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Ask OUP: we answer your questions about U.S. elections

In September, we asked our followers to send us questions regarding the U.S. midterm elections using the hashtag #AskOUP. We compiled a list of our favorite questions and answered them below.

How many seats do the Democrats need to regain control over the House and Senate?
In order for the Democrats to gain control over the House, they would need to see a net gain of 24 seats. To regain control of the Senate, Democrats would need to keep all of their seats and capture two of the Republican seats for a 51-49 majority. Of the seats up for election, 35 are held by Democrats, and nine are held by Republicans.

What is the average voter turnout for midterm elections?
Answered by L. Sandy Maisel in American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction
In Denmark and Germany, turnout in typical elections for the legislature averages between 70 and 90 percent; in Poland and Switzerland, about 50 percent; and in recent U.S. elections, around 36 percent have voted in midterm elections and about 50 percent in presidential.

How serious of an issue is voter fraud? What is being done to prevent it?
Answered by the editors of Electoral Integrity in America
We know surprisingly little about exactly what types of registration and voting procedures pose trade-offs between maximizing access and preventing electoral fraud, and what areas of election administration provide opportunities to pursue both goals simultaneously. Some scholars are circumspect about the trade-offs between these goals, arguing that there is no tension between inclusion and security, at least concerning certain policies like voter identification, Election Day, and early voting. Some argue more broadly that “efforts to make it easier to register and vote are compatible with the prevention of election fraud.” Yet comparative research shows that some efforts to clean up elections have the potential to disenfranchise some voters, and in the U.S. popular concerns about voter fraud and partisan acrimony over voting procedures persist. Concerns about voter fraud continue to be used to justify not only voter identification policies but also regulations on voter registration drives and cutbacks in early voting.

Because partisanship surrounds contemporary debates over election administra­tion procedures, it can be difficult to distinguish between strategic efforts to shape voting rules for partisan advantage and genuine ideological or pragmatic differences over competing goals of electoral integrity. It is thus important to have evidence-based analysis of how different election administration practices affect voter access and election fraud.

#AskOUP question about the midterm elections asked on Twitter. Image used with permission of @lmtaylor222.

Are there still systems and laws in place that affect the way votes are cast and counted?
Answered by the editors of The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress
How votes are aggregated through any electoral system affects political outcomes. Single-member district systems tend to distort vote shares into seat shares more than other representational systems, to the detriment of non-geographically concentrated minor political parties. Those who control redistricting can further manipulate these distortions to their advantage through a strategy known as gerrymandering.

In the theoretical extreme, it is possible for a political party that receives a quarter of the votes to win half of the seats, if it arranges its supporters such that they constitute a bare majority in half of the districts. The distribution of partisan supporters among districts may also be manipulated by varying the number of persons within districts, a practice known as malapportionment. Prior to the 1960s, state legislators—who often have primary authority to draw district lines—were loath to redistrict, since this upset connections between representatives and their constituents. Inaction created “creeping malapportionment,” whereby fast-growing urban areas were incrementally afforded less representation than slow-growing rural areas. Redistricting must now occur in a timely manner, following a national decennial census, although state laws dictate whether states may redistrict more than once between censuses. 

Does political polarization pose a problem in U.S. politics?
Answered by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts in their book Network Propaganda
Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, an unusually high number of incumbent Republican senators and representatives announced that they would retire from Congress rather than seek re-election.  Polarization was not the only factor at play. Some were facing increasingly competitive elections and the possibility of losing the power and leverage of being part of the majority party. However, increasing polarization and acrimony in Congress was a frequently cited factor, accentuating the fact that this is a conspicuous and unfortunate aspect of political life in the United States today, even among those who have at times helped to further and deepen legislative polarization.

I feel like today’s news cycle jumps from controversy to controversy. How can we better communicate when it comes to political policies?
Answered by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in his book Think Again
Politicians cannot work together, at least partly because they do not understand each other. Opponents will never agree to bear their share of the burden if they do not understand why that burden needs to be carried. This lack of understanding might sometimes result from incommensurable world views or conflicting assumptions that prevent mutual comprehension. However, political opponents too often do not even try to understand each other, partly be­cause they see no personal or political gain in reaching out and being fair. Indeed, they often have strong incentives neither to reach out nor to be fair. Tweeters and bloggers go wild on the Internet, because their goal is to gain likes for their jokes and gibes. They receive few such rewards on the Internet from balanced attempts to see the other side in contentious debates. Why should they try to understand their opponents when they think that they are bound to fail and get nothing in return for their attempts? Admittedly, many interesting and insightful conversations do occur on Twitter and the Internet, but the huge number of lurking trolls scares off many potential contributors.

When they give up on understanding, they turn to willful misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Arguments do little good when the audience is not receptive, so we also need to learn social skills and habits to encourage our audiences to be receptive to reasons.

Featured image credit: Vote Voting Ballot by mohamed_hassan. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post Ask OUP: we answer your questions about U.S. elections appeared first on OUPblog.

