Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes a pivotal context (...) in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (1999, 2003) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 1989) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana. (shrink)

RésuméCet article analyse le besoin qu'éprouvent certaines personnes de se «reconnecter», ou renforcer lews liens, à une culture dans laquelle elles n'ont jamais été enchâssées, eu égard aux critères auxquels se mesure généralement un tel enchâssement (langue, valeurs, croyances, modes de vie, coutumes religieuses, etc.). Situant les résultats de son analyse par rapport à la pensée de Kymlicka et autres, il fait valoir que des facteurs tels que les liens de parenté, l'identification à autrui et l'expérience du racisme déterminent largement (...) quel est le groupe culturel que les individus parviennent à considérer comme le leur. (shrink)

Studies of acculturation generally assume a similar process for men and women. Historically, the spectrum of young adults' activities was broader for women than for men, including domestic work in the home and labor force participation or school attendance. Using cross-sectional data from the 1910 Census Public Use Sample, this article applies a gendered critique of assimilation theory to explore ethnic differences in daughters' activities. Generational changes in daughters' pursuits reflect middle-class norms of women's domesticity. The findings highlight gender roles (...) transmission within the family and the fluidity of daughters' activities in response to distinctive ethnic preferences. Families engaged in household strategies regarding the allocation of members' activities to negotiate valued cultural goals, whether retaining daughters in the home or enabling daughters to attend school. The results do not support a simple assimilation model but, rather, point to considerable variation across ethnic groups in the activities pursued by coresident daughters. (shrink)

The docility hypothesis holds that human social learning produces genuinely altruistic behaviors as a maladaptive by-product. This article examines five possible sources of such altruistic mistakes. The first two mechanisms, the smoke-detector principle and the cost-accuracy tradeoff, are not specifically linked to social learning. Both predict that it may be adaptive for cooperators to allow some altruistic mistakes to happen, as long as those mistakes are rare and cost little. The other three mechanisms are specific to social (...) class='Hi'>learning: Through culture, individuals may come to adopt altruistic norms selected at the group level. Culture may provide people with cheap, accessible, but occasionally mediocre information that they are too reliant upon—a kind of informational dumping. Lastly, people may copy sources good to follow in one domain but not in another, thus committing calibration errors. I argue that those sources of errors are unlikely to lead to important amounts of altruism toward non-kin. Experimental evidence shows humans to be sufficiently skeptical, discriminative, and conscious of their own interest to avoid such altruistic mistakes in most cases. Docile altruism is unlikely to be an important aspect of human cooperation. (shrink)

The shift from the conventional agri-food system to alternative practices is a challenging transition for agricultural producers, yet surprisingly under-studied. Little research has examined the social and cultural processes in rural communities that mobilize producers and construct and sustain producer-driven alternative food networks (AFNs). For AFNs to go beyond just offering “alternative foods” or “alternative networks” and to be constructed as “alternative economies”, this transformation in the producer community is indispensable. This paper presents a case study of a rural (...) cooperative in Shanxi, China. The discontent with both productivist agriculture and the social decay in communities motivated a group of women to engage in a decade-long process of social mobilization, cultural reconstruction, and learning by experimentation. Through this, they developed an alternative vision and successfully created a localized alternative socio-economic model, which I call “anti-productivism”. It prioritizes ecological sustainability, self-reliance, reciprocity, and cultural values over output maximization, productivity growth, commodity exchange, and monetary gains. This case contrasts sharply with the urban-initiated, consumer-driven AFNs studied in the China literature, which mostly just offered alternative foods but brought little change to the producer community. It shows that the alternative economy must be embedded in an alternative community united by strong social bonds and shared cultural values. (shrink)

Japanese youth goods have become globally popular over the past 15 years. Referred to as `cool', their contribution to the national economy has been much hyped under the catchword Japan's `GNC'. While this new national brand is indebted to youth — youth are the intended consumers for such products and sometimes the creators — young Japanese today are also chastised for not working hard, failing at school and work, and being insufficiently productive or reproductive. Using the concept of immaterial (...) labor, the article argues that such `J-cool' products as Pokémon are both based on, and generative of, a type of socio-power also seen in the very behaviors of youth — flexible sociality, instantaneous communication, information juggling — that are so roundly condemned in public discourse. The article examines the contradictions between these two different ways of assessing and calibrating the value of youth today. It also looks at the emergence of youth activism around the very precariousness, for them, of socio-economic conditions of flexibility. (shrink)

Great individuals are assumed to cause the success of radical innovations--thus Henry Ford is depicted as the one who established the automobile industry in America. Hayagreeva Rao tells a different story, one that will change the way you think about markets forever. He explains how "market rebels"--activists who defy authority and convention--are the real force behind the success or failure of radical innovations. Rao shows how automobile enthusiasts were the ones who established the new automobile industry by staging highly publicized (...) reliability races and lobbying governments to enact licensing laws. Ford exploited the popularity of the car by using new mass-production technologies. Rao argues that market rebels also establish new niches and new cultural styles. If it were not for craft brewers who crusaded against "industrial beer" and proliferated brewpubs, there would be no specialty beers in America. But for nouvelle cuisine activists who broke the stranglehold of Escoffier's classical cuisine in France, there would have been little hybridization and experimentation in modern cooking. Market rebels also thwart radical innovation. Rao demonstrates how consumer activists have faced down chain stores and big box retailers, and how anti-biotechnology activists in Germany penetrated pharmaceutical firms and delayed the commercialization of patents. Read Market Rebels to learn how activists succeed when they construct "hot causes" that arouse intense emotions, and exploit "cool mobilization"--unconventional techniques that engage audiences in collective action. You will realize how the hands that move markets are the joined hands of market rebels. (shrink)

In the last decades neuroscience provided so many important contributions to philosophy of mind that nowadays the latter is inconceivable without the former in every topic this philosophical branch deals with. The studies connected to action understanding provided great advances in the field of developmental psychology for what concerns social learning abilities grounded on imitation. All information received by the infants are transmitted through actions. It would be impossible to conceive infant imitation without action interpretation. According to Meltzoff’s “like-me” (...) hypothesis, imitation is possible in human infants already at birth in virtue of an identification mechanism with the adults supported by mirror neurons (MNs) based simulation system. However, if we split the types of actions into two general categories, instrumental and communicative actions, we will see, according to an alternative account, how infants modulate differently the comprehension of observed scenarios, depending on whether they are passive observers (in the case of instrumental actions) or actively involved (in the case of communicative actions). Such a recognition of action features seems to be evident through different degrees of motor activation, as ERP techniques applied to infants and young adults revealed. Neuroscientific evidence highlight the crucial role of brain areas connected to motor activation for action interpretation, but at the same time, they allow both a bottom-up process and a top-down process interpretation whereby the motor activation is seen as a product of action understanding rather than its determining causal factor. The aim of the present study is to examine such epistemological conflicting perspectives underlying action interpretation, and their repercussions on different social learning theories. (shrink)

As attested by Taylor, Calhoun and others, recognition is central to (cultural) identity and to a related sense of self-worth. In contrast, by denying the comparable worth of other cultures, non-recognition represents a potentially damaging mode of intercultural relations. Although not widely acknowledged, a related consideration has been at issue in the rationality debate, initiated by Peter Winch, throughout its several phases. Briefly stated, the problem is that the polarized alternatives of ethnocentric universalism and self-sealing relativism that have characterized (...) this debate serve either to preclude mutual recognition altogether or to promote 'invidious comparison' (Dascal). As will be apparent, these alternatives pose significant barriers to intercultural research and relations on terms of mutual recognition and respect. The present paper seeks to come to terms with this problem by developing an account of cultural rationality, and a concomitant account of the logic of cross-cultural inquiry, which can promote growth of understanding through intercultural learning, and so help to foster more productive modes of intercultural relations. Specifically, the intent is to identify the conditions that need to be fulfilled if this more productive mode of cross-cultural inquiry is to be possible. Throughout, appeal is made to core hermeneutic tenets to ground the viability of a conception of cross-cultural inquiry that can transcend the terms of reference of the original Winchian debate. Following elucidation of the requisite conditions, the paper concludes with a reflection on possible barriers to their acceptance and implementation. Key Words: culture • dialogue • intersubjectivity • learning • rationality • understanding. (shrink)

