Higher education institutions are increasingly relying on learning analytics to collect voluminous amounts of data ostensibly to inform student learning interventions. The use of learning analytics, however, can result in a tension between the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) principles of autonomy and non-malfeasance on the one hand, and the principle of beneficence on the other. Given the complications around student privacy, informed consent, and data justice in addition to the potential to do harm, many (...) current practices around learning analytics within higher education can be considered to be in violation of CAS standards. This paper aims to explore this tension in greater detail and argues that the student voice offers a promising way to ensure that students’ autonomy is respected, harm is reduced, and that higher education institutions can still fulfil the principle of beneficence. (shrink)

Constitutionalism offers a governance order a set of normative values including, amongst others, the rule of law, divisions of power and democratic legitimacy. These normative values regulate the relationship between constituent and constituted power holders. Such normative constitutional legal orders are commonplace in domestic systems but the global constitutionalisation debate seeks to identify a constitutional narrative beyond the state. This book considers the manner in which the global constitutionalisation debate has neglected constitutionalism within its proposals. It examines the role normative (...) constitutionalism plays within a constitutionalisation process, and considers the use of community at both the domestic and global governance levels to identify the holders of constituent and constituted power within a constitutional order. In doing so this analysis offers an alternative narrative for global constitutionalisation based within normative constitutionalism. (shrink)

Social work supervision is a forum in which social workers and supervisors have the opportunity to explore ethics within their practice. It is also where social workers experience ongoing learning and development regarding ethics. This article is a selective review of social work supervision and ethics literature. Key areas identified are: 1) the role of supervision in the monitoring and development of ethical social work practice; 2) supervisors’ knowledge and application of codes of ethics, ethical theories, principles and ethical decision-making (...) models; 3) ethical supervisory relationships, processes and practices. A lack of research evidence was identified regarding the application of ethics within supervision and in relation to the interactional process of ethical exploration, inquiry and dialogue within sessions. Considering this lack of evidence, we propose that ethics be integrated throughout the supervision process through the development of care ethics culture, ethical sensitivity and ethical dialogue. The article concludes with recommendations about bringing ethics to the forefront in supervision. Recommendations are also made concerning further research pertaining to the monitoring and development of ethical social work practice through supervision, supervisors’ ethics knowledge, the interactional process of ethical supervisory practice with supervisees and the influence of organisational culture upon ethics and supervision. (shrink)

This investigation addresses a pressing anxiety of our time - that of homelessness. Tersely stated, the philosophical significance of homelessness in its more modern context can be understood to emerge with Nietzsche and his discourse on nihilism, which signals the loss of the highest values hitherto. Diverging from Nietzsche, Heidegger interprets homelessness as a symptom of the oblivion of being. The purpose of the present enquiry is to rigorously confront humanity's state of homelessness, and at the same time illumine the (...) extent to which Heidegger's thought engages with this pervasive phenomenon. In questioning the nature of homelessness, Heidegger's preoccupations with nihilism and modern technology prove crucial. Moreover, his attempts to overcome or prepare for the overcoming of this state of homelessness are also of great import to the current investigation. Adorno and Lèvinas offer scathing critiques of Heidegger's thought as it relates to the motifs of homelessness, homecoming (Heimkunft) and the German Heimat, for they associate it with provincialism, paganism, and a pernicious form of politics. In providing these critiques they bring to light the risks involved in undertaking a homecoming venture, and they also show how a great thinker can err greatly. While acknowledging the importance of these criticisms, the present study reveals how Heidegger's various discourses on homelessness and homecoming bear fruitful insights that can contribute not just to a Germanic sense of homecoming but to a sense of homecoming that humanity at large can relate to and be enriched by. (shrink)

PATHOS is not the same thing as suffering, though, of course, it is bound up with suffering, just as it is bound up with contingency and loneliness. We suffer when somebody dies whom we loved, but pathos makes its appearance only when we turn up a letter and find in it some characteristic turn of expression, brave and cheerful perhaps in face of pain or disappointment, or an old jacket, or a pipe, or things arranged in a certain way in (...) a bedroom or kitchen. Not that pathos has to wait on death: the boy in John McGahern’s novel The Dark sits by the fire at night after his father has gone to bed, and his mood of enmity and disgust is disturbed and broken by the sight of the heavy country shoes his father had thrown carelessly aside—he meets pathos for the first time, and is deeply changed by it, even though the external father-son relationship seems to remain unchanged.…What has happened in this case is that the boy’s personality has been extended in the direction of manhood; suffering was nothing new to him but this was something new, a new dimension, new horizons of the spirit. (shrink)