Not by “bread” alone [Part I]

Two recent posts (part 1 and part 2) were devoted to the origin of the word bride, and it occurred to me that a quick look at a few other br-words might be of some use. Breed, brood, and bread have been more than once invoked in trying to explain the etymology of the troublesome Germanic noun. Also the verb bear is part of the magic circle, because br- may be the so-called zero grade of the root with a vowel between b and r. (To understand what the zero grade of ablaut means, compare Engl. ken, full grade, and kn-, zero grade, in know). Once I devoted an entire series to English kl-words and see no reason why br– should be less attractive.

Before examining the tenuous link between bride and bread, I have to go all the way back to the food industry of the Germanic tribes. Bread seems to be an innovation, for the most ancient English name of the product we call bread was hlāf, that is, “loaf.” Most of what I’ll say about hlāf is common knowledge, but a few details may be new to our readers.

Hlāf had initial h, the sound that was later lost before l, n, and r. That is why, when we deal with the etymologically obscure words beginning with l, n, and r, such that were attested relatively late, we often suspect that they once had initial h. For instance, nap “surface of cloth raised and cut smooth” surfaced in English only in the fifteenth century and had the form noppe. Since Middle Low German and Middle Dutch also had noppe (Modern German and Dutch still have the same form, though with a somewhat different meaning), it appears that English borrowed this technical term from the continent, but the earliest form of the word in those languages is also unknown. Perhaps it began with an h (or, less likely, with a k). By contrast, nap “take a short sleep” goes back to Old Engl. hnappian, and the loss of h- is obvious.

In the Old English Paternoster, the phrase “give us daily bread” sounded so: “Ūrne ge-dæg-hwā-lic-an hlāf syle ūs tōdæg” (the hyphens are of course mine, added to show the boundaries between the morphemes). For comparison, here is this sentence in Gothic: “Hlaif unsarana þana sinteinana gif uns himma daga,” in Old Icelandic: “Gef oss ídag várt dagligt brauþ” (þ = th), and in Old High German: “Unsar brōt tagalihhaz gib uns hiutu.” One can see the competition between the two words: Gothic and Old English had hlaif and hlāf respectively, while Old Icelandic and Old High German used brauþ and brōt (all the forms are in the accusative).

This is a lady in her etymological sense. Image credit: Rolling pin, dough, hands and baker by rawpixel. CC0 via Pixabay.

Old Engl. hlāf was ubiquitous. This becomes especially clear when one looks at the numerous compounds with hlāf, such as hlāf-æta [long æ], that is, “loaf eater” (= “bread eater, dependent”; those who know Russian will remember na-khleb-nik: the same meaning and nearly the same inner form), hlāf-ofn “baker’s oven,” hlāf-ræce “loaf [bread, oven] rake,” and many others. To the speakers of Modern English only three old compounds with hlāf make sense. One is hlāf-ord, another is hlāf–dige” (they yielded Modern Engl. lord and lady). The third will be mentioned later.

Hlāford is a shortened form of hlāf-weard “bread-ward, bread-keeper.” He who had that title was the head of the household, whether the breadwinner or not. The others were his “bread-eaters” (see above). The shortening of hlāfweard to hlāford and lord is due to several tricks of historical phonetics and has nothing to do with the lord’s diminished status. But since today no one hears loaf in lord, the old sense of the compound is known only to those who have seen the word’s old form. The story of lady is similar. In Old Engl. hlāf-dige, dige was the root of a verb meaning “to knead.” The same root can be seen in Engl. dough, that is, “a kneaded mass.”

The House of Lords, our bread-wards. Image credit: House of Lords 2011 by UK government. OGL v.3 via Wikimedia Commons.The Lady of the Lake: certainty no longer a bread-kneader. Image credit: The Lady of the Lake by Speed Lancelot by Speed Lancelot (1860-1931). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If lady was originally a bread-kneader or someone who supervised the making or distribution of the bread belonging to the lord, couldn’t, in days of yore, the bride, assuming that the word meant “the young mistress of the family,” also be in charge of the bread made in the household? This association is the tenuous link between bride and bread, mentioned above. (Apparently, some people kneaded bread, while others needed it; those who never indulge in wordplay call punning the lowest form of wit—sheer envy.)

As noted, a third word with hlāf in the root exists. It is Lammas, from hlāf-mæsse; mæsse in it means the same as –mas “Eucharistic service” in Christ-mas. Lammas, the feast of St. Peter in Chains (an agricultural festival celebrated on the first of August), was observed in Anglo-Saxon England by the consecration of bread made of the first ripe grain. The first ripe grain and the last sheaf left in the field are familiar objects of veneration in old societies.

This is Lammas. Its connection with bread is apparent. Image credit: Freshly baked bread by Wesual Click. Public Domain via Unsplash.

To the best of our knowledge, Gothic hlaifs, Old Norse hleifr, and Old High German leip were the oldest Germanic words for what we call “bread.” But the Paternoster quoted above shows that, although in some areas a cognate of bread appeared early, in Gothic it did not exist, and it is absent from the Old Saxon Heliand, a poetic retelling of the Gospels. The origin of bread remains a matter of debate. Even less is known about the origin of loaf (hlāf). Today, Engl. loaf means only “portion of bread baked in one mass.” Icelandic and German make the same distinction: hleifur versus brauð, and Laib versus Brot. Whether leb– in German Lebkuchen “gingerbread” has anything to do with the root of Laib remains unclear. Dutch, like the rest of Low (that is, northern) German and Old Saxon, has only the word related to Engl. bread.