This contribution anchors the topic of transformative education in the discussion of human renewal. It posits that transformative education can only be perceived as an endeavour that encompasses the whole human being and the potential of humans to change and to adopt different perspectives on seeing and being in the world. The motif of the new human being (homo novus), as per the argument presented, can serve to develop a meaningful conceptual and praxis-related framework for education. Especially when considered against (...) the background of the debate on education serving the establishment of communities of belonging across cultures, in which ethics and values can be lived and probed. (shrink)

This article examines how the formation of markets in bottled water has relied on assembling a particular subject: the subject of hydration. The discourse of hydration is a conspicuous feature of efforts to market bottled water, allowing companies to appeal to scientifically framed principles and ideas of health in order to position the product as an essential component in self-health and healthy lifestyles. Alongside related principles, such as the ‘8 × 8 rule’, hydration has done much to establish new practices (...) of water drinking and consumption in which the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration and must engage in practices of ‘frequent sipping’. This article traces the emergence of the concept of hydration from its origins in exercise science and explores its circulation, contemporary uses and purchase. I argue that the appeal to biomedical languages and concepts found in the discourse of hydration connects with much broader ways of conceiving and acting upon the self that have become prevalent in contemporary society – what Rose and Novas call ‘biological citizenship’ – indicating how the ensemble of hydration participates in wider-ranging transformations in forms of rule. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical techniques of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’ by offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. In order to grasp these developments, I position the health sciences, and health and fitness in particular, as a potent site of popular culture in which bodies learn to be affected by the procedures of scientific experiment. A critical grasp of this context is best enabled, I argue, by situating the producers and consumers of scientific principles and commercial products as embodied and looking at their interconnection in processes of emergence. Through these means, we can begin to develop a fully materialized account of the question: how have we become so thirsty? (shrink)

Culture, defined as shared behavior or information within a community acquired through some form of social learning from conspecifics, is now suggested to act as a second inheritance system. Cultural processes are important in a wide variety of vertebrate species. Birdsong provides a classic example of cultural processes: cultural transmission, where changes in a shared song are learned from surrounding conspecifics, and cultural evolution, where the patterns of songs change through time. This form of (...) class='Hi'>cultural transmission of information has features that are different in speed and form from genetic transmission. More recently, culture, vocal traditions and an extreme form of song evolution has been documented in cetaceans. Humpback whale song ‘revolutions’, where the single population-wide shared song type is rapidly replaced by a new, novel song type introduced from a neighbouring population, represents an extraordinary example of ocean basin-wide cultural transmission rivalled in its geographic extent only by humans. In this review, we examine the cultural evolutions and revolutions present in some birdsong and whale song, respectively. By taking a comparative approach to these cultural processes, we review the existing evidence to understand the similarities and differences for their patterns of expression and the underlying drivers, including anthropogenic influences, which may shape them. Finally, we encourage future studies to explore the role of innovation vs. production errors in song evolution, the fitness information present in song, and how human-induced changes in population sizes, trajectories and migratory connections facilitating cultural transmission may be driving song revolutions. (shrink)

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting special emphasis on the fact that human minds create and transform their culture. Both papers are sympathetic to this idea, yet both also regret a lack of consilience with Boyd, Richerson and Henrich’s models of cultural evolution. I explain why cultural attraction theorists propose a different view on three points (...) of concern for our critics. I start by detailing the claim that cultural transmission relies not chiefly on imitation or teaching, but on cognitive mechanisms like argumentation, ostensive communication, or selective trust, whose evolved or habitual function may not be the faithful reproduction of ideas or behaviours. Second, I explain why the distinction between context biases and content biases might not always be the best way to capture the interactions between culture and cognition. Lastly, I show that cultural attraction models cannot be reduced to a model of guided variation, which posits a clear separation between individual and social learning processes. With cultural attraction, the same cognitive mechanisms underlie both innovation and the preservation of traditions. (shrink)

Although training in sport is necessary to reach Olympic status, a conditioned body is not the only outcome. Athletes also learn how to be Olympians. This learning involves taking on certain ways of acting, thinking and valuing. Such learning has implications beyond competition, as athletes eventually retire from elite sport and devote their time to other activities. This paper examines processes of learning and transition using the case of Amelia, a former Olympic synchronised swimmer. Through two in-depth (...) interviews, empirical material was generated which focused on the learning that took place during this athlete’s career and after, during her transition to paid employment. A cultural view of learning was used as the theoretical frame to understand the athlete’s experiences. Our reading suggests that the athlete learned in various ways to be productive. Some of these ways of being were useful after retirement; others were less compatible. In fact, Amelia used a two-year period after retirement to reconstruct herself. Key to her eventual successful transition was to distance herself from the sport and to critically reflect upon her sporting experiences. We thus recommend that those involved with high-performance athletes foster a more balanced perspective that acknowledges and promotes ways of being beyond athletic involvement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cancel Culture and the Trope of the ScapegoatA Girardian Defense of the Importance of Contemplative ReadingJoakim Wrethed (bio)What unfolds in this article encompasses violence, language/reading, and ethics. René Girard addresses these topics primarily in terms of mimesis, its potential violence, and the trope of the scapegoat. Still, toward the end of his career and life, he relentlessly pointed out the dangers implicated in the dynamism of these forces. He (...) addressed it clearly in his "apocalyptic book" Battling to the End (2010):I have been accused of repeating myself too often, of turning my theory into a fetish, of using it to explain everything. Yet it has described mechanisms that recent discoveries in neuroscience confirm: imitation is the initial and essential means of learning; it is not something acquired later on. We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it. Only by understanding the dangers of imitation can we conceive of authentic identification with the Other. However, we are becoming aware of the primacy of moral relationship at the very time when the atomization of humanity is being realized, and when violence has increased in intensity and unpredictability.1[End Page 15] It is this thin line between necessary/harmless imitation and its dangerous versions that will be the central theme in the analysis. As Girard states, a vast amount of established research confirms that the mimetic impulse is innate.2 We should pay specific attention to "the atomization of humanity," since it zooms in on our contemporary epoch's paradoxical "mass-individualism," evidently tremendously enhanced by information and communication technology (ICT). In order to contribute to Girard's lifework and to extend it beyond his own writing, we outline a few contemporary phenomena that clearly exhibit the primordial dangers of human violence that Girard draws attention to. These phenomena are initially only roughly sketched, but subsequent sections give them sharper relief. The central phenomena are cancel culture, speed, and the reading of literature. Just to be clear, the intended mode of reading should be construed in a broad sense, thus potentially including philosophy and theology, if one is inclined to emphasize the differences between these disciplines and the reading of literature.3Cancel culture in certain ways makes manifest a social welfare society version of escalating violence, indicating that "violence has increased in intensity and unpredictability."4 A succinct definition of cancel culture will initially suffice:Cancel culture refers to ending (or attempting to end) an individual's career or prominence to hold them accountable for immoral behavior. Driven primarily by young progressives, often through social media, cancel culture has attracted controversy since it swept into the national conversation.5This definition can easily be extended into larger historical patterns in which, for instance, colonial crimes are highlighted and demands are raised for contemporary acts of atonement. As Rob Henderson points out, the obvious flip side is that "the swift and decisive nature of cancel culture can stifle debate, and some believe that dialogue is a more productive way to foster change."6 The "swiftness" and the immediate collectable consequences are decisive in their functions as social punishment and exclusion; in other words, digitalized speed accomplishes verdict and punishment in a very short time span, which is a reflection of desire pure and simple. The rapidity from intention to anticipated effect rather resembles an instinctive and violent action more than the forwarding of a carefully thought through argument or statement. The present becomes an invincible ivory tower bristling with power to finally mete out the justice that the erroneous ethics of earlier times were incapable of conceiving and achieving. An always already accelerating modernity speeded up immensely through [End Page 16] the fast growth of information and communication technology (ICT). To be sure, the whole evolution of computer technology is defined primarily in terms of processing speed, together with the quantity of information that can be contained in as small a spatial entity as possible. The present-day reality of having almost everything only one or a few clicks away on a screen—as a modern day realization of the library in Alexandria—enhances the relevance of a phenomenon historians have referred to... (shrink)

