s there were only around 50 Hawaiian speakers outside of Ni'ihau, and in 1983 Hawaiians started the first Pūnana Leo, language nest immersion preschool. In 1986, the ban on the Hawaiian language in schools was lifted, and in 1987 the first immersion school began in the islands. Similar to IBE, there is an emphasis on training immersion teachers not just as educators, but as "mauli ola Hawai'i" or teachers of Hawaiian identity. Today, the University of Hilo supports various post-graduate studies in Hawaiian language, literature, teaching and language revitalization, and students can publish their dissertations in Hawaiian in some circumstances. Today, the US census reports that there are 24,000 speakers, and Hawaiian immersion programs are growing.
Intercultural Bilingual Education in Latin America: Political Debates and Criticisms by Countries.
In this section of the article, four specific case studies will be described and the political debates turning around them will be presented. The four case studies will constitute four countries: Nicaragua, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. For each of these countries, only one source by one specific author will be used. Although the implementation of one author only may seem biased, it is important to remember that the purpose of this article is to simply provide a general introduction to Intercultural Bilingual Education as an educational model and political movement with a special emphasis in Latin America.
IBE and Political Debates in Nicaragua.
One of the main debates around Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) is that multilingual, inter-ethnic societies challenge the western ideology stating that societies are “internally homogeneous” entities that have sharp divisions between each other based on linguistic and cultural markers. Since the IBE model in Nicaragua was largely designed on this ideology, its design and implementation by the Nicaraguan state (and NGOs) does not accommodate communities that are “mother tongue bi-multilingual”, for it constrains people living in inter-ethnic multilingual societies to choose a limited set of cultural and linguistic-identity markers.
Criticisms of IBE as implemented in the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.
Freeland (2003) explains that the IBE program in Nicaragua constitutes a remarkable improvement in contrast to the cruel assimilationist Spanish-monolingual schooling model applied to indigenous populations. It also has enhanced the gain of prestige of Coastal minority languages (Miskitu, Sumu/Mayangna, English Creole: Garifuna, Rama) through educational programs and production of educational material and research in these languages.
Nonetheless, Freeland also points to significant flaws in the IBE program in Nicaragua. The first flaw is that the program applies a “one-size-fits-all” policy, which ignores social dynamics based on the co-existence of different ethnic groups in a single community and their use of two or more languages as mother tongues. Furthermore, it produces various inequalities regarding the fulfillment of language rights by different groups: some of them are able to achieve their rights through the program but many others are not. In addition, the IBE program in Nicaragua is largely based on an early-transitional model designed for a facilitated transition into a monolingual Spanish environment and less focused in the long-term maintenance of individuals’ mother tongues.
Conclusion on IBE in the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.
Freeland concludes in her ethnography that the IBE programs implemented in the various communities of the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast are effective as long as the people whom they serve have agency over these and can achieve whatever linguistic and cultural goals they desire (2003, 254). The moment the IBE, whether directed by the state or an NGO, is imposed on a community by disregarding their goals, it becomes objectified. In this sense, the members of the communities are rather seen as objects that serve as a means to a fixed, constraining end and not as individuals with collective and individual aspirations hoping to get the best out of IBE programs.
IBE and Political Debates in the Amazonian Low Basin of Peru.
Lucy Trapnell (2003), a linguistic anthropologist and co-designer of the IBE program in the Peruvian Amazonian Low Basin in conjunction with AIDESEP (Inter-ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest or "Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana" in Spanish), explains that this program promotes the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in schools, languages and cosmovisions, and at the same time it incorporates indigenous realities of perceiving the world. Therefore, the AIDESEP IBE program opts to focus on the aspect of self-determination of indigenous peoples about their identity. On this basis, self-determination is based on “cultural heritage”, and it allows people to have agency over the shaping of their communities instead of clinging to a romanticized past. By the same token, Trapnell argues that the AIDESEP IBE program avoids falling into the “Myth of the Noble Savage” fallacy, which portrays indigenous cultures as pristine, static, and isolated, by treating “cultural heritage” as a socio-historic aspect and by providing a greater importance to society over culture.
Criticisms in AIDESEP IBE implementation in the Peruvian Amazonian Low Basin.
Trapnell argues that, unlike the Peruvian national curriculum, AIDESEP recognizes the importance of addressing the pervasive assimilationist agenda of national education towards indigenous peoples. By training community teachers to be culturally sensitive and have more effective pedagogical methods, AIDESEP empowers the incorporation of indigenous knowledges in communities’ schools. Furthermore, one of the most relevant aspects of the AIDESEP project is that it serves not only as an IBE program but also as a political platform through which indigenous peoples of Peru voice their claims of rights to their lands, culture, and sovereignty.
Nonetheless, negative outcomes are also reported in Trapnell's study based on the opinions of the students and faculty participating in the program. Students report having spent an excessive part of their training (70%) in the theoretical reconstructing of past ideal societies but reported that they did not have sufficient ethnographic skills to understand the present reality of their own communities. By the same token, there is a disproportionate focus on the socio-historic past of indigenous communities, something about which students in the program complained. Ironically, their complaints were dismissed as “self-rejection” of students’ own past.
Another present criticism that Trapnell emphasizes about traditional IBE programs in Latin America is that such programs may focus excessively on cultural aspects of a society based on tradition. Too often, this approach runs the risk of objectifying and commodifying culture and language revitalization efforts. Furthermore, it ultimately leads to a static, romanticized view of indigenous societies that strongly contrasts with the realities indigenous peoples currently live. At the end of the AIDESEP IBE program, another negative outcome was an ethnocentrism towards other indigenous peoples by several students based on the preservation and performance of specific cultural traits—on the basis of these cultural traits, they created categories of “real indigenous peoples” as opposition to more “urbanized” peoples.
IBE in Ecuador: The Political Arena and Organizations.
Indigenous organizations like CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador or "Confederación de Naciones Indígenas del Ecuador" in Spanish")" and indigenous political figures have greatly pressed for the recognition and enforcement of indigenous language rights in Ecuador by framing these rights’ legitimacy through the category of “collective” or group rights. For instance, the right of indigenous peoples to speak their languages in public and official acts and their use of public services in their languages have been promoted. CONAIE created an “administrative structure” that served as an extension whose responsibility involved the production of teaching material in Indigenous languages of Ecuador (as well as their standardization), bilingual-teacher training, and implementation of IBE programs throughout the country. This structure is the DINEIIB (National Directorate of Bilingual Indigenous Intercultural Education or "Dirección Nacional de Educación Indígena Intercultural Bilingüe" in Spanish).
Standardization of Kichwa in Ecuador: sociolinguistic consequences.