This is a follow-up to The Future of Belief, and it resumes and develops all the main themes of that very controversial book: the dehellenisation of philosophy and theology, the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, the identification of man and consciousness, the radical mutability of dogma, the assertion that God does not exist since He is beyond being, and the attendant distinction between being and reality. There is, in fact, little or nothing that is new in the way (...) of thesis or conclusion; Professor Dewart is concerned rather with re-examining and strengthening the foundations of his position. The Future of Belief was a kind of manifesto addressed to the world at large; the present book is more technical, and seems to be addressed to philosophers and theologians: at least it is doubtful whether anybody else will have the patience and mental equipment to read it through. Even at that the book is heavy going, and the task of reading it is not sufficiently lightened by the realisation that something important is being said. This, however, is a personal judgment : a very competent Catholic scholar has already hailed the Foundations as the book that will dominate Christian thinking for the next decade or so. (shrink)

EXISTENCE EXISTS. I imagine that this statement will seem to many people to be either meaningless or false or pointless. In what follows I shall try to show that the statement is meaningful, true, important.

DR JOSEPH BOBIK’S article The First Part of the Third Way is a notable contribution to the literature on the subject. Anybody who has wrestled with the text itself—a text as profound and disconcerting as anything St Thomas has written—will be grateful for the many fine elucidations the article provides, and will be grateful especially for the fact that he has kept to the text itself as given in Summa Theologiae I, q 2, a 3 and has not read into (...) it some argument of his own. This method is particularly helpful and fruitful when there is question of pointing to a flaw in the argument. Against Kant and against most critics of the argument no defence is possible, for no real effort has been made to understand the argument in its own terms, within its own ‘thought-world’—one can of course insist that the attack is misdirected, but this kind of non-discussion scarcely serves the common pursuit of truth and will never enlarge anybody’s horizons. Dr Bobik, on the other hand, is able to point to the exact proposition in the text which he finds faulty and he is in a position to situate this proposition in the general context of Thomist metaphysics. In such circumstances there is everything to be gained by a further examination of the proposition and its context. (shrink)

The predicament with which Professor Paton is concerned is that of religion in an intellectual climate in which its continued survival is becoming more and more difficult, the climate of modern science. The seventh chapter entitled “Intellectual Impediments” states the difficulty very strongly: religion is under fire from physics, biology, i.e., evolution, psychology, history. Professor Paton is concerned with what is left of religion after these partial defeats and he hopes, with a modesty which does not succeed in hiding itself, (...) to “induce some of the indifferent to consider the possibility that religion may not be all nonsense, but may contain something precious without which life may be incomplete”. (shrink)

This book explores and examines current topics and issues in teacher education through the lens of eight practicing teachers. Their voices add a new perspective on the effectiveness and practicality of current trends and reforms in teacher education.

This book explores and examines current topics and issues in teacher education through the lens of eight practicing teachers. Their voices add a new perspective on the effectiveness and practicality of current trends and reforms in teacher education.

Qualitative research is a key form of research in education; the findings of such projects frequently play a central role in shaping policy and practice. First time qualitative researchers require clear and practical guidance from the outset. However, given the diversity of both subject matter and methodological approaches encompassed by qualitative research, such guidance is not always easily come by. _Qualitative Educational Research in Action: Doing and Reflecting_ is a collection of ten first-hand accounts by educational researchers of qualitative inquiries (...) they carried out. The subjects are diverse, taking in school restructuring, policy analysis, critical literacy, phenomenology and the student teacher relationship. Each chapter outlines the research question investigated and provides an overview of the project's findings, before going on to describe how each researcher approached the challenges of their particular inquiry. The researchers reflect upon the unexpected turns qualitative research can take and the way such projects can move through different theoretical and methodological positions, often ending up significantly removed from the original premise, but all the more valuable for that. Anyone conducting qualitative research in education will be heartened and inspired by this collection, and will also find in it invaluable guidance on dealing effectively with the idiosyncrasies and pitfalls of qualitative research - guidance that is all the more valuable for coming from those who have themselves navigated similar difficulties. (shrink)

Radical curriculum policy transformations are emerging as a key strategy of universities across different countries as they move to strengthen their competitive position in a global knowledge era. This paper puts forward a ?global case study? research agenda in the under-researched area of university curriculum policy. The particular curriculum policies to be investigated point to potentially new forms of liberal education, and they resonate in varying degrees with contemporary patterns in Europe as well as longer standing patterns in the United (...) States. This research agenda stands to make a unique contribution with its ?whole curriculum? approach to: the examination of the relationship between curriculum content, pedagogy and assessment; the tracking of curriculum policy borrowing across different jurisdictions extending between global and local levels; and the investigation of historical antecedents of contemporary curriculum policy patterns. In particular, the proposed agenda features a rare combination of spatial and temporal dimensions of university curriculum policy flows. This research agenda will provide a strong empirical evidence base for extending theory building about university curriculum policy development, as well as policy ?learning? for policy makers, practitioners and scholars ? globally. (shrink)