The Pedagogical Contract explores the relationship between teacher and student and argues for ways of reconceiving pedagogy. It discloses this relationship as one that since antiquity has been regarded as a scene of give-and-take, where the teacher exchanges knowledge for some sort of payment by the student and where pedagogy always runs the risk of becoming a broken contract. The book seeks to liberate teaching and learning from this historical scene and the anxieties that it engenders, arguing that there (...) are alternative ways of conceiving the economy underlying pedagogical activities. Reading ancient material together with contemporary representations of teaching and learning, Yun Lee Too shows that apart from being conceived as a scene of self-interest in which a professional teacher, or sophist, is the charlatan who cheats his pupil, pedagogy might also purport to be a disinterested process of socialization or a scene in which lack and neediness are redeemed through the realization that they are required precisely to stimulate the desire to learn. The author also argues that pedagogy ideally ignores the imperative of the conventional marketplace for relevance, utility, and productivity, inasmuch as teaching and learning most enrich a community when they disregard the immediate material concerns of the community. The book will appeal to all those who understand scholarship as having an important social and/or political role to play; it will also be of interest to literary scholars, literary and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, legal theorists, feminists, scholars of education, sociologists, and political theorists. Yun Lee Too is Assistant Professor of Classics, Columbia University. She is the author of Rethinking Sexual Harassment;The Rhetoric of Identity in Socrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy; and The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism, forthcoming; and coeditor, with Niall Livingstone, of Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. (shrink)

Under the influence of Western learning, there was a revival in the study of “traditional Chinese learning.” It moved from the “center” to the “edge” after its ideological sanctity was eliminated in modern times. Traditional Chinese learning is still a vital force, however. Traditional Chinese culture emphasizes the productive and social “relationships” and the harmonious “whole,” as well as the Chinese efforts to control their own fate. Traditional Chinese learning revolves around the idea of “human beings,” (...) a vivid manifestation of which is the idea of “benevolence” in Confucianism. If China’s modernization is no more than the transformation and transcendence of the nation under the influence of external forces, traditional Chinese learning would be able—through its inheritance and development of benevolence—to become an important philosophical source for Chinese people. But this can only occur through sufficient awareness of culture and learning. (shrink)

In the present scenario of globalisation, knowledge has become the prime factor of production for competitive advantage. This calls for acquisition and utilisation of knowledge for innovation and technical change on a constant basis, which is only possible in a ‘learning organisation’. Innovative activities of a learning organisation are influenced by three main factors: (1) internal learning; (2) external learning; and (3) the innovation strategies decided upon by the enterprise management. An assumption has been made (...) that, particularly in developing countries, absorption and adaptation of technologies, i.e. indigenisation, take place through a process of ‘learning by doing’. Taking this into consideration, this paper focuses on a few case studies carried out at NISTADS, New Delhi, India, on small enterprises in the formal as well as traditional sectors, highlighting the learning process in an organisational context and how it brings in innovation and technological change at enterprise level. The study demonstrates that the learning environment in an organisational context is an indispensable process to be innovative and building up capabilities for technological change. This in turn also calls for strong networking of the enterprises with academia, R&D institutions and other enterprises, to create knowledge clusters. This builds up a strong case for a network approach of learning organisations not only at the regional level but also at the cross-cultural level for constant innovation and technical change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Welcome To The Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual RealityAnn Weinstone (bio)1. The Question of Addiction and TranscendenceIt has become a truism to say that virtual reality (VR) is addictive. Case, the protagonist of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, dreams of connection to the net like a junkie jonesing for a fix. In Jeff Noon’s novel Vurt, you get to cyberspace by tickling the back of your throat with addictive, government-produced feathers. (...) Verity of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz sports nanotechnology implants that compel her to enter virtual worlds into which she sinks with feelings of deep bliss. As in Vurt, in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, everything’s an addiction: cyberspace, people, rock and roll.But let’s move away from fiction. Graphic cyberartist Nicole Stenger, a self-professed neo-Platonist, writes, “[a]nd what if the passage to a new level of humanity actually meant abolishing indeed the natural one, or at least some part of it?... Will it not require immense effort to recover from this enhancement of the senses, from this habit of perfection? [Stenger 57]. Michael Benedikt, editor of Cyberspace: First Steps, deems VR “a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology” [1; my emphasis]. Ad copy for “Origin,” a VR game, reads, “You must die to learn how to live.... Death is not an option. It’s an addiction.” And an article in the New York Times titled “The Lure and Addiction of Life on Line” displays a graphic of a bespectacled male, tapping away at a computer located inside of a panopticon-sized rendering of a globe to which the avid user is happily chained [see Asciu]. From advertisements to scholarly texts, it is difficult to find any writing about VR that does not engage in and, as I will argue, rely upon the rhetorics of addiction. William Gibson dubbed cyberspace a “consensual hallucination.” That was 1984. In 1996, critic Robert Markley rechristened VR “a consensual cliché” [56]. Surely, the “addictiveness” of cyberspace contributes to the sense of tired familiarity. My question is this: Why does cyberspace have to be addictive? What work is addiction doing in discourses of virtual reality?In this essay, I’m concerned with the production of what might be called hyper-real transcendence. Jean Baudrillard, in his influential schema “three orders of simulacra,” identifies a first, “natural” order in which “a transcendent world, a radically different universe, is portrayed... in contrast to the continent of the real” [309]. I propose that a third-order, hyper-real, transcendence has survived the collapse of the distance between the model and the original. This transcendence relies on rhetorics of disembodiment, [End Page 77] immortality, and extra-human reproductive and generative powers within virtual spaces. Such spaces include scholarly and technical essays about VR or cyberspace, science fiction, advertisements for VR games, VR game narratives, and other advertising copy that borrows from current discourses of virtuality. My discussion takes place in a field crowded with talk of the death of logocentrism and the end of phonocentric culture. 1 Derrida has written that “scientific language [e.g. computer code] challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing” [Grammatology 10], the logocentric relation of voice to mental experiences. Baudrillard writes mournfully that the “third-order” world of simulated simulacra, of hyper-reality, leaves “no room for any kind of transcendentalism” [310]. Baudrillard and Derrida write with differing affects of the same effect—the waning or death of the foundation of Western notions of transcendence. In this tradition, transcendence commences with the penetration of the self by a supra-enlivened Other, whether that other be a king, a god, nature, the voice of logos, the Law, or an abstracted version of vitality itself. Particularly, I question the persistent coupling of rhetorics of transcendence with rhetorics of addiction. My initial point will be that following the established Western logocentric tradition, rhetorical relationships of addiction between VR users and VR narratives are the “software” with which hyper-real transcendence is produced and sustained. In other words, VR demands, as the price of transcendence, that the user become of the medium... (shrink)

Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early modern era, Ottoman political treatises did not regard the people as the source of the state's problems. Yet in the nineteenth century, as the imperial ideology of Ottomanism and modern discourses of citizenship spread, so did the understanding of laziness as a social disease that the 'Ottoman nation' needed to eradicate. Asking what we can learn about Ottoman (...) history over the long nineteenth-century by looking closely into the contested and shifting boundaries of the laziness - productivity binary, Melis Hafez explores how 'laziness' can be used to understand emerging civic culture and its exclusionary practices in the Ottoman Empire. A polyphonic involvement of moralists, intellectuals, polemicists, novelists, bureaucrats, and, to an extent, the public reveals the complexities and ambiguities of this multifaceted cultural transformation. Using a wide variety of sources, this book explores the sustained anxiety about productivity that generated numerous reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans. (shrink)