The production of a standardized version of Kichwa (Unified Kichwa or "Kichwa unificado" in Spanish) has been an essential component and one of the most important achievements of the IBE program directed by DINEIIB in Ecuador. Kichwa is the indigenous language with the largest number of speakers in Ecuador and has several regional dialects in the Andean highlands and the Amazonian Lowlands of the country. The phonological features of many dialects were simplified and unified under the standardized version of the language, which contained several neologisms that replaced loanwords from Spanish. Despite the implementation of Unified Kichwa by indigenous intellectuals and children at schools, there are ethnolinguistic differences between speakers of the standard dialect and those who speak more traditional dialects of Kichwa, especially elders in the community and people from rural areas. These linguistic differences in both spoken Kichwa versions have provoked internal divisions among community members of different generations and social classes. These divisions have rapidly led to conflict and sociolinguistic intolerance between groups of people within the Kichwa-speaking communities.
Criticisms in the implementation of IBE by the state in Ecuador.
Despite the significant advances in indigenous education that have been made in Ecuador since the twentieth century, Haboud and King point to three essential flaws that have not allowed for IBE in Ecuador to fulfill its realization. The first hindrance of IBE in Ecuador is the lack of trained and qualified educators for indigenous languages. There are simply not enough qualified teachers in the country to impart an effective education in the academic curriculum. The second criticism stems from an unclear “definition” of what IBE entails as a bilingual model regarding the degree to which indigenous languages and Spanish are to be taught in schools. In that sense, there is an inconsistent use of the term “intercultural” as an ideology that wishes to be inclusive for all ethnicities in the country but that, in reality, is largely limited to indigenous peoples only. Non-indigenous people barely, if ever, learn indigenous languages or enroll in IBE schools and thus cannot appreciate the components of the IBE program. Finally, there are heavy cuts in spending in social welfare sectors, including education and health. These social welfare cuts are very frequent and are more intense in Latin American countries like Ecuador.
IBE in Chile: Incorporation of Mapuche traditional Teachers.
Ortiz (2009) investigated the role that ancestral teachers of Mapuche indigenous knowledge known as "Kimches" played in the functioning of IBE schools in the rural community of Piedra Alta, located in the "Area de Desarrollo Indigena" (Area of Indigenous Development in Spanish or ADI) in Araucania, Southern Chile. He argues that the incorporation of Kimches in Intercultural Bilingual schools like Piedra Alta constitute a decolonizing methodology and “an act of epistemological resistance” (Ortiz 2009, 95). In that sense, the incorporation of Kimches is a methodology to revitalize and legitimize Mapuche culture and Mapudungun (Mapuche's language) in response to the pervasive “Eurocentric modern” pedagogy implemented by the Chilean state in order to create a national identity based on assimilation of indigenous peoples.
Challenges faced by IBE schools' incorporation of Kimches in rural Mapuche communities.
Ortiz reports that in rural communities like Piedra Alta, IBE schools have incorporated traditional Mapuche teachers known as Kimches, who impart indigenous knowledge in the classrooms to their students through oral teachings and written texts. Kimches also act as intermediaries between Mapuche parents and non-indigenous or non-Mapuche faculty and staff at the schools and are usually respected and active members in their communities. Unfortunately, Kimches have also been the subject of criticism by some parents of the Mapuche community, who see them as unfit to teach in formal schools in comparison to mainstream teachers. The teaching content of Kimches has also been criticized by some Mapuche parents opposing IBE by saying that this type of indigenous knowledge is of no use in mainstream Chilean society and that they rather prefer their children to learn indigenous knowledge at home. Kimche teachers also face challenges when they try to impart indigenous knowledge in Mapudungun to their students because many of their Mapuche students simply do not understand the language well enough to be engaged in class. Therefore, the teachers are forced to code-switch between Spanish and Mapudungun. However, there is a clear dominance of Spanish both in the classroom and the community and family meetings where Ortiz's ethnography took place.
According to Ortiz, there is “a generational breakdown in the transmission of indigenous culture and language” among many younger generations in rural regions, which is a main cause of Mapuche youngsters not learning or knowing Mapudungun and other cultural aspects (Ortiz 2009, 110). On the other hand, there has been a pervasive influence of mainstream Chilean and global culture in the form of technology, thus inviting Mapuche youth to move towards a more assimilated Chilean but also global identity.
Criticisms in the implementation of IBE by the state in Chile.
Despite the prevalence of IBE schools in rural areas of Chile, Ortiz reported no IBE programs in Santiago, Chile's capital and home city of approximately fifty percent of the total Mapuche population. In the rural areas, the implementation of IBE programs is not consistent and heavily depends on the intervention of the Chilean State and the Catholic Church, which manage the resource allocation for these schools. However, there is a considerable inequality of resource allocation for IBE indigenous schools. The latter dependence of IBE schools on the Chilean State and Church is further exemplified on the limited intercultural bilingual education these entities provide to the indigenous populations it serves at the grade level. Indigenous schools are limited to the elementary school level, which means these schools are only able to offer education until the eighth grade. As a consequence, indigenous students are forced to look for schooling outside their communities, mostly in urban centers, where schools are Hispanicized and where mainstream Chilean education is imparted.
In the rural areas, the positive benefits that IBE may have for the Mapuche people are not acknowledged among various factions of the communities. One of the most present criticisms presented by Ortiz is that many Mapuche parents do not consider IBE to be an adequate program for their children in the sense that it does not equip students with the sufficient, necessary tools for them to obtain social upward mobility in mainstream Chilean society. Furthermore, this social upward mobility is mainly conceived as getting better-paying jobs and superior education in universities.
Current political debates on the relevance and role of IBE in Chile for the Mapuche.
Ortiz argues that, currently, Mapuche IBE is seen as a part of a series of socio-political rights that Mapuche leaders claim regarding land rights and sovereignty. It is not seen as an independent enterprise in which considerable resources and attention should be invested in. By the same token, he also argues that there is a dissonance of agendas regarding IBE for indigenous peoples in Chile and other countries and the national Latin American states, a dissonance he calls “the assimilationist/pluralist paradox” (Ortiz 2009, 99). This paradox is a political debate in which indigenous leaders and activists expect to use IBE as a political platform in which they are able to launch their claims for land and sovereignty. Contrary to the “indigenist” agenda, Latin American states, such as Chile, aim to use IBE as a tool of assimilation for indigenous people into a single national identity. Ortiz concludes that IBE programs do not have the unanimous support of Mapuche communities. He argues that there needs to be a greater attention and autonomy given to IBE programs in Mapuche communities by Mapuche leaders. That is, IBE should stand on its own rather than being a complement of wider, complex political debates such as land rights and political sovereignty.
Cross-comparison between Chile and other Latin American countries regarding IBE implementation.
It is important to take into account that, unlike countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, whose indigenous populations are substantially large, Chile's indigenous peoples only constitute a little more than four percent of the total population in Chile. The fact that indigenous population in Chile is so small implies that IBE has not been implemented in the same ways as in other Latin American countries, where the large indigenous populations have demanded IBE as a political platform for their rights. In addition, the Mapuche people, the largest indigenous nation in Chile, has heavily migrated to urban centers and it has been reported that only twenty percent of Mapuche still live in rural areas. The remaining eighty percent have migrated to five main urban centers, Santiago being the home of most of the Mapuche urban population.