It has been suggested that hlaif-, the source of loaf and its congeners, referred to some baked product, while the etymon of bread denoted “dough.” Another hypothesis has it that hlaif- referred to unleavened bread, while the protoform of bread designated the bread raised (“brewed”) with yeast. Both ideas look moderately plausible. The origin of hlāf remains a puzzle. The similar-looking Latin noun lībum “pancake” has been offered and rejected as a cognate of the Germanic word.

The names of foodstuffs travel easily from land to land, and several foreign look-alikes of Germanic hlaif– are known. The Slavic word for “bread” (Russian khleb and so forth: see na-khleb-nik above) is universally, and with good reason, believed to be a borrowing from Germanic. The Ural–Altaic and Semitic sources of hlaif– have also been suggested. The least promising formula is “borrowed from an unknown language.” If hlaif– was indeed borrowed, we need not jump to the conclusion that the speakers of early Germanic knew nothing about bread. It is enough to get acquainted with a special variety of a familiar product, in order to borrow the technology and the word. With this background information in mind, we can approach the origin of bread.

Wait until next week.

Featured image credit: Sunshine, wheat, ray and plant by pragmart. Public Domian via Unspalsh.

The post Not by “bread” alone [Part I] appeared first on OUPblog.

Not by “bread” alone

Two recent posts (part 1 and part 2) were devoted to the origin of the word bride, and it occurred to me that a quick look at a few other br-words might be of some use. Breed, brood, and bread have been more than once invoked in trying to explain the etymology of the troublesome Germanic noun. Also the verb bear is part of the magic circle, because br- may be the so-called zero grade of the root with a vowel between b and r. (To understand what the zero grade of ablaut means, compare Engl. ken, full grade, and kn-, zero grade, in know). Once I devoted an entire series to English kl-words and see no reason why br– should be less attractive.

Before examining the tenuous link between bride and bread, I have to go all the way back to the food industry of the Germanic tribes. Bread seems to be an innovation, for the most ancient English name of the product we call bread was hlāf, that is, “loaf.” Most of what I’ll say about hlāf is common knowledge, but a few details may be new to our readers.

Hlāf had initial h, the sound that was later lost before l, n, and r. That is why, when we deal with the etymologically obscure words beginning with l, n, and r, such that were attested relatively late, we often suspect that they once had initial h. For instance, nap “surface of cloth raised and cut smooth” surfaced in English only in the fifteenth century and had the form noppe. Since Middle Low German and Middle Dutch also had noppe (Modern German and Dutch still have the same form, though with a somewhat different meaning), it appears that English borrowed this technical term from the continent, but the earliest form of the word in those languages is also unknown. Perhaps it began with an h (or, less likely, with a k). By contrast, nap “take a short sleep” goes back to Old Engl. hnappian, and the loss of h- is obvious.

In the Old English Paternoster, the phrase “give us daily bread” sounded so: “Ūrne ge-dæg-hwā-lic-an hlāf syle ūs tōdæg” (the hyphens are of course mine, added to show the boundaries between the morphemes). For comparison, here is this sentence in Gothic: “Hlaif unsarana þana sinteinana gif uns himma daga,” in Old Icelandic: “Gef oss ídag várt dagligt brauþ” (þ = th), and in Old High German: “Unsar brōt tagalihhaz gib uns hiutu.” One can see the competition between the two words: Gothic and Old English had hlaif and hlāf respectively, while Old Icelandic and Old High German used brauþ and brōt (all the forms are in the accusative).

This is a lady in her etymological sense. Image credit: Rolling pin, dough, hands and baker by rawpixel. CC0 via Pixabay.

Old Engl. hlāf was ubiquitous. This becomes especially clear when one looks at the numerous compounds with hlāf, such as hlāf-æta [long æ], that is, “loaf eater” (= “bread eater, dependent”; those who know Russian will remember na-khleb-nik: the same meaning and nearly the same inner form), hlāf-ofn “baker’s oven,” hlāf-ræce “loaf [bread, oven] rake,” and many others. To the speakers of Modern English only three old compounds with hlāf make sense. One is hlāf-ord, another is hlāf–dige” (they yielded Modern Engl. lord and lady). The third will be mentioned later.

Hlāford is a shortened form of hlāf-weard “bread-ward, bread-keeper.” He who had that title was the head of the household, whether the breadwinner or not. The others were his “bread-eaters” (see above). The shortening of hlāfweard to hlāford and lord is due to several tricks of historical phonetics and has nothing to do with the lord’s diminished status. But since today no one hears loaf in lord, the old sense of the compound is known only to those who have seen the word’s old form. The story of lady is similar. In Old Engl. hlāf-dige, dige was the root of a verb meaning “to knead.” The same root can be seen in Engl. dough, that is, “a kneaded mass.”

The House of Lords, our bread-wards. Image credit: House of Lords 2011 by UK government. OGL v.3 via Wikimedia Commons.The Lady of the Lake: certainty no longer a bread-kneader. Image credit: The Lady of the Lake by Speed Lancelot by Speed Lancelot (1860-1931). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If lady was originally a bread-kneader or someone who supervised the making or distribution of the bread belonging to the lord, couldn’t, in days of yore, the bride, assuming that the word meant “the young mistress of the family,” also be in charge of the bread made in the household? This association is the tenuous link between bride and bread, mentioned above. (Apparently, some people kneaded bread, while others needed it; those who never indulge in wordplay call punning the lowest form of wit—sheer envy.)