As a product of the tourism performing arts industry in culture–tourism integration development, to develop a featured culture–tourism town is a new trend for tourism development in the new era. To analyze the social benefit of the culture–tourism industry, in this study, an artificial intelligence model for social benefit evaluation is constructed based on backpropagation neural network and fuzzy comprehensive analysis, with Yiyang Town taken as an example. The criterion layer in the model includes three indexes, and the index layer (...) contains 11 indexes. The weight values of cultural inheritance and protection, ecological environment improvement, and commercial economy development to the social benefit of the town are 0.522, 0.570, and 0.424, respectively. For G1, 41.20% is excellent; for G2, 39.5% is excellent; and for G3, 40.5% is good. In general, 30.76% of the total social benefit is excellent, with 37.69% being good, 21.48% being qualified, and 10.07% being unqualified. It is inferred that the total social benefit level of Yiyang Town is good according to the constructed model. Therefore, the culture inheritance and protection, the ecological environment improvement, and the commercial economy development are the key evaluation factors of social benefit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creating a Learning Space That Is Virtual and ExperientialBette E. Schneiderman (bio)The final product of the Rembrandt Project will be a Web site that is intended primarily for use by middle and high school teachers and their students. It is a celebration of Rembrandt’s work in the contexts of his time, place, and culture and all that may emanate from them. A special feature of the site is (...) the integration of art, aesthetic, and social studies education. Other articles in this issue address the rich content of the project’s work, that is, the artworks themselves, their contextual grounding, and the development of skills that maximize learning. This article looks at the creation of a learning space as a home for the development of the project. It explores issues related to learning spaces and features some of the technologies that can be used within them.The Rembrandt Project will not be a Web site that merely flattens images on a computer screen or conveys facts about Rembrandt and his oeuvre. Rather, it is a portal to a learning place with online features and opportunities for learners to have transformative experiences. Learning may occur online in electronic conversations, in opportunities to view and respond to reproductions in collections that cannot be visited in person, and in the creation and display of learners’ products. Learning is facilitated by access to a range of resources and people. Numerous announcements of activities, events, and products will be posted on the site. Some individuals will work in the space of the works themselves while others might undertake learning activities in museums, galleries, and private homes. In some cases special programs will highlight certain works and relate them to the project. Images of places in the Netherlands will also be presented with accompanying learning opportunities for those who may wish to see the paintings in person or simply ponder their influence from afar. All participants will be encouraged to share creations and reflections on the site. [End Page 38]To provide a sense of what this article is about, three cases are presented, each with two scenarios and a sample online discussion. The purpose of these cases is to draw readers into the experience of a virtual learning space before discussing contemporary learning communities, learning spaces, and technologies. The cases will show how to develop lively democratic conversation that makes communal learning possible. Participants can be of all kinds, from experts to those who simply want to learn. They can be located anywhere and participate at whatever time suits them best.Case A: Two ScenariosScenario 1: Viewing a Masterwork by RembrandtStanding before a work by Rembrandt you are drawn into its space. If you have viewed a Rembrandt in the past, recall your experience. If not, perhaps you might want to travel to a place that has one of his works or access some of his images online.1 Or you might think about a work of art that aroused your interest and prompted you to ponder its import and ask questions. Perhaps you returned to the work many times, experiencing it more deeply and differently upon each visit. What is it, specifically, about the encounter that resulted in a satisfying experience? And what changed the moment you viewed the work in a book reproduction, a slide, or a digitized image on a computer? In pursuing its purposes, the Rembrandt Project explores ways multiple skills can help maximize the experience of a wide range of works both online and off. Case A, Scenario 1, will set the stage for an experience with the work itself.Scenario 2: Viewing a Masterwork OnlineSelect a major work by Rembrandt online.2 What makes experiencing this image worthwhile, despite the fact that certain aspects cannot be captured in this flat digitized space? Upon reflecting on these scenarios, thoughts about experiencing the work may be recorded and discussed with others.3Case B: Two ScenariosScenario 1: An Experience of a LandscapeImagine wandering through an open field, tingled by a gentle breeze, warmed by the sun, refreshed by the aromas of moist grasses, mixed flowers, and the woody smells of trees. A village, visible... (shrink)

This paper examines the rise of what is popularly called "natural horsemanship" , as a definitive cultural change within the horse industry. Practitioners are often evangelical about their methods, portraying NH as a radical departure from traditional methods. In doing so, they create a clear demarcation from the practices and beliefs of the conventional horse-world. Only NH, advocates argue, properly understands the horse. Dissenters, however, contest the benefits to horses as well as the reliance in NH on disputed concepts (...) of the natural. Advocates, furthermore, sought to rename technologies associated with riding while simultaneously condemning technologies used in conventional training . These contested differences create boundaries and enact social inclusion and exclusion, which the paper explores. For horses, the impact of NH is ambiguous: Depending on practitioners, effects could be good or bad. However, for the people involved, NH presents a radical change—which they see as offering markedly better ways of relating to horses and a more inclusive social milieu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dialogic and the Aesthetic:Some Reflections on Theatre as a Learning MediumAnthony Jackson (bio)A Doll's House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night's Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.— George Bernard Shaw, "The Problem Play"1People have tried for centuries to (...) use drama to change people's lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn't work. It might be nice if it worked, but it doesn't. The only thing dramatic form is good for is telling a story.—David Mamet, A Whore's Profession2These two assertions, some 100 years apart, were of course meant to be contentious—but they do point to one of the recurring questions about the role that theatrical art plays in modern Western culture and nicely encapsulate the contrasting claims made by practitioners and critics alike for the "work in the world" that drama can do. On the one hand, it is argued that what is conventionally thought of as great dramatic art—while it may be imaginatively rich, aesthetically compelling, and "timeless" in its appeal—will not achieve the social impact that plays such as A Doll's House have done. Such plays have a different function. They can be directly useful to us in the "real world" beyond the theatre walls, perhaps capable of influencing that world or at least influencing the way we think about and operate in the world—but they may not, consequently, have much shelf life. A Doll's House, of course, obstinately refuses to leave both shelf and stage but in this respect may be an exception that proves the rule; the vast majority of "interventionist" dramas rarely outlive their historical moment. (A play such as Spirochete, a [End Page 104] living newspaper written in 1938 in Chicago with the aim of heightening public awareness of the widespread—but barely discussed—problem of syphilis and of the cures available, undoubtedly did much effective work in the world but remains of and for its time.3 )On the other hand, playwright David Mamet casts buckets of cold water over the whole notion of "useful" dramatic art. Let us not delude ourselves, he argues, into thinking drama is good for anything else than telling a story—the value of good dramatic storytelling is important enough as it is. It serves the art form—and possibly those we wish to influence—badly if we insist on trying to change the world using drama as our lever. A genuine work of art, it is often said, cannot be didactic or "instrumental." The novel, play, or poem that sets out to convey information or to preach a message risks surrendering those very qualities we usually value in art—complexity, multilayered meanings, richness of imagination. Jonathan Levy, in his A Theatre of the Imagination, argues that "the impulse to create theatre for children is the impulse to give a gift, without strings. It is this impulse... we should... call upon when we find ourselves in the theatre tempted to teach."4 Further, "when art is used to teach, either the teaching or the art must suffer."5 The implication is clearly that teaching and dramatic art make awkward bedfellows. It has to be one or the other, not both. The late, much missed, Lowell Swortzell took a not dissimilar line in his provocative essay on theatre-in-education, "Trying to like TIE,"6 and many practitioners of children's and young people's theatre have likewise resisted having their work categorized as educational or in any way curriculum driven. The work must have its own justification, as art, as storytelling, offering young people an experience that may complement but that is fundamentally different from anything else they get in school. Even Augusto Boal has at times appeared to reinforce the dichotomy. Arguing for a theatre that can serve the immediate needs of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the disadvantaged, he has negotiated a challenging and productive path through the artistic and socially responsive implications of... (shrink)

This practical book is designed to help school leaders develop a sustainable culture of learning across the curriculum. It offers a personal insight into how one school embraced a range of dialogic and analytical tools to create an environment in which all stakeholders were inspired to evaluate and innovate. Each chapter tackles one piece of the 'jigsaw' that makes up a successful school environment, considering topics such as Attitudes for Learning, Coaching for learning and Love of (...) class='Hi'>Learning. Utilising theory, case studies and activities, it illustrates how the reader can realistically and practically increase student attainment in their own school setting. This book will help leaders: Develop a supportive and encouraging leadership style that will create a cycle of self-improvement and self-efficacy for all ; Adapt the curriculum to focus on progress and engagement ; Use the Philosophy 4 Children strategies to promote deeper thinking and enquiry, increasing the rate of school improvement through a system of enquiry based staff professional development Using an inner city primary school as a working example, this book will be a source of inspiration and encouragement for school leaders, teachers and school advisors looking to cultivate and embed a love of learning into their school. (shrink)