Nonmaleficence


Menachem Magidor

Menachem Magidor (Hebrew: מנחם מגידור; born January 24, 1946) is an Israeli mathematician who specializes in mathematical logic, in particular set theory. He served as President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was President of the Association for Symbolic Logic from 1996 to 1998, and is currently the President of the
Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science (DLMPST/IUHPS; 2016-2019). In 2016 he was elected an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he received the Solomon Bublick Award.
Biography.
Menachem Magidor was born in Petah Tikva, Israel. He received his Ph.D. in 1973 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His thesis, "On Super Compact Cardinals", was written under the supervision of Azriel Lévy. He served as President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1997 to 2009, following Hanoch Gutfreund and succeeded by Menachem Ben-Sasson. The Oxford philosopher Ofra Magidor is his daughter.
Mathematical theories.
Magidor obtained several important consistency results on powers of singular cardinals substantially developing the method of forcing. He generalized the Prikry forcing in order to change the cofinality of a large cardinal to a predetermined regular cardinal. He proved that the least strongly compact cardinal can be equal to the least measurable cardinal or to the least supercompact cardinal (but not at the same time). Assuming consistency of huge cardinals he constructed models (1977) of set theory with first examples of nonregular ultrafilters over very small cardinals (related to the famous Guilmann Keisler problem concerning existence of nonregular ultrafilters), even with the example of jumping cardinality of ultrapowers. He proved consistent that formula_1 is strong limit, but formula_2. He even strengthened the condition that formula_1 is strong limit to that GCH holds below formula_1. This constituted a negative solution to the singular cardinals hypothesis. Both proofs used the consistency of very large cardinals. Magidor, Matthew Foreman, and Saharon Shelah formulated and proved the consistency of Martin's maximum, a provably maximal form of Martin's axiom. Magidor also gave a simple proof of the Jensen and the Dodd-Jensen covering lemmas. He proved that if 0# does not exist then every primitive recursive closed set of ordinals is the union of countably many sets in formula_5.


