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Students’ perception of what they learn in Teaching Hotel Château Bethlehem [EuroChrie Conference (Cooperative Education and Research for Hospitality & Tourism Educators), Freiburg (D) 16-19 October 2013]

Bachelor students of Hotel Management School Maastricht, part of Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, start their educational program with a semester of orientation on Hotel Operations in theory and practice. The teaching staff was curious about students’ perception of what they learn during their duty in the Teaching Hotel Château Bethlehem. Students were interviewed about the learning environment, the coaching and their learning outcomes. The interview findings gave insight in different unexpected and subconscious learning outcomes together with the conditions under which they occur during practice-based learning. Findings were presented to the teaching staff during a work conference. The entire team emphasised the value of the research method for fine-tuning students’ learning outcomes.

The perception of teachers on usability and accessibility of programming materials for children with visual impairments

Angels talking back and new organs of perception

This article focuses on the role of the artistic process in connecting to the natural environment. In my research I have explored what participants experience and learn when they engage in different types of arts-based environmental education (AEE) practices that I have facilitated. The premise of AEE is that efforts to learn about our (natural) environment can effectively take their starting point in an artistic activity, usually conducted in groups. I found that, on the whole, two major orientations can be distinguished. One starts from the point of aesthetic sensibility: the tuning in with the senses, or with ‘a new organ of perception’ (Goethe), in order to perceive ‘the more than human’ with fresh new eyes. This tradition can be traced back (but is by no means limited) to the Romantic Movement. Art in this context may help to amplify the receptivity of the senses and strengthen a sense of connectedness to the natural world. The other major orientation in seeking bridges between nature and art builds on a view of artistic process as leading to unexpected outcomes and ‘emergent properties’. The fundamentally singular experience of making a work of art may evoke an aesthetic object that becomes a ‘self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject’ (Kandinsky). The artwork can be spontaneously generative and multilayered with meanings, some of which may even be ambiguous and paradoxical. But perhaps more importantly: it can catch the participant of an AEE activity by surprise, overwhelm him or her as ‘coming from behind one’s back’. The element of improvisation, of taking in the new and unanticipated and accommodating for it, is the core quality here. These two orientations, when practiced as part of AEE, have implications on how we relate to nature through art. In the closing of this article I address the question of whether it is possible to bridge the dualism between the two orientations.

Shifting Patterns in Co-regulation, Feedback Perception, and Motivation During Research Supervision Meetings

Supervision meetings give teachers and students opportunities to interact with each other and to co-regulate students’ learning processes. Co-regulation refers to the transitional process of a student who is becoming a self-regulated learner by interacting with a more capable other such as a teacher. During a task, teachers are expected to pull back their support and give opportunities to students to take responsibility. This study aims to explore the shifting patterns of co-regulation, feedback perception, and motivation during a 5-month research project. Participants were 20 students conducting research in pairs and six teachers who supervised these students. Two videotaped supervision meetings at the beginning and end of the research process and questionnaires on feedback perception and motivation were analysed. Results on co-regulation showed a constant and comparable level of regulation at the start and at the end of students’ research projects. Feedback perception did not change, but motivation decreased significantly.

Enactive Cinematic Perception

Since the arrival of cinema, film theorists have studied how spectators perceive the representations that the medium offers to our senses. Early film theorists have bent their heads over what cinema is, how cinema can be seen as art, but also over what cinema is capable of. One of the earliest film theorists, Hugo Münsterberg argued in 1916 that the uniqueness of cinema, or as he calls it photoplay, lies in the way it offers the possibility to represent our mental perception and organisation of the reality, or the world we live in: “the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion” (Münsterberg [1916] 2004, 402)

Measurement of acute nonspecific low back pain perception in primary care physical therapy

The Dutch version of the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire is an appropriate instrument for measuring patients' perceptions in acute low back pain patients, showing acceptable internal consistency and reliability. Concurrent validity is adequate, however, the instrument may be unsuitable for detecting changes in low back pain perception over time.