This study aims to determine the opinions of teachers of Religious Culture and Ethics Course (DKAB) about subject-based classroom application in-depth. The research has been carried from qualitative research methods with a case study design. In order to determine the working group of the study, criteria sampling was used in the first stage, and the maximum diversity sampling method was used in the next step. The sample of this research consists of 8 DKAB teachers working in Ankara province. A semi-structured (...) interview form has been used as a data collection tool in the study. The data of the qualitative of this research has been analyzed with both descriptive and content analysis by NVivo 10 program. In order to ensure validity and reliability in the study, credibility, transferability, consistency, and verifiability strategies have been used. When the research data were analyzed, four themes were formed: positive opinions about the application, negative opinions and problems related to the application, contribution of the practice to religious education and training, and recommendations about the application. DKAB teachers find the application more positive than the classroom system. It has been found that the practice of subject-based classrooms is a motivational tool for Primary School students, while it causes some problems for lower secondary school and upper secondary school students.Summary: Learning environments are among the key elements in the acquisition of 21st-century skills. Classrooms are also a part of the learning environment. Classes are the learning environment in which teachers and students spend most of their education and training process. In this context, subject-based classroom application is one of the preferred methods in the arrangement of classrooms.Subject-based classroom application means that the teachers have a special classroom related to their branches in the school building, and students attend the teacher's classroom according to the syllabus. In this practice, the teacher can decorate walls, floor, ceiling, column, and beam of the classroom with students’ study materials such as banner, poster, painting, cartoon to make the course more effective and efficient and to create a psychological atmosphere called classroom atmosphere-air.This application aims to activate the student by enriching the classroom and make learning effective and efficient. The classroom equipped with appropriate equipment and materials provides a favorable environment for the implementation of effective teaching strategies. The application can create “class/classroom culture” by using ordinary meanings and symbols related to the course. It provides students the opportunity to exhibit their products and contributes to students' self-regulation skills development. Besides, real-life practices or practices close to reality can be brought into the classroom. As a result, permanent learning can be realized with the possibility of creating a shared living space and the number of sensory organs participating in learning.This current study aims to address in-depth information about the opinions of Religious Culture and Moral Ethics (DKAB) teachers in primary, secondary, and high schools regarding the subject-based classroom application. When the studies in the literature are examined, it is seen that the studies related to the subject-based classroom application have increased since 2010. However, it is clear that this research is directed towards social studies, geography, science, and mathematics courses and is based on the opinions of students, teachers, and administrators at the secondary school level. In the context of DKAB course, there has been no research including the views of teachers, students, or school administrators regarding the application of subject-based classrooms. This study is carried out revealing perspectives of DKAB teachers by examining their opinions on the subject-based classroom application and contribute to the field. The research was conducted with a case study design from the qualitative research methods. The participants consist of 8 DKAB teachers working in Ankara province. A mixed purposive sampling method was used to determine the study group. In the first stage, the teachers implementing the DKAB classrooms application were taken as criteria. In the next step, the study group was determined within the framework of the maximum diversity sampling method by considering the variables such as school level, gender, age, education level, duration of teachers' work. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview form with expert opinion. In the form, there are nine main questions and probe questions, which include questions related to subject-based classrooms application, the contribution of the application to religious education and training, the contribution of teachers to professional and personal development, the effect of teachers' belonging to the school, the effectiveness, and improvement of the application. Permission has been obtained from the Ankara Provincial Directorate of National Education and participants via consent form for the interview. The interviews were recorded in audio, 169.58-minute audio recording transcripts, and 52-page interview data obtained. The qualitative data of this research has been analyzed with both descriptive and content analysis by NVivo 10 program. In order to ensure validity and reliability in the study, credibility, transferability, consistency, and verifiability strategies have been used.When the data of the research were analyzed, the opinions of DKAB teachers about the subject-based classrooms application categorized under four themes; positive and negative opinions/problems about the practice, the contribution of the practice to religious education and teaching and practical suggestions. Under the theme of positive opinions on the application, positive aspects for the teacher, student, parents, and comparison with the classroom system were formed. According to the participants, the practice of DKAB classroom is a “facilitation” element for the teacher because of the factors such as the teacher not moving around the classroom, not carrying material, having freedom to organize the classroom, and material regularity. In this application, since the teacher has a class of his own, the teacher adopts and owns the classroom and the sense of belonging to school increases. This sense of belonging is felt so strongly that there is even a participant who plans to retire if the application is abandoned. The positive aspects of the application for the students are that; a classroom is a motivating tool, the boards and walls can be used, and the student has the opportunity to exhibit their activities. When compared with the classroom system, it was stated that as a result of the branch classroom practice, the school equipment could be better protected, class order and cleaning easier, and the success of the students would be increased.The negative views of the participants on the application were grouped under the categories of students, teachers, and parents. Not having a fixed class of their own, continually relocating and losing time in recess, staying in the classroom door when the classroom is locked, not adopting the classroom and lack of lockers constitute the negative aspects of the application for the students. The overuse of classrooms, less use of teachers' rooms, lack of communication between colleagues are the negative aspects of the application for the teachers. It was stated by (75%) most of the participants that branch classroom application contributed to the continual learning of students in religious education and teaching. To make the application more functional, DKAB teachers have proposed arrangements such as improving physical infrastructure, enriching teaching materials, and arranging school syllabus and keeping classrooms open. As a result, teachers find the application more positive than the classroom system. While it is a motivation tool for primary school students, it causes some problems for secondary and high school students, such as carrying bags, staying at the door, and wasting time. In this sense, the application is recommended to be applied in primary schools that have a sufficient number of classrooms. Also, the system should be applied in secondary and high schools where the number of students is low, or the number of classrooms is sufficiently provided that the problems experienced by the students are eliminated. School administrations and teachers need to take necessary measures to make the application effective and efficient. (shrink)

The essay draws on the concept of ‘asymmetric counter-concepts’ as developed by Reinhart Koselleck starting with twin-formulas such as ‘the familiar and the unfamiliar’ which are generally used to establish collective des­ignations of the self and others and which institutionalize the axiological and the epistemological. These counter-concepts can have different semantic temperatures. The focus is on the underlying meaning-production schemes which produce value-asymmetries. The essay tries to show that a process of heating up these value-asymmetries is only one side (...) of the history of such asymmetric counter-concepts from medieval to modern times. Simultaneously a cooling down can be observed in written texts from different periods; examples include the 12th century Rolandslied and the 16th century Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Full negation eliminates uncertainties and value insecurities. But the complexities and contingencies that emerge since Early Modern times then lead to losses of negatability, which in turn render gains in unfamiliarity. The modern experience of the foreign is indeterminate otherness instead of determined negation that characterized pre-modern alterity. Modern societies therefore need to mediate between validity and contingency under the circumstances of plurality. Interpretational demands and uncertainty about the relevant interpretive frames increase. Foreignness is then experienced as unfamiliarity. This presupposes intellectual attitudes like irritability, curiosity, and willingness to learn. The modern concept of ‘culture’ then is proposed as a comparative pattern where only unavoidable structural asymmetry remains. It explains cultural differences and the experience of foreignness through heterogeneity. Using this specifically modern pattern, there is no longer a legitimate value slope between one’s own position and its negation. The distinction is then between the familiar and the unfamiliar. (shrink)

Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has co-evolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie this hypothesis, in order to (...) explore how language and mindreading interact through cultural evolution. This model treats communicative behaviour as an interplay between the context in which communication occurs, an agent’s individual perspective on the world, and the agent’s lexicon. However, each agent’s perspective and lexicon are private mental representations, not directly observable to other agents. Learners are therefore confronted with the task of jointly inferring the lexicon and perspective of their cultural parent, based on their utterances in context. Simulation results show that given these assumptions, an informative lexicon evolves not just under a pressure to be successful at communicating, but also under a pressure for accurate perspective-inference. When such a lexicon evolves, agents become better at inferring others’ perspectives; not because their innate ability to learn about perspectives changes, but because sharing a language with others helps them to do so. (shrink)

Modernity is founded on the belief that the world we build is a human invention, not a part of nature. The ecological consequences of this idea have been catastrophic. We have laid waste to natural ecosystems, replacing them with fundamentally unsustainable human designs. With time running out to address the environmental crises we have caused, our best path forward is to turn to nature for guidance. In this book, Henry Dicks explores the philosophical significance of a revolutionary approach to sustainable (...) innovation: biomimicry. The term describes the application and adaptation of strategies found in nature to the development of artificial products and systems, such as passive cooling techniques modeled on termite mounds or solar cells modeled on leaves. Dicks argues that biomimicry, typically seen as just a design strategy, can also serve as the basis for a new environmental philosophy that radically alters how we understand and relate to the natural world. By showing how we can imitate, emulate, and learn from nature, biomimicry points us toward a genuinely sustainable way of inhabiting the earth. Rooted in philosophy, The Biomimicry Revolution has profound implications spanning the natural sciences, design, architecture, sustainability studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. It presents a sweeping reconception of what philosophy can be and offers a powerful new vision of terrestrial existence. (shrink)