Verb-initial word order

In syntax, verb-initial (V1) word order is a word order in which the verb appears before the subject and the object. In the more narrow sense, this term is used specifically to describe the word order of V1 languages (a V1 language being a language where the word order is obligatorily or predominantly verb-initial). V1 clauses only occur in V1 languages and other languages with a dominant V1 order displaying other properties that correlate with verb-initiality and that are crucial to many analyses of V1. V1 languages are estimated to make up 12-19% of the world’s languages.
V1 languages constitute a diverse group from different language families. They include Berber, Biu-Mandara, Surmic, and Nilo-Saharan languages in Africa; Celtic languages in Europe; Mayan, and Oto-Manguean languages in North and Central America; Salish, Wakashan, and Tsimshiani languages in North America; Arawakan languages in South America; Austronesian languages in Southeast Asia. Some languages are strictly VSO, for example Q’anjob’al (Mayan). Others are strictly VOS, for example Malagasy (Austronesian). Many alternate between VSO and VOS, an example being Ojibwe (Algonquian).
Examples.
The following examples illustrate the rigid VOS and VSO languages and the VOS/VSO-alternating languages.:
Q’anjob’al (VSO)
Malagasy (VOS)
Ojibwe (VOS/VSO)
VSO order:
VOS order:
Word-order correlations.
Verb-initial languages pattern with SVO languages on many of their word orders. The similarity between the word orders typical for both verb-initial languages and SVO languages has led many typologists to refer to all of these languages as simply VO. According to Matthew Dryer’s 1992 study of a worldwide sample of languages, the majority of VO languages (of which verb-initial languages are a subtype) have the following word order tendencies:
Strong tendencies:
Weak tendencies:
Theoretical approaches.
Functionalist approach.
Many functional linguists do not posit an underlying syntactic tree in which a verb-initial language is SVO. Rather than try to find ways to derive the structures of verb-initial languages from underlyingly SVO structures, functional linguists would look at how cognitive principles make it possible for languages to have different word orders and why certain word orders are more common, less common, or almost non-existent. Russell Tomlin (in his 1986 paper "Basic word order. Functional principles") argued that there are three cognitively grounded principles which can account for the observed distributions of the frequencies of word order in human languages. The three principles are:
Since subjects are generally more likely than objects to be topics and to have animate referents, the topic-first principle and the animate-first principle both cause a strong tendency in languages to prefer the subject to go before the object. Thus, languages where the object comes before the subject are rare.
Of the three possible word orders in which the subject comes before the object (VSO, SVO, and SOV), the VSO is less common because of the verb-object bonding principle, which states that objects tend to be more closely tied to verbs than subjects are (which is supported by phenomena such as object incorporation being found in many languages). Because of this principle, the two orders in which the object and verb are placed next to each other (SVO and SOV) are more common than VSO.
The way the three principles interact to produce stark differences in frequencies between the word orders is illustrated by the table below (the assumption is that the more of the three principles a particular word order satisfies the more frequent it would be):
According to the table above, the application of these three principles would predict the following hierarchy in the relative frequencies of word order:
SOV=SVO > VSO > VOS=OVS > OSV
This prediction roughly corresponds to the real frequencies observed in the world's languages:
Generative approach.
There are a number of different solutions proposed for deriving V1 word order in the generative framework. These solutions include the movement of the verb or verbal phrase from traditional SVO sentences, lowering the subject from a higher position, such as Spec-IP to adjoin to a projection of the verb, or stipulating that the specifier is right branching instead of the more common left branching specifiers found in X-bar theory.
Verb movement.
A common analysis for V1 word order is the head-raising of the verb from a base-generated SVO sentence into a position higher than the subject. This is a popular proposal for Irish and other Celtic languages, but also has been applied to Afroasiatic V1 languages such as Berber and Arabic (Ouhalla 1994). The V0 raising account has also been proposed for a number of Austronesian languages, but there is no existing proposal for Mayan languages.
To derive VSO word order, the verb raises through head movement and raises to either C or T.
Deriving VOS order through V head-raising is less straightforward. The common solution is scrambling, which has been proposed for deriving Tongan (Otsuka 2002) and Tagalog (Rackowski 2002) sentences. The scrambling mechanism involves the object moving to a high position, such as Spec,TP (Otsuka 2002), in order to check information structure features.
The head-movement analysis is motivated by ellipsis data in Celtic and Semitic languages, and by verb-adjacent particles and adverbs in Austronesian languages.
In Irish, elliding all postverbal arguments is possible, suggesting that the subject and the verb belong to one functional projection, and the verb is outside of it (McCloskey 1991).
In Tagalog, there can be adverbs between the verb and the object in VOS order, implying that the verb and the object can be separated, and do not form a constituent. In Tongan, there is an asymmetry between case-marked arguments and clitic pronouns: the clitics surface pre-verbally, whereas the case-marked nouns can only surface post-verbally (Otsuka 2005). Otsuka (2005) proposed that the subject clitic undergoes head-movement to T0, and attaches to the verb, whereas the case-marked subject moves to Spec,TP. He concludes that only verb head-movement can explain such a syntactic asymmetry in Tongan.
Phrasal movement.
V1 word order can also be analyzed as a derivation from the more common SVO order through verbal phrase movement. This solution is commonly proposed for Austronesian languages. Accounts on phrasal movement differ on 1) the highest maximal projection that moves (VP, vP, or TP), 2) the landing site of the moved phrase (Spec,TP or higher), and 3) the motivation for movement (generally agreed to be the EPP).
VOS order can be derived straightforwardly by raising the VP to a specifier position in a higher projection, such as the TP.
VSO order, on the other hand, has to be derived by remnant movement of the VP after evacuating the object from the phrase first.
An argument for VP raising is the island constraints that arise in the VP in VOS sentences, due to The Freezing Principle, which says that there can be no movement out of a moved constituent.
Various Austronesian languages follow this constraint to various levels. Seediq for example is strict in that only VP-external constituents can go under A’-movement. Toba Batak, Tagalog, and Malagasy on the other hand, have this restriction only for VP-internal arguments, while allowing adverbs and indirect objects to surface clause-initially. One proposal to solve this problem is to propose that adjuncts evacuate from the VP, before it raises.
Mayan languages, on the other hand, do not have such a restriction. Ch'ol, for example, allows object extraction in WH-questions from VOS word orders. For such cases, it has been proposed that the object evacuates before the phrasal movement to a higher position than the subject, and thus can undergo WH-movement later.
Right-hand specifier.
Some researchers have proposed deriving verb-initial word order by modifying the basic X-bar structure to permit right ward specifiers. This analysis has been particularly influential for Mayan languages, notably by Judith Aissen for Tzotzil. This is notable because it goes against standard X-bar theory and modern Minimalist theories where all specifiers are required to be leftward.
The difference between VSO and VOS word orders in a right-hand specifier theory is accomplished via a combination of controlling which specifiers are right-ward and controlling which argument(s) moves. VOS word can be derived from the base positions of a VP with a right-specifier (note that the majority of this literature assumes the VP-Internal hypothesis). From the base position, VOS can also be derived by moving the subject up to any right-specifier position (e.g. the specifier of IP).
VSO word order is derived from the same base order. The object then moves to a right-specifier position above the VP (the specific landing site will vary from language to language).
Movement of either the subject or object arguments was originally motivated by positing an EPP feature on the landing site. Modern analyses are more likely to argue that movement is motivated by a need to give the argument case or for purposes of information structure.
Subject-lowering.
Another type of approach to derive verb-initial word orders involves subject lowering, resulting in a structure in which the subject follows the verb. Whereas proposals for V-raising and VP-raising generally assume that the linear order of a sentence is derived in syntax, the subject lowering account assumes that phonological well-formedness determines the linear word order. Subject lowering has been proposed by Sabbagh (2013). He treats subject lowering as a prosodic phenomenon.
The basic idea is as follows. After the syntactic derivation is done, the subject is in SpecIP/SpecTP. On its way to phonological realization, the end result of the syntactic derivation can be manipulated in order to satisfy phonological and morphological requirements. In the case of subject lowering, the subject will move to V and right-adjoin to it, as illustrated by the tree below (taken from Clemens & Polinsky).
Different languages are said to feature subject lowering, namely Berber (Choe 1987), Chamorro (Chung 1990, 1998), Tagalog (Sabbagh 2005, 2013).
As Clemens & Polinsky (2015) explain, support for subject lowering comes from coordination facts. When two sentences are coordinated, the subject must be able to have scope over the coordination, even though it shows up in a lower position in the clause. To be able to have this scope, the subject needs to occupy a high position in the syntactic derivation.
Sabbagh (2013) proposes a prosodic constraint to motivate subject lowering in Tagalog. This constraint is called Weak Start and it says that "[a] prosodic constituent begins with a leftmost daughter, which is no higher on the prosodic hierarchy than the constituent that immediately follows." This proposal is situated in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011). Match Theory states that clauses (CP and IP/TP) with illocutionary force correspond to intonational phrases (ɩ), XPs correspond to phonological phrases (φ), and X⁰s correspond to phonological words (ω). Sabbagh (2013) proposes that the prosodic hierarchy is as follows:
Prosodic hierarchy: ɩ > φ > ω.
The prosodic constraint Weak Start regulates the order in which different members of the hierarchy can appear in a single prosodic phrase. The hierarchy states that elements that are relatively high on the prosodic hierarchy need to be preceded by elements that are equal or lower to them on the prosodic hierarchy (Sabbagh 2013). In other words, phonological phrases (φ) need to be preceded by phonological words (ω).
This structure does not meet the requirement that Weak Start imposes on it ("i.e." elements high on the prosodic hierarchy need to be preceded by elements that are equal or lower on the hierarchy). The subject, which is a phonological phrase (φ), precedes the verb, a phonological word (ω). This means that there is a mismatch between syntax and phonology. In other words, for syntactic reasons, the subject must be high (because of scope over coordinations), but for phonology, the subject needs to follow the verb, instead of preceding it. Lowering the subject resolves this mismatch. The structure after subject lowering is illustrated in the structures below.
In these structures the verb (ω) precedes the hierarchically higher subject (φ). This structure obeys Weak Start. Thus, subject lowering is applied in order to satisfy this prosodic structure constraint.
Syntactic structures involving subject lowering obey syntactic and phonological principles. The subject has moved to SpecIP/SpecTP, which gives it its necessary scope (as can be inferred from coordination structures). Lowering the subject in the prosodic structure causes the structure to obey the phonological constraint Weak Start as well.