As noted, a third word with hlāf in the root exists. It is Lammas, from hlāf-mæsse; mæsse in it means the same as –mas “Eucharistic service” in Christ-mas. Lammas, the feast of St. Peter in Chains (an agricultural festival celebrated on the first of August), was observed in Anglo-Saxon England by the consecration of bread made of the first ripe grain. The first ripe grain and the last sheaf left in the field are familiar objects of veneration in old societies.

This is Lammas. Its connection with bread is apparent. Image credit: Freshly baked bread by Wesual Click. Public Domain via Unsplash.

To the best of our knowledge, Gothic hlaifs, Old Norse hleifr, and Old High German leip were the oldest Germanic words for what we call “bread.” But the Paternoster quoted above shows that, although in some areas a cognate of bread appeared early, in Gothic it did not exist, and it is absent from the Old Saxon Heliand, a poetic retelling of the Gospels. The origin of bread remains a matter of debate. Even less is known about the origin of loaf (hlāf). Today, Engl. loaf means only “portion of bread baked in one mass.” Icelandic and German make the same distinction: hleifur versus brauð, and Laib versus Brot. Whether leb– in German Lebkuchen “gingerbread” has anything to do with the root of Laib remains unclear. Dutch, like the rest of Low (that is, northern) German and Old Saxon, has only the word related to Engl. bread.

It has been suggested that hlaif-, the source of loaf and its congeners, referred to some baked product, while the etymon of bread denoted “dough.” Another hypothesis has it that hlaif- referred to unleavened bread, while the protoform of bread designated the bread raised (“brewed”) with yeast. Both ideas look moderately plausible. The origin of hlāf remains a puzzle. The similar-looking Latin noun lībum “pancake” has been offered and rejected as a cognate of the Germanic word.

The names of foodstuffs travel easily from land to land, and several foreign look-alikes of Germanic hlaif– are known. The Slavic word for “bread” (Russian khleb and so forth: see na-khleb-nik above) is universally, and with good reason, believed to be a borrowing from Germanic. The Ural–Altaic and Semitic sources of hlaif– have also been suggested. The least promising formula is “borrowed from an unknown language.” If hlaif– was indeed borrowed, we need not jump to the conclusion that the speakers of early Germanic knew nothing about bread. It is enough to get acquainted with a special variety of a familiar product, in order to borrow the technology and the word. With this background information in mind, we can approach the origin of bread.

Wait until next week.

Featured image credit: Sunshine, wheat, ray and plant by pragmart. Public Domian via Unspalsh.

The post Not by “bread” alone appeared first on OUPblog.

Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, and the establishment of Black literature [excerpt]

 In March of 1924, Charles S. Johnson, sociologist and editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, approached Alain Locke with a proposal: a dinner was being organized with the intention to secure interracial support for Black literature. Locke would attend the dinner as “master of ceremonies” with the responsibility of creating the bridge between Black writers and potential White allies. Both Johnson and Locke recognized that a literary movement centered on the Black experience in America would need White support in order to gain momentum. The following excerpt from The New Negro details how Locke secured a space for Young Black writers within the larger literary community.

As March 21 approached, participants became nervous. A week before the dinner, Bennett wrote Locke, “I am so glad that you have agreed to come. I feel the utter necessity of your being there.” Bennett was even more grateful he would be out front when the day of the event arrived. “You are particularly appreciated,” she wrote to Locke, “because of the tremendous and unswerving confidence that you have in us. Your faith in our utter necessity is particularly helpful as I find that my mind is not clear on the eve of this momentous event.” Even Johnson seemed nervous. After confiding in Locke that “the thing has gone over big, nothing can be allowed to go wrong now,” Johnson asked him to come up early that day to help him finalize the evening’s program. “I would like to see you as early as possible to have the first talk about plans, and probably, we shall have to do most of the arranging of the program then.” After a short introduction by Johnson, Locke would discuss the significance of these new writers, and then introduce Carl Van Doren who would outline his hopes for the Negro writer. Then, Horace Liveright, the publisher of Cane and There Is Confusion, would make a few remarks about the publishing scene for Negro books, a market-reassuring strategy most likely recommended by Johnson. After, Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, and a few others would read poems and give testimonials. Jessie Fauset would give the closing remarks.

Work on the program concluded, two of the smallest African Americans—Johnson was only 5´2˝—proceeded to the Civic Club dinner, dressed to the nines that Friday evening. Locke began his remarks by arguing that a new sense of hope and promise energized the young writers assembled, because they “sense within their group—meaning the Negro group—a spiritual wealth which if they properly expound will be ample for a new judgment and re-appraisal of the race.” Although Locke’s optimism has led critics to claim that he promised Black literature would solve the race problem, his language was actually quite cautious. Negro literature would “be ample,” that is, sufficient, to contradict those Whites who claimed Blacks were intellectually inferior “if they [i.e., the Black writers] properly expound [it].” Their success would allow “for a new judgment . . . of the race” if Whites were willing to render it. But there are no guarantees.