Studies of animal culture have not normally included a consideration of cetaceans. However, with several long-term field studies now maturing, this situation should change. Animal culture is generally studied by either investigating transmission mechanisms experimentally, or observing patterns of behavioural variation in wild populations that cannot be explained by either genetic or environmental factors. Taking this second, ethnographic, approach, there is good evidence for cultural transmission in several cetacean species. However, only the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops) has been shown experimentally (...) to possess sophisticated social learning abilities, including vocal and motor imitation; other species have not been studied. There is observational evidence for imitation and teaching in killer whales. For cetaceans and other large, wide-ranging animals, excessive reliance on experimental data for evidence of culture is not productive; we favour the ethnographic approach. The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties. The wide movements of cetaceans, the greater variability of the marine environment over large temporal scales relative to that on land, and the stable matrilineal social groups of some species are potentially important factors in the evolution of cetacean culture. There have been suggestions of gene-culture coevolution in cetaceans, and culture may be implicated in some unusual behavioural and life-history traits of whales and dolphins. We hope to stimulate discussion and research on culture in these animals. (shrink)

This practical book is designed to help school leaders develop a sustainable culture of learning across the curriculum. It offers a personal insight into how one school embraced a range of dialogic and analytical tools to create an environment in which all stakeholders were inspired to evaluate and innovate. Each chapter tackles one piece of the 'jigsaw' that makes up a successful school environment, considering topics such as Attitudes for Learning, Coaching for learning and Love of (...) class='Hi'>Learning. Utilising theory, case studies and activities, it illustrates how the reader can realistically and practically increase student attainment in their own school setting. This book will help leaders: Develop a supportive and encouraging leadership style that will create a cycle of self-improvement and self-efficacy for all ; Adapt the curriculum to focus on progress and engagement ; Use the Philosophy 4 Children strategies to promote deeper thinking and enquiry, increasing the rate of school improvement through a system of enquiry based staff professional development Using an inner city primary school as a working example, this book will be a source of inspiration and encouragement for school leaders, teachers and school advisors looking to cultivate and embed a love of learning into their school. (shrink)

__Youth, Education, and the Role of Society_ examines the “learning landscape” currently available to American adolescents, arguing that we need to expand, enrich, and diversify the learning opportunities available to young people today._ Central to the book is Robert Halpern’s view that we depend too exclusively on schools to meet the full range of young people’s developmental needs. “High school learning as typically structured is just too fragmented, isolated, and abstract to meet young people’s developmental needs,” he (...) argues. “It relies too much on century-old curriculum and pedagogy, and is too oriented, in an unreflective way, toward preparing young people for four-year college.” As Halpern notes, school leaders are already aware of the limitations posed by traditional high schools and are aiming for reformed school institutions and curricula. However, he contends that “better meeting young people’s learning and developmental needs will require far more than a reconceptualized high school experience. It will mean a fundamentally different understanding of where learning can take place and the wholehearted participation of a variety of institutions and sectors of society.” The book’s initial chapters explore the nature of productive learning experiences for adolescents. The volume then looks at how various institutions—including schools, after-schools, businesses, and nonprofit and civic organizations—can make unique and indispensable contributions to those crucial learning experiences. Halpern also considers how other countries “structure learning” during these formative years, and he concludes with an exploration of the social and cultural challenges ahead—challenges we must meet, he argues, if we are to enlist and sustain the necessary participation of institutions and adults in an expanded and enriched program for preparing young people for adult life and success. A bold and wide-ranging effort to examine—and reimagine—learning and youth development, this book promises to be a major contribution to the literature on adolescent education. (shrink)

The relatedness between a country or a firm and a product is a measure of the feasibility of that economic activity. As such, it is a driver for investments at a private and institutional level. Traditionally, relatedness is measured using networks derived by country-level co-occurrences of product pairs, that is counting how many countries export both. In this work, we compare networks and machine learning algorithms trained not only on country-level data, but also on firms, which is something not (...) much studied due to the low availability of firm-level data. We quantitatively compare the different measures of relatedness, by using them to forecast the exports at the country and firm level, assuming that more related products have a higher likelihood to be exported in the future. Our results show that relatedness is scale dependent: the best assessments are obtained by using machine learning on the same typology of data one wants to predict. Moreover, we found that while relatedness measures based on country data are not suitable for firms, firm-level data are very informative also for the development of countries. In this sense, models built on firm data provide a better assessment of relatedness. We also discuss the effect of using parameter optimization and community detection algorithms to identify clusters of related companies and products, finding that a partition into a higher number of blocks decreases the computational time while maintaining a prediction performance well above the network-based benchmarks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Louise Pascale, “Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer: Embracing Two Aesthetics for Singing”Vicki R. LindIn "Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer: Embracing Two Aesthetics for Singing," Louise Pascale explores classroom teachers' beliefs about singing. Specifically, she looks at possible reasons why many classroom teachers who have been raised in the Western traditions of music-making do not feel comfortable singing. As a vocal music education professor and an (...) avid singer, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. My image of a vibrant elementary classroom, rooted in my experiences as a student and later as an elementary music teacher, includes singing. If, as Pascale notes, there is a growing number of teachers who define themselves as "non-singers" and who, because of this, do not include music in the classroom, there is indeed reason for alarm.As I read the introductory paragraph of this paper I immediately thought of elementary teachers who had at one time or another been labeled as "tone deaf" and who had allowed an early negative singing experience to cause them to believe they could not sing. Pascale challenged this simple explanation of the non-singer and made a strong case for a more thorough investigation of the problem.Pascale began her investigation by conducting a series of interviews with people who believed they could not sing. She found a variety of reasons for the self-proclaimed non-singers negative self image including: 1) never being selected to sing a solo; 2) not being able to lead songs, and 3) not singing in tune. Pascale used the story of a young Barbados woman, Onika, as an illustration of how these experiences could be linked to Western music traditions. Onika was born in Barbados but moved to the United States at the age of four. This young woman considered herself a singer in her native country but a non-singer in America. Onika felt she was a singer in Barbados because she enjoyed singing music in the Solka tradition; the music was fun, moved fast, and she could sing along without being concerned about how she sounded. She described herself as a non-singer in the United States because she was not able to lead songs and did not have a strong voice.I agree that the conventional Western view of music in the schools is rooted in classical traditions that value performance, perfection, and virtuosity and that these views may lead to the above mentioned assumptions regarding singing. I question, however, whether this conventional view permeates the beliefs of those [End Page 200] outside of the traditional music education circle. Onika's experiences with music in Barbados seemed to be very natural, a part of life; her experiences with music in the United States seemed limited to formal experiences in church or school settings. It would be interesting to investigate whether the dichotomy is between two cultures, the United States and Barbados, or between two different ways of experiencing music, in school and in everyday life.The main body of Pascale's work is the description of two aesthetics for singing, Aesthetic A, the classical Western tradition and Aesthetic B, a broader, multi-dimensional perspective. The list of characteristics differentiating Aesthetic A and Aesthetic B relate to the teaching of music, the process of music education. Emphasizing product and performance, stressing the importance of skill building and relying on classical repertoire are characteristics related to the traditional viewpoint, or Aesthetic A. These characteristics are contrasted with those related to Aesthetic B; the emphasis is placed on process and participation, stress is placed on social value and feeling, and vernacular repertoire is used. Pascale makes the point that Aesthetic B is not meant to replace "traditional" thinking but is a broadening of the perspective. Two questions emerge from Pascale's two aesthetics. First, is there a commonly held "traditional" culture of singing that exists in schools today? Schools and learning populations in the United States are so diverse it is hard to imagine a single philosophy driving music education. Second, does Aesthetic B add new dimensions, or does it describe a balance that is necessary in any philosophy that... (shrink)