The Devil and the Good Lord

The Devil and the Good Lord () is a 1951 play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The play concerns the moral choices of its characters, warlord Goetz, clergy Heinrich, communist leader Nasti and others during the German Peasants' War. The first act follows Goetz' transformation from vicious war criminal to a "good" person of noble deeds, as during a siege of the town of Worms, he decides not to massacre its citizens.
The play was first performed at the Théâtre-Antoine in Paris, where it opened on 7 June 1951 and ran until March 1952. This production was directed by Louis Jouvet. Of all his dramatic writings, "The Devil and the Good Lord" was Sartre's favourite. He based the character of Goetz on his analysis of the psychology and morality of the writer Jean Genet, which he had developed more substantially in his "Saint Genet" (1952).


Epsilon Sigma Alpha

Epsilon Sigma Alpha International (ΕΣΑ) is a community and collegiate service organization for anyone ages 18 and older. The organization states that its purpose "is to inspire leadership and service by bringing good people together to pursue programs and projects that make a positive difference locally, nationally and internationally."
The organization's mission statement reads: "ESA is Good Friends, Good Works, and Good Times… We create activities and support causes that let us surround ourselves with welcoming, positive people who enjoy making a difference and having fun together."
Established in 1929, ΕΣΑ is a network of an estimated 15,000 members in over 1,000 community based chapters, with coordinating organizations at state and international levels. ΕΣΑ also includes United States collegiate chapters which provide charitable service to their campuses and communities. All service by ΕΣΑ members is unpaid, with membership fees covering large portions of administrative and chapter expenses.
Philanthropic projects.
Chapters, both independently and jointly, conduct fund raising activities for charitable causes. As the care and expenses of handicapped children are a current ESA priority, the international Philanthropic Projects of Epsilon Sigma Alpha are St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the Easter Seal Society. As of July 2006, ΕΣΑ had raised over 100 million dollars for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, meeting an organization goal for their 75th anniversary. As of 2019, ΕΣΑ has helped raise more than $245 million in cash and pledges for the kids of St. Jude. ΕΣΑ has endowed the St. Jude Bone Marrow Transplant area in the hospital's Patient Care Center and the fourth floor of the ALSAC Tower.
Through their efforts to raise awareness and funds, ΕΣΑ helps support Easterseals and has been a supporter of Easterseals since 1982 when they were adopted as a second International Project. Since that date ΕΣΑ has raised over $6 million.
ΕΣΑ also encourages each local chapter to select and support local benevolent, charitable or civic enterprises. ΕΣΑ activities on local levels may be jointly organized with men's fraternal organizations, including the Lions Clubs International. As a whole, the chapters have created an impressive record of service. Each year, members help raise millions of dollars for philanthropic projects and give an estimated 650,000 hours of personal service.
In addition, the ΕΣΑ Foundation supports education through an ongoing Scholarship/Endowment Program and provides grants to individuals involved in charitable service for children and adults.
History.
Adelia Prichard of Oregon, a National President of Business and Professional Women's Clubs from 1923 to 1925, spearheaded the sorority's organization by proposing a national education and service sorority. In 1929, a group of community oriented women in Jacksonville, Texas drafted an organization charter. With ten signatures, a national charter was issued to ΕΣΑ by the state of Missouri on February 11, 1930. The organization still functions under the original charter but is now incorporated in the state of Colorado.
Prichard was appointed the first National Director, and spearheaded the sorority's early growth. She asked prominent women from around the United States to serve as members of the Founder's Chapter and to act as advisors. The chapter included Pearl Kinman; Clara Leach; Althea Terry, State President of the Business and Professional Clubs; Susan. B. Rebhan, a State Supreme Court Judge; Florence Sterling, writer and editor; Phoebe Kerrick Warner, author and National Chairman of the Rural Women's Clubs; businesswoman Florence Crawford; teacher Daisy Birchfield; and Mary Redfield Plummer, lecturer on parliamentary law at Northwestern University. The first National Headquarters office was located in Kansas City, Missouri, with a central states divisional office in St. Louis.
Director Sybil Murphy Flaherty organized the first National Convention in 1938. Two chapters in Kansas City hosted the convention with about 60 delegates attending. At that time, delegates set up a National Advisory Council (the forerunner of the present International Council), and elected Irene Copeland Lugland of Kansas City as the first National President.
During World War II, ΕΣΑ National Headquarters sponsored an “Empty Your Purse for Uncle Sam” campaign, one of the first nationally organized activities of the organization. In this door to door campaign, members collected metal for recycling into munitions. ΕΣΑ also collected books and other reading material for distribution to soldiers around the world. Local projects to assist the war effort were encouraged, and many chapters enrolled and sponsored Red Cross courses to combat local emergencies.
In 1948, an ΕΣΑ chapter was organized in Voorsburg, in the Netherlands. The name of the National Advisory Council was then changed to the International Advisory Council. Since then, Epsilon Sigma Alpha chapters have been organized in Germany, Guam, Denmark, Peru, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Scotland.
In 1988 the first collegiate chapter was formed, on the campus of Ball State University.
Emblems and symbols.
Emblems associated with ΕΣΑ include the Greek letters Epsilon Sigma Alpha (ΕΣΑ) and a national emblem is based on local and state chapters.
The yellow jonquil was chosen as the organization's floral emblem as it is "rich in color, perfect in form." A members magazine, "The Jonquil," takes its name from the flower and is published twice yearly.
Collegiate Chapters.
Epsilon Sigma Alpha has the following Collegiate Chapters


M-command

In generative grammar and related frameworks, m-command is a syntactic relation between two nodes in a syntactic tree. A node formula_1 m-commands a node formula_2 if the maximal projection of formula_1 dominates formula_2, but neither formula_1 nor formula_2 dominates the other.
In government and binding theory, m-command was used to define the central syntactic relation of "government". However, it has been largely replaced by c-command in current research. M-command is a broader relation than c-command, since a node m-commands every node that it c-commands, as well as the specifier of the phrase that it heads. Like c-command, m-command is defined over constituency-based trees and plays no role in frameworks which adopt a different notion of syntactic structure.


David Sepkoski

David Sepkoski, Ph.D. (born January 27, 1972) is an American science historian and college professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Background and career.
Sepkoski was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to paleontologist Jack Sepkoski. His stepmother is the paleomammologist Christine Janis. He received his BA from Carleton College, his MA from the University of Chicago, and his doctoral degree in science history from the University of Minnesota. His publications include three books, most recently "Catastrophic Thinking", which deals with mass extinction events.