“Carl Van Doren then laid out what the White literary press wanted from the younger Negroes: art not anger.”

More powerfully expressed was Locke’s belief that by avoiding a literature of racial harangue, the new group of writers could make a broader contribution than those who had come before them. Locke advanced a new concept, that of generation, to suggest this was a new cohort of Black writers possessed of a devotion to literary values that set them apart from their forerunners. For example, Locke introduced Du Bois “with soft seriousness as a representative of the ‘older school’ ” of writing. That seemed to put Du Bois slightly on the defensive and felt called upon to justify writers of the past as “of necessity pioneers and much of their style was forced upon them by the barriers against publication of literature about Negroes of any sort.” Locke introduced James Weldon Johnson—a writer of poetry, music lyrics, and a novel—“as an anthologist of Negro verse”—another dig, since Johnson was a novelist, a lyricist, and a poet, in addition to editing The Book of American Negro Poetry and writing a powerful introductory essay. Locke did acknowledge him for having “given invaluable encouragement to the work of this younger group.” By defining these NAACP literary scions as elderly fathers and uncles, Locke implied their virtual sons and daughters were Oedipal rebels whose writings rejected the stodginess of their literary parents. Against the backdrop of an ornate Civic Club dinner, with its fine china, polished silverware, and formally attired White patrons, Locke issued a generational declaration of independence for the emerging literary lions of the race.

Carl Van Doren then laid out what the White literary press wanted from the younger Negroes: art not anger. Gingerly but tellingly, Van Doren ventured that the literary temperament of the African American, whether produced by African or American conditions, was distinguished by its emotional transcendence, its reputed ability to avoid haranguing White America for its obvious wrongs and turning suffering into works of unparalleled beauty. Young Black writers had to sit and listen to Van Doren declare that “long oppressed and handicapped, [Negro artists] have gathered stores of emotion and are ready to burst forth with a new eloquence once they discover adequate mediums. Being, however, as a race not given to self-destroying bitterness, they will, I think, strike a happy balance between rage and complacency—that balance in which passion and humor are somehow united in the best of all possible amalgams for the creative artist.” A certain amount of condescension was the cost of liberal White support.

Featured image credit: “Books Notepad Pen Education Notebook Student” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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Alexander the Great in numbers [quiz]

Have you got Alexander’s number? The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World explains the career of the Macedonian king by exploring a set of mind-blowing numbers. Test your knowledge of Alexander’s life with this quiz!

 

Featured image credit: Alexander the Great mosaic. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the US

After Oscar Wilde graduated from Oxford, he moved to London and fell into unemployment and although he tried his hand at different jobs he couldn’t find any stable source of income. However, he did become friends with some of the celebrities of the day and attracted the attention of the caricaturist of Punch magazine, which eventually brought him to the attention of theatre promoter Richard D’Oyly Carte.

In 1881, D’Oyly Carte offered Wilde the opportunity to travel to the US as the advertisement of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride, which was the sensation of the day. This proved to be a pact with the devil as the operetta made fun of Wilde and people who cared about art. Nevertheless, on Christmas Eve 1881, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde wrapped himself in a fur cloak, boarded the SS Arizona at Liverpool, and set off to the US for his 50 date lecture tour across the country.

The below map shows some of the stops of his tour and the experiences he had.

Featured image credit: Oscar Wilde, photographic print on card mount, circa 1882, by Napoleon Sarony. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The embracement of student-created visuals in the music room

When students walk into a music room, there is an opportunity to inspire them with a visually stimulating learning environment. This doesn’t mean filling every wall and space with dozens of posters, papers, and colors. This means creating a visual environment which acknowledges your students’ participation and input into the class. Your own teacher decorating style may be calm, clean, and efficient; perhaps something that you feel leads to less distraction. Or, you prefer inspiring educational posters and pictures of musical themes placed around your room! Sometimes we share a room, which means we can’t put up everything we want. However, it is essential to not forget student input on your walls.

Often, music teachers have so much over-whelming work with the lessons and activities, that the look of the room is placed low on the priority list. There is so little time to teach music that it is easy to forget to invite your students to become contributors to the visual aspects of the music class environment.

Let’s go back a minute. Why did I use ‘embracement’ in the title? Why not ‘use’ or ‘benefit?’ I felt that ‘embracement’ gives the reader the visual and emotional impact of the definition. It emphasizes the importance. The visual aspect of the music room becomes a missed opportunity if we don’t utilize its educational value and its potential to display student knowledge and musical passion.

Background

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has been an academic keystone for individualizing teaching in general for generations. Howard Gardner found a way to identify student learning strengths and proposed that teachers need to adapt their lesson and adjust for this. The types of multiple intelligences include musical, kinetic, visual, and logical. Musical intelligence means we can discern aspects of sound like pitch, timbre, and rhythm. Visual Intelligence means we think in three dimensions and use our eyes while creating with our hands.

All students use all the learning ‘intelligences,’ but each student is different in how his/her brain utilizes them. All students benefit from what they see in the music classroom, but especially the students that are strong in their visual and spatial sense. I myself am a visual learner and my music experience and understanding have been enriched by the tapestry of music notation and drawing and expression within the classroom.

