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This volume explores a selection of significant and topical elements from the vast amount of Romanian folkloric and mythological material. It sheds light on the mythical-ritualistic aspects of three complex calendar holydays (specifically The Lads of Brașov, Călușarii, and Sânzienele), whose ritualistic sequences, laden with mythical-symbolical reminiscences, were lost during the Communist period and are known today thanks to their spectacular features. Such aspects include demonic mythical beings (such as Iele, Rusalii, Știma Apei, The Woodwoman, and Strigoi) that define the collective imaginary; significant myths that have found their artistic expression in fairytales and legends; and the role of women in traditional Romanian society.
This book analyzes teacher quality in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is the key to faster education progress. Based on new research in 15,000 classrooms in seven different countries, it documents the sources of low teacher quality and distills the global evidence on practical policies that can help the region produce "great teachers."
In the past fifteen years, Brazil has made great strides in increasing its population's access to early child education, with both preschool and creche enrollment increasing by over fifty percent. Education programs for young children have consistently been shown to have long-term positive effects on life outcomes of participants. In Brazil, these programs have demonstrated positive impacts on, for example, income, length of schooling, and test scores. However, the quality of pre-schools and creches is essential in achieving these improvements, and even in capital cities, very few centers are rated as high-quality centers. Representation of the poorest and most vulnerable children among thos...
The Brazilian Way of Doing Public Administration is an accessible collaboration between scholars and practitioners rich with findings applicable worldwide, exploring Brazil’s government’s functioning at various points in recent history.
Defining the Others, “them”, in relation to one’s own reference group, “us”, has been an essential phase in the formation of collective identities in any given country or region. In the case of Russia, the formulation of these binary definitions – sometimes taking a form of enemy images – can be traced all the way to medieval texts, in which religion represented the dividing line. Further, the ongoing expansion of the empire transferred numerous “external others” into internal minorities. The chapters of this edited volume examine the development and contexts of various images, perceptions and categories of the Others in Russia from the 16th century Muscovy to the collapse of the Russian empire.
This open access edited volume is a comparative effort to discern the short-term educational impact of the covid-19 pandemic on students, teachers and systems in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the first academic comparative studies of the educational impact of the pandemic, the book explains how the interruption of in person instruction and the variable efficacy of alternative forms of education caused learning loss and disengagement with learning, especially for disadvantaged students. Other direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic diminished the ability of families to suppo...
Inside Christian churches, natural light has been harnessed to underscore theological, symbolic, and ideological statements. This volume explores how the study of sunlight can reveal aspects of the design, decoration, and function of sacred spaces in the Middle Ages.
By bringing the concepts of “identity,” “comparativism,” and “communication” together, this volume invites a reinterpretation of these defining concepts of postmodernism. Composed of contributions from Australia, Azerbaijan, Japan, Romania and the Ukraine, this interdisciplinary and intercultural book investigates the multiple identities activated in broader discursive contexts. This collection of nineteen chapters opens with an introductory overview followed by two parts: the first, focusing on Plural identities and comparativism, contains a series of “case studies” that can be subsumed within imagology and comparativism; the second, Communication and discourse, illustrates two directions of research: literary communication and terminology. In spite of the methodological and thematic polyphony of its contributions, the volume adopts a unified and coherent tone. By integrating the study of contextual and discursive identities, this book will be of interest to all those involved in image and literary studies, in both linguistics and culture.
Tanzania aims to reach middle income status by 2025. Since the country's economic growth will increasingly require workforce with postsecondary training and skills, the education system needs to close systemic gaps and inefficiencies at the root of its current undeperformance.
T.D. Kokoszka grew up in Texas with a Jewish mother and a Polish-American father. While he was aware of roots going back to Eastern Europe from both families, he found it hard to learn very much about them. He knew that Polish people would whack one another with palm leaves around Easter, and he knew that his great-grandmother purportedly believed in forest spirits known as borowy. However, it wasn't until he was in his teens that he became vaguely aware of an ancient people known as the Slavs who gave rise to the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Slovakian, Slovene, and Czech languages. It quickly became clear to him that this was a family of cultures currently under-represent...