Episodic-like memory

Episodic-like memory is the memory system in animals that is comparable to human episodic memory. The term was first described by Clayton & Dickinson referring to an animal’s ability to encode and retrieve information about ‘what’ occurred during an episode, ‘where’ the episode took place, and ‘when’ the episode happened. This ability in animals is considered ‘episodic-like’ because there is currently no way of knowing whether or not this form of remembering is accompanied by conscious recollection—a key component of Endel Tulving’s original definition of episodic memory.
Distinction from human episodic memory.
In order for an animal’s memory to qualify as ‘episodic-like,’ it must meet three behavioural criteria reflecting the content, structure and flexibility of the memory. "Content" refers to recalling what happened, where it happened, and when it happened on the basis of a specific past experience. "Structure" refers to forming an integrated what-where-when representation, and "flexibility" refers to being able to use the information in a versatile way. In order for an animal to meet these behavioural criteria then, they must be able to not only form what-where-when memories, but integrate the what, where and when of the event into an integrated framework. The assessment of episodic-like memory must rely on these behavioural characteristics because animals do not have the language capabilities to participate in the episodic memory tests developed for humans.
Evidence of an episodic-like memory system was first provided by Clayton & Dickinson (1998). They demonstrated that western scrub jays ("Aphelocoma californica") remember where they cache different types of food, and discriminately recover them depending on the perishability of the item and the amount of time that has passed since caching. Recent research has further investigated episodic-like memory in these birds, but has also explored evidence of this memory system in other species such as the rufous hummingbird, pigeons, primates, rats and honeybees.
The overall organization and brain structures involved in human episodic memory have also been compared to what exists in the animal brain. Many similarities have been found including the role of the medial temporal lobe, a structure including the hippocampus. Nonetheless, many have cautioned making comparisons to human episodic memory. Many criticisms of this area of research have been made including questioning how accurately we can attain this information simply based on behavioural criteria and non verbal tests.
Neural mechanisms.
The ability to encode and retrieve past experiences relies on the circuitry of the medial temporal lobe, a brain structure that includes the hippocampus and other para-hippocampal cortical areas. The organization of these brain areas is largely conserved across mammalian species as are the major pathways that information travels between the medial temporal lobe and the neocortex. Because of this strong parallel between animal brain structures and the structures involved in human episodic memory, there is reason to believe that not only do some animals possess the ability to form what-where-when memories, but that this episodic-like system may be more comparable to human episodic memory than once thought.
According to Eichenbaum (2000), information that is projected from nearly all neocortical areas come together onto one or more subdivisions of the para-hippocampal region which includes the perirhinal cortex, the postrhinal cortex and the enotrhinal cortex. This information is then projected onto subdivisions of the hippocampus which are connected by a path which begins with the dentate gyrus, continuing to area CA3, then CA1, and finally through to the subiculum. Information is then directed back to the para-hippocampal region and finally to the same areas of the cerebral cortex that were the source of input to this region. This organization has been observed in primates, rats, and other mammalian species.
The hippocampus in particular has an evolutionarily well conserved structure. It contains similar cell types and comparable structural design in humans and non-human primates. Its structure in rodents is also remarkably similar although in rodents it contains approximately ten times fewer cells and more connections between hemispheres.
Animal lesion studies have also provided evidence related to the importance of particular brain structures in episodic-like memory. Rats with medial prefrontal cortical lesions showed impairment on the ‘where’ component suggesting that this area contributed to retrieving information on object location. Similarly, hippocampal lesions severely impacted all three components (what, where, and when) suggesting that the hippocampus is responsible for detecting new events, stimuli, and places when forming new memories and on retrieving that information later on.
Research.
Western scrub jays ("Aphelocoma californica").
Recent research regarding mental time travel and episodic-like memory has focused on determining whether there are any non-human animals that demonstrate future planning and under what conditions they do so. One species that has frequently been considered is the western scrub jay ("Aphelocoma californica"), a member of the corvid family of birds native to western North America. These large-brained, long-lived, and highly social birds hide food caches for future consumption and rely on memory to recover their caches of hidden food at a later date, typically weeks if not months into the future. They show an ability to form what-where-when memories characteristic of episodic memory as they remember the spatial location and contents of their caches as well as recalling which conspecifics were watching during caching.
Flexibility within episodic-like memory has been demonstrated within a study by Clayton et al. involving the caching of perishable and non-perishable foods. The jays were allowed to cache perishable and non-perishable items but then discovered, in the interval between caching and recovery, that the perishable food type degraded more quickly than originally thought. They reasoned that, if the birds do use a flexible declarative memory system, they should be able to update their knowledge about the rate of perishability of the food and change their search behaviour at recovery accordingly, even though the episodic information about what they cached where and when was encoded before gaining the new knowledge about the decay rates. Results confirmed this reasoning demonstrating that these birds possess a flexible episodic like memory system where they can update their information after the time of encoding.
An experiment conducted by Dally et al. examined the importance of social living in scrub jays by testing whether storer birds remember the status of the observer bird who watched them during caching – adding a ‘who’ to the what-where-when memory framework. They found that, as predicted, storer birds’ adjusted their behaviour during the initial caching period according to the rank of the observer bird. In the dominant observer bird condition, where they experienced the highest risk of cache theft, storers cached predominantly in the tray farthest away from the observer bird and recached the greatest proportion of items during the recovery period. In a second part of this study, they tested whether scrub jays remember which particular individual was present when they made specific caches. Birds cached in front of observer birds as they did the first part of this study, but then hours later were separated into three conditions where they either recovered their caches in private, in front of an observer bird that watched them cache initially, or in front of a new control bird. They found that the proportion of caches that were recached at recovery differed significantly between conditions and significantly more caches were recached during the observed condition relative to the control condition. This suggests that during the recovery stage, storer birds remember whether the observer bird watching them recover their cache was the same bird who watched them cache initially and engage in additional behaviours to prevent cache theft.
Hummingbirds.
A study of the rufous hummingbird found they were able to learn and remember which flowers in an arrangement contained a nectar reward. Although visual cues such as the type and colour of flower increased how quickly the locations were learned, they weren't necessary for learning. Hummingbirds could remember that only the center flower contained a reward even in arrangements of identical flowers. Artificial flowers were created using small cardboard disks painted in unique colours, the center of which contained a syringe tip filled with a small amount of sucrose solution. When spacing between the flowers was increased, hummingbirds still remembered the relative locations of the flowers in arrangement. When the arrangements of artificial flowers were moved, the hummingbirds remembered which flowers contained nectar, even when the new location of the arrangement placed an empty flower in the location previously occupied by a reward flower.
Rufous hummingbirds are also able to adjust their foraging strategies based on when they've last visited flowers and how often the flower's nectar is renewed. Artificial flowers were refilled in either ten- or twenty-minute intervals upon being emptied. The hummingbirds were able to distinguish between the types of flower and adjust their foraging strategies accordingly. Over time the hummingbirds learned the schedule of renewal and visited the flowers renewed every ten minutes much more frequently than the flowers renewed every twenty minutes. This implies planning on the part of the hummingbird in order to avoid redundant trips and avoid wasting energy. Similar cognitive abilities and foraging strategies were also observed in a study of the green-backed firecrown, another species of hummingbird.
Pigeons.
The pigeon has also been shown to exhibit qualities similar to episodic-like memory. Pigeons respond to a stimulus shown before the presentation of food by thereafter pecking future examples of the stimulus. In the event that a stimulus is presented without food, pigeons will choose not to peck at future presentations of the stimulus. A study at the University of Kentucky aimed to determine whether pigeons could recall their previous actions with regard to certain hues presented either with or without food. The first phase of the experiment involved training the pigeons to peck in response to one stimulus (vertical lines) and refrain from pecking for at least four seconds in response to another stimulus (horizontal lines). The presented stimuli were then followed by both a red and green key. Pecking the green key following a pecking stimulus (vertical lines) resulted in a food reward, as did pecking the red stimulus following a non-pecking stimulus (horizontal lines). This allowed the experimenters to effectively pose questions to the pigeons on their past actions. The pigeons were required to recall what the previous stimulus had been and how they had reacted in order to formulate a correct response and receive a reward.