All students use all the learning ‘intelligences,’ but each student is different in how his/her brain utilizes them. All students benefit from what they see in the music classroom, but especially the students that are strong in their visual and spatial sense.

“Differentiated instruction” refers to a teaching philosophy that incorporates giving different students different ways to learn the same material. By differentiating your instruction, you have a better chance of reaching more students. You also have a better chance of deeper comprehension. Valerie Strauss in the 2013 article “Howard Gardner: ‘Multiple Intelligences’ are not ‘Learning Styles’” gives us sound ways to incorporate this thinking. She says, “Individualize Your Teaching.”  Find different, effective strategies that work for each student. She also says, “Pluralize Your Teaching.” Write your lesson plans while keeping in mind you need to teach materials in different ways. My example of her idea is to teach a music concept using singing, clapping, reading, drawing, analyzing charts, and more.

Ideas for visuals

These are just a few examples. If would like to share your own ideas, I would love to hear about them in the comments section.

Hanging Pictures (see photo): Students are given white art paper, pencils, and pastels and are asked to come up with colorful impromptu drawings of a music theme. The class discusses ideas like drawing instruments, people singing and dancing, music notation, etc. The teacher shows drawn examples of ideas. Students draw their images with pencil and then finish with pastels. The teacher will have hung clothesline around the room and will hang the pictures using clothespins.

Photographs: The teacher facilitates getting pictures taken of the class during music activities and displays them on bulletin boards.

Music Notation: After creating their own songs using music notation, students will make a copy using fancy giant staff paper and border it with decorations to make an elegant composition display. This could also be done on the computer.

Group Displays: Students work together to create maps of song locations, make diagrams, make idea webs of music concepts, and come up with rhythm or phrasing charts.

Live Performance: Students present song stories with costumes and dialogue. They conduct students singing or playing instruments for a song.

Reflection: The teacher gives the students time to internally reflect after a lesson; to stop and visualize music examples.

Collaboration: The teacher works with the school art teacher to do an art project with a music theme that will be displayed.

Conclusion

Student-created visuals:

Remind students of what they’ve learned.
Validate how they feel about music and community.
Cultivate a sense of ownership of the music class.
Inspire students to create more and learn more.
Reinforce music concepts.

The educator’s embracement of student-made visuals and art in the music class is, in my view, essential. This display of music and compositional themes dresses the music room and makes the room enchanting to enter. Being surrounded by your own and other’s contributions to the class is priceless in value for the student’s head as well as for the heart.

Featured image credit: Pinsel mit grüner und roter Farbe by Marco Verch. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Oxford Think Festival: 10th – 18th November 2018

Oxford University Press is delighted to once again partner with Blackwell’s Oxford to host a weekend of talks and discussions. After three successful years as the Oxford Philosophy Festival, the event returns this year as the Oxford Think Festival.

Celebrating the quest for knowledge and seeking to stimulate discussion of some of the big issues and ideas of our time, the festival brings together some of our most inspiring and exciting minds. Join us for a full weekend of debates and discussion, a special event on World Philosophy Day, and an exciting preview event with Martha C. Nussbaum.

All events are free to attend, but registration is strongly recommended to secure your space.

Preview event: Martha C. Nussbaum in conversation with Roger Crisp


Saturday, 10th November 2018, 13:00 GMT

For decades Martha C. Nussbaum has been an acclaimed scholar and humanist, earning dozens of honours for her books and essays. In The Monarchy of Fear, she turns her attention to the current political crisis that has polarized America since the 2016 election. She focuses on fear (“genetically first among the emotions”) and its role in stoking anger, disgust, and envy, and how those emotions, in turn, perpetuate divisive politics (sexism and misogyny especially). Drawing on a mix of historical and contemporary examples, from classical Athens to the musical Hamilton, Martha Nussbaum untangles this web of feelings and provides a roadmap of where to go next.

Register online for our Martha C. Nussbaum event.

Tim Williamson in conversation with Richard Marshall


Thursday, 15th November 2018, 13:00 GMT

On World Philosophy Day, join Tim Williamson and Richard Marshall as they discuss how modern philosophers think and work and tackle some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways. Drawing on examples throughout the history of philosophy’s successes and failures, Tim Williamson demonstrates how philosophy begins with common-sense curiosity and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. From thought experiments to deduction to theories, this talk will make you rethink what philosophy is.

Register online for our Tim Williamson event.

Jamie Susskind on Future Politics


Saturday, 17th November 2018, 13:00 GMT

In his book Future Politics, author and barrister Jamie Susskind confronts one of the most important questions of our time: how will digital technology transform politics and society? He will argue that rapid and relentless innovation in a range of technologies – from artificial intelligence to virtual reality – will transform the way we live together. He will challenge the audience to rethink what it means to be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, what it means for a political system to be just or democratic, and propose ways in which we can – and must – regain control.

Register online for our Jamie Susskind event.

Jeremias Prassl on Humans as a Service


Saturday, 17th November 2018, 15:00 GMT

Is crowdsourcing the future of work? The gig economy promises to revolutionize work as we know it, offering flexibility and independence instead of 9-to-5 drudgery. The potential benefits are enormous: consumers enjoy the convenience and affordability of on-demand work while microentrepreneurs turn to online platforms in search of their next gig, task, or ride. Jeremias Prassl offers a lively and critical account of the gig economy: its promises and realities, what is at stake, and how we can ensure that customers, workers, platforms, and society at large benefit from this global and growing phenomenon.