What explains the unique features of human culture? Culture is not uniquely human, but human culture is uniquely cumulative. Cumulative culture is a product of our collective intelligence and is supported by cognitive processes and learning strategies that enable people to acquire, transform, and transmit information and technologies within and across generations. Technological and social innovations are currently driving unprecedented changes in cultural complexity and diversity. Innovation is a cognitively and socially complex, multistep process that typically requires (cumulative) (...) cultural learning to achieve. I argue that the technological solutions that characterize twenty-first-century innovation can only be explained by understanding both the capacity to learn from and build upon the insights of others and the transmission systems that store the knowledge and technologies of previous generations. Human uniqueness is a product of cumulative cultural learning, transmission, and innovation. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is the first comprehensive analysis of educational themes across the entirety of the critical theorist's diverse writings. Starting with Benjamin's early reflections on teaching and learning, Tyson E. Lewis argues that the aesthetic and cultural forms to which Benjamin so often turned-namely, radio broadcasts, children's theatrical productions, collections, cityscapes, public cinemas, and word games-swell with educational potentialities. What emerges from Lewis's reading is a constellational curriculum composed of minor practices such as poor teaching, absentminded (...) learning, and nondurational studying. This curriculum carries political significance, offering an antidote to past and present forms of fascist manipulation, hardness, and coldness. Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is a testimony to Benjamin's belief that "everyone is an educator and everyone needs to be educated and everything is education.". (shrink)

The basic conception of this paper is to conceptualise learning as a change in relation between a person and the world through change in his/her capacity for tool use and interpretation of artefacts. Further this relation has to be defined within a context (state, societal field, institutional practice and person’s activity). Both context and tool/artefact have to be seen as objectification of human needs and intentions already invested with cognitive and affective content.

This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook (...) surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary psychology (CEP) accounts for the cultural evolution of cognition. It is based on evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory and aims at a synthetic attempt which is achieved by what we want to call ‘generalization by recursion’. We argue in this paper that the evolutionary psychology program as a whole could greatly benefit from CEP’s generalization. As we will show, there is one theoretical element in particular, that CEP relevantly generalizes in contrast to its predecessors. (...) It comes from cultural evolutionary theory and has been referred to as the ‘dual inheritance argument’. CEP’s novelty consists in showing that not only cognitive products (‘grist’) but also cognitive mechanisms (‘mills’) are subject to cultural evolution and provides lots of empirical evidence for this claim. This account is ‘recursive’, because CEP’s generalization of the dual inheritance argument theoretically employs a recursive feedback-loop between cultural learning and cultural evolution. We also argue that this account might be considered to supersede unificatory and reductionistic efforts of its competitors, because it is stronger than purely structural or analogical unification while at the same time it is not too strong in order to fall prey to implausible reductionism. (shrink)

The perception of separation between school and home/community is related to diminished achievement in school and lack of motivation to learn STEM subjects. The National Council of Educational Research and Training is among many research organisations that have strongly recommended that schools bridge the disconnect between school-based knowledge and learners’ everyday knowledge. We designed the SPIRALS curriculum to bridge this gap between formal science and students’ everyday lives. SPIRALS helps students explore community-based practices to learn about science, environmental sustainability and (...) systems thinking. We implemented the SPIRALS curriculum in a private, urban, English medium school in Western India with approximately 315 students and their four teachers, 214 of whom also participated in the research from which our conclusions are drawn. Our findings about program impacts rely upon analysis of interviews with teachers and students, as well as student work, and conference participation assessment surveys distributed after a capstone experience at which students present their work. This chapter describes our findings about how students learned science, environmental sustainability, and systems thinking through engagement with community-based practices. We also discuss the process of how the SPIRALS approach worked in India and how it could be expanded into a broader learning model across different socio-cultural contexts within India. (shrink)

In classrooms, museums, health clinics and beyond, the educational uses of visual media have proliferated over the past fifty years. Film, video, television, and digital media have been integral to the development of new pedagogical theories and practices, globalization processes, and identity and community formation. Yet, Brian Goldfarb argues, the educational roles of visual technologies have not been fully understood or appreciated. He contends that in order to understand the intersections of new media and learning, we need to recognize (...) the sweeping scope of the technologically infused visual pedagogy—both in and outside the classroom. From Samoa to the United States mainland to Africa and Brazil, from museums to city streets, _Visual Pedagogy_ explores the educational applications of visual media in different institutional settings during the past half century. Looking beyond the popular media texts and mainstream classroom technologies that are the objects of most analyses of media and education, Goldfarb encourages readers to see a range of media subcultures as pedagogical tools. The projects he analyzes include media produced by AIDS/HIV advocacy groups and social services agencies for classroom use in the 1990s; documentary and fictional cinemas of West Africa used by the French government and then by those resisting it; museum exhibitions; and TV Anhembi, a municipally sponsored collaboration between the television industry and community-based videographers in São Paolo, Brazil. Combining media studies, pedagogical theory, and art history, and including an appendix of visual media resources and ideas about the most productive ways to utilize visual technologies for educational purposes, _Visual Pedagogy_ will be useful to educators, administrators, and activists. (shrink)

None of us can avoid being interested in food. Our very existence depends on the supply of safe, nutritious foods. It is then hardly surprising that food has become the focus of a wide range of ethical concerns: Is the food we buy safe? Is it produced by means which respect the welfare of animals and sustain the land? Are modern biotechnologies employed in food production immoral? This book addresses such issues by applying ethical principles to many areas of (...) current concern. The contributors provide original and thought-provoking treatments of a number of highly topical issues - from global hunger and its ethical implications to the cultural habits affecting consumption. This interdisciplinary study will prove to be essential reading for all those concerned with food, as professionals, students or consumers. (shrink)

This article examines recent ageing policies and the way they are framed. Here it identifies underlying but sometimes contradictory narratives of growth and decline. It concludes that the overall aim of such policies is to reconstitute elderly subjectivities, conduct and everyday experience in light of neoliberal ambitions for sustained economic growth and geopolitical anxieties about regional decline nurtured by an unprecedented demographic process of population ageing. As a consequence, the language of inclusion is judged to be of ambiguous value for (...) elderly people. Although the article is critical of the ways older people are perceived as a problem and of the solutions – such as pension reform, biopolitical-cum-economic behaviour modification and pronatalism – that are being pursued, in response it also finds some potential in current thinking for a more radical reappraisal of the elderly lifestyle and of the life cycle as a whole in relation to work regimes. It speculates that the generation of post-war baby boomers now approaching retirement just might rediscover resources in its counter-cultural memory to imagine a more emancipatory elder life congruent with a more sustainable environment. (shrink)

The main thesis of this article is that Western societies risk becoming Balkanized if they confront the superdiversity issue without sound management of intolerance. The Balkanization process has some essential features that allow the use of this term outside the area of origin (namely the Balkan Peninsula). Thus: It always affects a diverse political unit that comprises an inextricable medley of racial, ethnocultural, religious, ideological, or gender identities. It emerges only where neither the hegemony principle nor the confederacy principle can (...) sustain a divided population’s peaceful coexistence. It entails “antagonistic and conflict-oriented relationships resistant to resolution” between the groups or classes dissociated from a diverse political unit. It increases the density of physical and psychological boundaries between the formerly associated parts. It is perpetuated by the great sponsors of the dissociated parts. Any diverse political unit can enter a process of Balkanization, regardless of its degree of culture and civilization. Balkanization does not have a fatal course. Just as there is no society immune to Balkanization, there is no diverse society doomed to Balkanization. Balkanization can be prevented, checked, stopped, or reversed, depending on society members’ individual and collective actions. To survive, the superdiverse liberal democracies from the Euro-Atlantic area need an agonistic public sphere, where actionable truths emerge from a genuine clash of educated opinions. If intolerance management is the first step in preventing the Balkanization of a superdiverse political unit, promoting social and political tolerance towards all people who express educated opinions is the best starting point to genuine tolerance. The return to Enlightenment rationalism values that underpinned our freedom of thought and expression will help us meet the challenges inherent in current and future superdiversity. By feeding enlightened conversations and debates with genuine, educated opinions, people learn to have tolerance for “unpleasant” pieces of knowledge. Then, they spread general tolerance – as a by-product – across the entire society. (shrink)

Since the "Conference on Foreign Philosophy" held in Wuhu in October 1978, the study of foreign philosophy in China has undergone a prosperous stage. This article discusses the significance of the study of foreign philosophy in the context of renovation, transformation and remolding of Chinese contemporary culture, explores the role of the discipline in the context of Chinese cultural construction, and anticipates the future of this discipline. A cross-cultural perspective is needed for a proper understanding of the significance (...) of the learning and study of foreign philosophy in Chinese cultural construction; otherwise we might fall into cultural conservationism. Secondly, to make philosophy and social sciences prosperous is also a task for foreign philosophy studies, and whether or not foreign philosophy can be well studied should be a mark of the prosperousness of the construction of Chinese culture. Finally, philosophy is a product of human beings and should eventually serve human beings. Chinese culture should open itself up to the world and so should foreign philosophy studies in China. (shrink)