This differs from other memory tasks where the aim was simply to determine whether a stimulus and response could be paired as a learned association and then testing the memory for that association. This experiment showed a clear use of episodic memory or a similar construct, pigeons were shown to think back on past experience to generate a positive future outcome.
Primates.
Due to their similarities to humans, researchers have been interested in looking into the episodic memory abilities of non-human primates. However, little uncritisized research has previously been done. For example, Schwartz performed an experiment with gorillas in a task requiring the animal to select the appropriate card that represented the food he had just eaten and who had given it to him. While the gorilla appropriately identified the food items and trainer, it is unclear if he recalled the event or chose the answer most familiar to him. Menzel also showed evidence of episodic memory in apes, however, an alternative explanation is that the chimpanzees were displaying spatial semantic memory. Furthermore, Hampton had mixed results when testing rhesus monkeys; while demonstrating memory for the location and type of food, they lacked sensitivity to when they acquired the knowledge. Thus, more research was required for this type of memory in non-human primates.
Chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos were tested using an adapted design by Clayton and colleagues for experimenting with scrub jays. After five minutes and again at one hour, the apes were presented with the choice of selecting hidden frozen juice, less-preferred grapes, or an empty platform. While the juice was the preferred item, it would melt before the hour. Subjects were both male and female. Food item placement was changed during multiple trials so that the study was not accidentally measuring familiarity. The primates rarely chose the empty platform, and after five minutes preferred the juice solution over the grape. After an hour, while a smaller number of primates chose the juice, the majority of apes still reached for melted juice.
The study also wanted to compare human and primate performance on the task to show episodic memory. Humans exhibit age-dependent performance with inverted U-shaped results, meaning ability increases in childhood, stabilizes for a few years and then descends as adulthood progresses. The similarities in findings found may indicate these primates and humans share some information encoding and storage mechanisms. Future research may be done with a larger sample size and different experiments to replicate the inverted U-shape findings.
Rats.
A study by Babb and Crystal (2005) provided evidence that rats also demonstrate the ability to discriminate based on what, where, and when. In experiments using a radial arm maze, four of the eight arms of the maze contained food. The other arms were made inaccessible to the rats. Of the food containing corridors of the maze, three contained standard rat-chow pellets while one arm contained high value chocolate-flavoured pellets. This was the first phase of the experiment, defined as the forced-choice phase (some corridors were inaccessible). The second phase was defined as the free-choice phase (all corridors were now accessible to the rats). The period of time between each phase served as a discriminating cue. Some days the interval between phases would be short (30 minutes) other days the interval would be long (4 hours), but only one type of interval was tested each day. On days when a short interval was used, the previously inaccessible corridors were made accessible and were the only corridors to contain regular pellets and no chocolate pellets were refilled. On days using a long interval, pellets were refilled as on short interval days, but in addition, the chocolate pellets were refilled in the location they had originally been found. The rats were able to discriminate based on the length of interval before the test phase, with the phases following a long interval having the rats immediately search in the arm of the maze associated with the location of the high value (chocolate-flavoured) pellets.
Honey Bees.
Researchers in Australia found what they consider to be Circadian timed episodic-like memory in honey bees. In their study they examined foraging bees in three Y-mazes. Two mazes represented training and testing zones with different time placements. Maze C acted as the location for transfer tests. The bees were placed in Maze A in the afternoon hours of 2:30 to 5:30, whereas Maze B held bees in the morning hours of 9:30 to 12:30. All of the three mazes had two compartments, and in Mazes A and B, one held a sugar solution as a reward for making the positive decision. During training, the compartment containing the positive pattern was changed every thirty minutes. In Maze A, the positive (rewarded) pattern was a blue horizontal pattern, while the negative (non-rewarded) pattern was a blue vertical pattern. Additionally, the positive pattern for Maze B was a yellow vertical (rewarded) pattern, with a yellow horizontal pattern as a negative (non-rewarded) pattern. The three aspects of episodic-like memory in this experiment are the morning or afternoon times (when), either Maze A or B (where), and by using horizontal/vertical patterns (what).
In the first of four experiments, the colour cue was removed by using black patterns, but the shape cues remained the same. The scientists tested whether the bees would still choose the positive pattern; this decision would then be based on the what, where, and when components. Through the other three experiments, one of the cues was examined independently from the others.
They found that, on average, 96% of bees learned to forage at each maze at the appropriate time. The experimenters suggest the error rate can be accounted for by a foraging strategy, in which multiple feeding locations are visited at fixed times. Only a small number of bees visited the incorrect compartment during these times, and usually by only briefly hovered outside of it, instead of entering it. With the addition of visual pattern in this test, the bees also showed 80-88% of the time to have learned which maze to enter at the correct time. With the removal of the colour cue in both of these tests, the results remained consistent. The bees then showed they had learnt these rules by applying them to the new context, Maze C, in experiment 2. In experiment 3, based on colour cue alone, having excluded the pattern and maze location cues, the forager bees could still make a correct decision. In the final experiment, the bees used only pattern orientation cues; the lowered performance showed how much more difficult this was than when the colour cue was still present.
The researchers were uncertain, however, if the honey bees have a sense of time governed by their circadian rhythm by connecting a specific memory to a certain time period in the 24-hour cycle, or if they can measure elapsed time between two events. The difference in this type of memory from other episodic-like memory in animals is the presence of circadian timing, since normally interval timing is displayed.
Randolf Menzel also provided evidence for episodic memory in honey bees by examining their learning of spatio-temporal tasks. The bees showed learning of serial positioning, turning serial patterns into episodes. The bees showed evidence of discrimination, thus at three out of four serial positions, stimuli were independently learned. Menzel suggests strong results may be found by further isolating the configural components. Such serial pattern configuration in mammals has been interpreted as indicative of mental representations of time and space.
Criticisms.
Many criticisms surrounding episodic-like memory in animals revolve around the Bischof-Kohler Hypothesis. The Bischof-Kohler hypothesis holds that only humans can dissociate themselves from their current motivation and take action for future needs. It suggests that animals are incapable of anticipating future needs, and any future-oriented behaviours they exhibit are either fixed action patterns or cued by their current motivational state.
Another criticism is that it is possible that in many cases animals are simply exhibiting Garcia-type learning which involves conditioned taste aversion. This type of behavioural response occurs when a subject associates the taste of a food with negative symptoms caused by that food so that they will avoid consuming a possibly toxic substance in the future. This being said, if a scrub jay chooses one food over another preferred food that will eventually spoil this may not be planning for the future, but taste aversion to avoid getting sick from the spoiled food.
Suddendorf and Busby have also specifically criticized the term episodic-like memory and believe it should be called www-memory (what-where-when memory) instead. They argued that an animal could know what happened, where it happened, and when it happened without actually being able to remember the specific event. Likewise, personal memories are not always accurate. Therefore, remembering a personal past event does not necessarily involve remembering the when and the where of the past event.
Areas for future research.
It has been argued that although behavioural criteria for mental time travel have been put forward and nonverbal tests have been proposed, current research has not yet provided a sufficient demonstration of mental time travel in animals that demonstrates flexibility. Future research should focus on this component of episodic-like memory in order to demonstrate that animals are not only able to form what-where-when memories, but that they can bring together these components into an integrated framework and then modify this information later on.
For future research, it has also been suggested that as we come across similarities between animal and human abilities we should immediately question how these abilities are dissimilar so that we do not mistake similarity for equivalence. While these strong criticisms do exist, however, many of the same critics are optimistic about future research. They suggest that a demonstration of this ability may be possible as long as researchers take these criticisms and alternative explanations into account.