Register online for our Jeremias Prassl event.

Lyndsey Stonebridge in conversation with Elleke Boehmer


Sunday, 18th November, 13:00 GMT

The twentieth century bore witness to the creation of a new class of person: the placeless people; those who cross frontiers and fall out of nation states; the refugees; the stateless; the rightless. Join Lyndsey Stonebridge and Elleke Boehmer as they discuss how a generation of writers and intellectuals responded to the mass displacements of the last century, and anticipate many of the issues we confront today. Exploring the work of Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, and Simone Weil, among others, Lyndsey Stonebridge argues that we urgently need to reconnect with the moral and political imagination of these writers to tackle today’s refugee ‘crisis’.

Register online for our Lyndsey Stonebridge event.

David Dwan on Liberty, Equality, and Humbug


Sunday, 18th November 2018, 15:00 GMT

George Orwell is part of the political vocabulary of our times and yet, partly due to this popularity, what he stands for remains opaque. His writing confirms deep and widely shared intuitions about political justice, but part of its enduring fascination is the fact that these intuitions don’t quite add up. In Liberty, Quality & Humbug, David Dwan explores Orwell’s ambiguous views of key concepts such as liberty, equality, solidarity, truth, and happiness and reveals how, through his journalism and fiction, Orwell ultimately puts his own idealism on trial.

Register online for our David Dwan event.

If you are in the Oxford area between Sunday 10th and Sunday 18th November 2018, make sure to register for any of the above events. We look forward to seeing you at Blackwell’s, Broad Street!

Featured image credit: Night, lights, lantern and community by Ryan Franco. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Environmental Law and the core of legal learning: framing the future of environmental lawyers

Environmental law has not been taught or seen as a ‘core’ legal subject, giving environmental law academics freedom to teach the subject in many different ways. This structural sidelining, however, belies important questions about how teaching environmental law relates to the core of legal learning. We are not suggesting that there is a core of environmental law knowledge that every student should learn (although there is lots to learn), but that it is important to reflect on whether there are core legal concepts, reasoning processes and skills that all environmental lawyers should have. This issue is now particularly pertinent as the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales is ‘releasing’ the LLB from its conventional structure of core legal subjects, so that existing assumptions about how environmental law relates to the core of (undergraduate) legal learning are up for grabs.

Thinking about the relationship between environmental law and the core of legal learning depends on one’s view of what that core is, and, fundamentally, on what a law school is for. The debate over the latter question is long-standing, with William Twining identifying struggles between ‘academic’ and ‘professional’ models of law schools, reflecting diverging ambitions to pursue liberal arts education or to lay the foundations for entry into the legal profession respectively. This debate is caricatured by fixed understandings about the structure of UK law degrees. A preset list of subjects and skills – as currently set out in the ‘Joint Statement’ regulating the form and content of UK ‘Qualifying Law Degrees’ (QLDs) – forms the ‘core’ in most of our law schools. Knowledge about law is seen to come from learning these conventional, fixed ‘core’ subjects (public law, criminal law, etc.). While using these knowledge blocks is one approach to teaching, we suggest that the core of legal learning is more fundamental, less functional and less structural: the core essentially concerns key legal concepts and skilled approaches to legal reasoning.

Thinking about the core of legal learning in this way has two implications for teaching environmental law. First, it explains why the relationship between environmental law and standard ‘core’ legal subjects can be fraught. Recent research surveying UK law schools (by Steven Vaughan and his UCL students) shows that almost all law schools teach law in the blocks of the QLD, with environmental law offered as an optional subject, usually in the final year. A notable exception is the University of York, which takes a ‘problem-based learning’ approach to law. Environmental law dominantly being an option suggests that it is an ‘extra’ to the core of legal learning, a ‘nice to have’ for students if they care about the environment and can forgo other subjects often perceived as more relevant for their future careers.

As environmental law teachers know well, we are faced with difficult pedagogical and disciplinary decisions in teaching environmental law. Can we assume that environmental law students have learned or assimilated enough foundational legal knowledge that we can expect them to ‘apply’ this or move beyond this in learning about law that relates to environmental problems? Can we explore interesting facets of environmental law – examining new regimes or complex legal questions in a range of legal areas – safe in the knowledge that students understand basic legal doctrines, procedures and frames of analysis? In our experience, the answer is often no. Students can struggle to connect their foundational legal knowledge to environmental problems, or this connection may be obscured through teaching choices that stray from ‘core’ legal concepts and skills.

This leads to the second reason for thinking differently about environmental law and the core. We need to acknowledge that we are imparting, testing and critiquing core legal concepts and legal reasoning processes when we teach environmental law. With that acknowledgment comes a responsibility to reflect on our choices as environmental law teachers, and potential opportunities. How much do we need to teach basic legal doctrines and concepts in environmental law? What are those concepts? Where does this foundational teaching fit in the syllabus of an optional course? Might we want to restructure some parts of legal degrees to teach key legal concepts and reasoning more explicitly through the framework of environmental problems (inspired by the York approach)? We have taken some small steps in this latter regard at UCL, where a new compulsory first-year module – Law’s Connections led by Professor Maria Lee – includes a climate change case study that provides an intensive introduction to the study of law and the role of law in addressing social challenges.