The aim of the present work is to make a plausible case for the phylogenetic origin of self-knowledge, one which is compatible with a prevalent view about its ontogenetic origin, the social-scaffolding view. Essentially, the phylogenetic origin is generally argued to be evaluative metacognition, i.e. a system of cognitive control mechanisms, while the ontogenetic origin is generally argued to be mindreading, i.e. cognitive capacities supporting mental state attribution. So put simply, the present work aims to provide a plausible solution to (...) the problem of how to establish metacognition as a significant precursor to mindreading. Previous attempts to establish metacognition as an evolutionary precursor to mindreading have struggled to account for the exact relevance that metacognition has for the origin of self-knowledge. This present work analyses this struggle as first having to solve ‘the problem of triviality’, explain how metacognitive mechanisms are more sophisticated than mechanisms enabling basic cognitive feats. Once this problem is solved, however, the problem develops into having to show that the added layers of sophistication warrant construing metacognition as a significant precursor to self-knowledge. This latter problem is analysed as the ultimate problem, referred to here as simply ‘the problem of the origin of self-knowledge’. Thus, the present work seeks to offer a plausible solution to both of these problems. The solution to these problems is argued to be embodied metacognition, cognitive control mechanisms that enable conscious self-control of information-seeking behavior through the production of strongly embodied feedback signals. These feedback signals, often called ‘noetic feelings’, are theorized to motivate, demotivate, and guide cognitive acts to be more accurate. Here it is argued that these signals are strongly embodied, characterizing conscious emotional states constituted by psychological imperatives, states with external manifestations in the form of bodily expressions that can be detected, monitored, and regulated by individuals in the subject’s socio-cultural environment. To argue for this, I augment evaluative metacognition in light of evidence from recent interoception-based research in metacognition which reveals the degree to which noetic feelings are strongly embodied. They are thus argued to be cerebrally generated feedback signals produced by cognitive comparators that become intricately intertwined with bodily processes. Recent evidence suggests these signals come to fulfill their role in cognition through the conscious perception (the interoception) of internal bodily changes, specifically cardiovascular changes, and hence the subtitle of the present work, “How We Feel Our Hearts to Know Our Minds”. Reconceptualizing evaluative metacognition as embodied metacognition provides us with the tools for solving the two problems above. Concerning the first, mechanisms enabling conscious self-control of cognition are clearly more sophisticated than mechanisms that enable basic feats of cognition, such as reinforcement learning. Moreover, appealing to strongly embodied noetic feelings offers the possibility of solving the first problem in such a manner that the second problem is also solved. As conscious expressions of emotions, noetic feelings demand robust information-seeking behaviours and manifest feelings of confidence and uncertainty externally, thus they are well-suited to link metacognition to the social-scaffolding view about the origin of self-knowledge. (shrink)

You can find countless books dedicated to student success and resilience. But what about the faculty? What do we do to help college faculty cultivate their professional and personal growth and resilience? During more than three decades as a teacher and workshop facilitator, Steve Piscitelli noticed that many educators can become isolated from their colleagues and their larger institutional culture. They become "islands" disconnected from the potential power of the teaching and learning community. That isolation can affect teaching efficacy (...) and resilience. To encourage educators to embrace the power of collaboration, Piscitelli outlines the "7Rs" for success: relationships, relevance, resources, rainbows, responsibility, reflection, and resilience. He created thirty-seven scenarios, based on real life issues. Each shows how to apply these seven themes to better adapt to professional and personal challenges educators face. The scenarios raise questions about the classroom, work-life integration, collaboration with coworkers, and interpersonal relationships with supervisors. Every teaching and learning situation-every one-gives us the opportunity to take stock of and strengthen our own resilience level. And we do not have to do it alone. That is the beauty of our calling! And that is the strength of this book. It recognizes the power of a collegial teaching and learning community. Piscitelli supplements the information and scenarios with links to brief thought-provoking videos (approximately sixty seconds each) that encapsulate major themes and discussion points. More information at www.stevepiscitelli.com. I think it's brilliant. I often feel like I'm on an island as a professor. -Ashli Archer, Professor I like how you let people know that even though you have developed a table of contents, they might want to skip around. The flexibility will be very appealing.-Erin Hoag, VP of Financial Services and Strategic Development, Innovative Educators This book will be a welcome resource! -Todd Stanislav, Director, Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning Wow, you are covering some controversial topics! This book is going to be different and invaluable!-Pam Ranallo, Co-Owner, Innovative Educators Your scenario addressing the issue of favoritism vs. jealousy demonstrates amazing insight and ability to address the "hard" topics. Bravo!-Karen Armstrong, Career Counselor I think this is a wonderful idea and have never seen anything along these lines before!-Mary Boone Treuting, Director of Center for Academic Success and the Center for Teaching Excellence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:W. T. Jones SOMNIO ERGO SUM: DESCARTES'S THREE DREAMS What is remarkable about Descartes's dreams is not that he dreamed (for even philosophers presumably dream), but that he wrote down a description of his dreams and of his interpretation of them and then kept this record for more than thirty years, until his death.* What is remarkable, in a word, is that this thinker, who prided himself on his (...) rationalism and who has come to represent, at least to philosophers, the very spirit of rationalism, should have taken his dreams so seriously. Philosophers—perhaps because the dreams conflict with their view of Descartes, perhaps because they conflict with their view of themselves and their discipline—have tended to play down the dreams or to ignore them altogether. Thus, though Bernard Williams, the author of a recent volume on Descartes, refers to the dreams as "a significant event," he proceeds in a footnote to undercut the adjective by quoting Christiaan Huygens, apparently with approval, to the effect that the dreams show "a great weakness [in Descartes], and I think that it will seem much the same to Catholics who have freed themselves from bigotry." If we try to free ourselves from what seems to be a standing philosophical prejudice against dreams and dreaming, what can Descartes's dreams tell us about his theories? That is the topic of this article. But first a caveat concerning my position on the interpretation of dreams generally. The interpreter of a dream, like the interpreter of other cultural products, has to try to steer a course between the Scylla of overinterpretation (reading into the dream something that is not expressed in it) and the Charybdis of underinterpretation (missing something that is actually expressed in the dream). My own bias leads me to fear overinterpretation more than underinterpretation; I had?Descartes's original Latin record of the dreams no longer survives. A new English translation by my colleague, John F. Benton, of a late seventeenth-century paraphrase of a portion of Descartes's text appears as an appendix to this article. 145 146Philosophy and Literature rather go aground on Charybdis than be shipwrecked on the Scylla of the Freudians and the Jungians.2 I am skeptical of interpretations of Descartes's dreams that are not supported by nondream materials—on the assumption that any dynamic element expressed in the dreams that is not also expressed in nondream materials is unlikely to be of much importance for understanding Descartes's thought. Therefore, instead of beginning with the dreams and then looking here and there in nondream materials for supporting evidence, I shall begin with nondream materials and only later turn to the dreams. In a word, I shall try to read back both from nondream material and from dream material to dynamic elements which may be present in, and shaping, both. My hope is that the uncovering of these elements will result in a better understanding of nondream and dream material alike. I Accordingly, I shall begin with a brief account of some of the themes of two of Descartes's best known philosophical writings, The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). The Discourse is particularly relevant to our inquiry because it "covers" the period in which the dreams occur, but in a very different medium from that of the Olympica and at a later date. The Discourse was in fact a discreet, as it were sanitized, version of the whole long voyage of discovery in which the dreams were but one, if nonetheless a critical, episode. Descartes tells us he had been educated "at one of the most celebrated schools in Europe" and had not beenjudged by his instructors "inferior" to his fellow students. Yet, on completing his course of study, he found himself "embarrassed with so many doubts and errors" that the only result of his efforts to instruct himself had been the "increasing discovery" of his own ignorance. Having gone through all the sciences of his time—languages, literature, rhetoric, theology, philosophy—without learning anything of consequence, he had then turned to travel, to seeing courts and armies, hoping thereby to discover the answers he sought "in... (shrink)