Max Mallmann

Max Mallmann Souto Pereira (October 18, 1968 – November 4, 2016) was a Brazilian Prêmio Açorianos-winning novelist, short story writer and screenwriter specialized in historical fiction, urban fantasy and magic realism. In 2018 he was named one of the most important Brazilian fantasy writers of the 21st century, alongside André Vianco, Eduardo Spohr and Raphael Draccon.
Biography.
Max Mallmann was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul on October 18, 1968. He graduated in Law from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and even passed the bar examination of the Order of Attorneys of Brazil, but never followed the profession. While growing up, he enjoyed reading stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe and Monteiro Lobato, and comic books by Carl Barks, which motivated him to become a writer. After publishing many short stories in different magazines, his debut novel, "Confissão do Minotauro", came out in 1989, when he was only 21 years old. Seven years later he published "Mundo Bizarro", which awarded him a Prêmio Açorianos in 1997.
In 1999 Mallmann moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he found work as a in-house screenwriter for Rede Globo. During his tenure with Globo, he wrote for television series and "telenovelas" such as "Malhação", "Coração de Estudante", "Carga Pesada" and "A Grande Família", and also created the children's microseries "Clara e o Chuveiro do Tempo", broadcast from December 18, 2005 to January 12, 2006. Around the same time he published two of his most critically acclaimed novels: "Síndrome de Quimera" in 2000 (which was shortlisted for a Prêmio Jabuti the following year) and "Zigurate: Uma Fábula Babélica" in 2003.
In 2010 he published "O Centésimo em Roma", the first novel of the "Desiderius Dolens" series. The series focuses on the eponymous antihero, a centurion who lives in Ancient Rome during the Year of the Four Emperors. The second installment, "As Mil Mortes de César", came out in 2014. A third one, "A Prole da Loba", was left unfinished.
In September 2015 Mallmann was diagnosed with lung cancer, eventually dying from the disease on November 4, 2016, at the age of 48. Until his death he was working with his wife, fellow writer Adriana Lunardi, on the web television series "Ilha de Ferro", which finally premiered on November 14, 2018.


John Bannerman (historian)

John Walter MacDonald Bannerman (13 August 1932 – 8 October 2008) was a Scottish historian, noted for his work on Gaelic Scotland.
Biography.
He was born in Balmaha, Stirlingshire, the son of John MacDonald Bannerman, later Lord Bannerman of Kildonan, and his wife Ray Mundell. His family were native speakers of Scottish Gaelic, and Bannerman studied Celtic languages at the University of Glasgow and completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge where he was taught by Kathleen Hughes.
Although he considered teaching Gaelic in schools, Bannerman instead took up a post at the Celtic department of the University of Aberdeen before joining the history department at the University of Edinburgh in 1967. He took over the running of the family farm at Balmaha in 1968, shortly before his father's death, dividing his time between teaching at the University, writing and farming.
His work on Gaelic Scotland was influential. His early works on Dál Riata, the Senchus fer n-Alban and the Iona chronicles which formed part of the later "Chronicle of Ireland" are contained in his 1974 book "Studies in the History of Dalriada". He was a major contributor to the record of "Late Medieval Monumental Sculpture in the West Highland" published in 1977 and his study of the Beaton family—"The Beatons: Medical Kindred in the Classical Gaelic Tradition"—appeared in 1986. In his latter years he worked on the history of the Lordship of the Isles. He retired from teaching in 1997 and took up farming full-time at Balmaha.
Bannerman married Chrissie Dick in 1959. They had five children.


Menedemus the Cynic

Menedemus (; fl. 3rd century BC) was a Cynic philosopher, and a pupil of the Epicurean Colotes of Lampsacus. Diogenes Laërtius states that he used to go about garbed as a Fury, proclaiming himself a sort of spy from Hades:
He assumed the garb of a Fury, and went about saying that he had come from Hades to take notice of all who did wrong, in order that he might descend there again and make his report to the deities who live in that country. And this was his dress: a tunic of a dark colour reaching to his feet, and a purple girdle round his waist, an Arcadian hat on his head with the twelve signs of the zodiac embroidered on it, tragic buskins, a preposterously long beard, and an ashen staff in his hand.
However, Wilhelm Crönert argued that this story is actually derived from one of the satires (the "Necromancy") of Menippus, and that parallels to this story can be found in the dialogues of Lucian which are based on those of Menippus.
The claim that Menedemus was originally a pupil of Colotes of Lampsacus, on the other hand, may be true. Two papyri from Herculaneum show that Menedemus disputed with Colotes on Epicurean opinions concerning poetry.


Thomas Langan

Thomas Langan (1929 - May 25, 2012) was an American philosopher and a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America (1982-1983).