At a minimum, we would argue that environmental law is ideally placed for students to develop certain ‘core’ skills of legal reasoning. In particular, it is a subject in which we can promote students to have intellectual versatility in their legal reasoning, seeing and framing issues through different legal lenses – doctrinal, regulatory, philosophical, and so on. It is not a subject in which we can pretend that only one approach to law is right, and it requires flexible and critical legal thinking. This is not to say that anything goes in teaching environmental law but that robust, carefully chosen, and self-conscious analytical legal reasoning is required. Developing these skills is a core aspect of legal learning. There is nothing necessarily niche or of the ‘fringe’ about environmental law in the classroom. 

In the way that we frame, phrase and organize our environmental law classes, we are defining the approach to our subject for future environmental lawyers and future citizens, and also expressing a (usually unarticulated) view on the role played by a law school. The time is ripe to reflect on the skills, approaches and visions for environmental law that we impart to our students, and how these relate to the core of legal learning. We need to identify the ‘core’ functions that an environmental law education might serve, and how our teaching meets these, or doesn’t, or can’t.

Featured image credit: Blur-Book-Stack by Janko Ferlic via Pexels.

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Ants are picky when using tools for foraging

Tool use, once considered unique to our species, is now known to be widespread in the animal kingdom. It has been reported in most of the major taxonomic groups, with notable exceptions being myriapods, amphibians and reptiles. In insects, one of the best documented examples of tool use is seen in members of the ant genus Aphaenogaster. When these ants encounter liquid food sources, they drop bits of leaf, soil, etc. into the food, and then carry the food-soaked tools back to the nest. By using tools, individual workers are able to transport much larger volumes of liquid food than they would if they carried it internally in their relatively small and non-distensible crop.

Image credit: an Aphaenogaster subterranea worker dropping a piece of sponge into honey-water. Photo by Imola Bóni. Used with permission.

But how do ants select among various materials as suitable tools? A recent study suggests that the physical properties (e.g., soaking properties) of tools are important in this respect, and ants show unexpected plasticity in their behavior. However, we still know little about other factors that can influence the decision of which tools to use in certain situations. To elucidate this issue, we investigated the tool-using behavior of Aphaenogaster subterranea by examining how tool-using workers deal with various foraging challenges.

For the experiments, we used different types of tools and liquid baits with varying distances between the baits and the tools. The tools provided for the ants were materials used in nature (small soil grains, large soil grains, pine needles, and leaves), and we also used a tool type of anthropogenic origin (sponges) to examine the role of familiarization with a novel material. Three types of liquids with different viscosity (water, honey-water, and honey) were selected to test whether ants behave differently depending on the bait’s viscosity. Baits and tools were arranged in such a way as to allow us to model the ecological constraints affecting the foraging behavior of ants. In one setting, all the five types of tools were placed at a closer (4 cm) or at a further distance (12 cm) from the bait, while in the other setting one type of tool was placed closer (4 cm) to the bait, while the rest were situated at a further distance (12 cm). We predicted that ants would select the most easily transportable tools, but the preference for certain tools would change with the change in the foraging environment.

Image credit: a honey-water bait covered with tools. Note workers at 6 and 9 o’clock carrying soil grains to the bait. Photo by Gábor Lőrinczi. Used with permission.

In accordance to our predictions, ants showed the strongest preference for small soil grains, the smallest and most easily transportable tools. However, when large-sized and unmanageable tools were the first to be discovered or were more readily accessible to the ants, workers used these tools more frequently. Why did they do that? By selecting easily manageable tools, ants can optimize their foraging effort, since these tools, though have weaker soaking capacity, can be most efficiently and rapidly transported to the baits and then to the nest. On the other hand, when ants are not aware of all alternatives available to them, they use the first discovered or most readily accessible tools (mostly regardless of the degree of their transportability) in order not to waste time looking for other tools with more suitable properties.

Interestingly, ants not only selected tools that were best matched to the particular foraging environment, but also improved the use of certain tools. After some time, when workers became familiar with the provided tools, they regularly tore sponges and (rarely) leaves into smaller pieces to ease handling and transportation. Moreover, in many cases, colonies allocated a relatively large number of workers specifically to this task.

What our study reveals is that the tool-using behavior of ants is even more flexible and adaptable than previously thought. This is intriguing, especially in light of the fact that flexible tool choice has been mainly documented in vertebrates like corvids and primates. The tendency of improving certain tools is particularly an interesting finding since tool manufacture is very rare in animals, most likely because it increases the complexity of the tool-using process. The ability of ants to learn how to use novel tools more effectively suggests that social insects may possess much higher cognitive capacities than we realized. Bumblebees, for instance, can learn to use tools by observing others and improving upon what they observe, as was shown in a recent study. The question is: what are the limits of flexible tool use and complex cognition in insects?

Featured image credit: An Aphaenogaster subterranea worker near a drop of honey-water covered with soil grains. Photo by Imola Bóni. Used with permission.

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