Reflecting on the past is often a critical ingredient for successful learning. The current research investigated how counterfactual thinking, reflecting on how prior experiences might have been different, motivates effective learning from these previous experiences. Specifically, we explored how the structure of counterfactual reflection – their additive (‘‘If only I had”) versus subtractive (‘‘If only I had not”) nature – influences performance in dyadic-level strategic interactions. Building on the functionalist account of counterfactuals, we found across two experiments that generating additive (...) counterfactuals about a previous negotiation produced an advantage for negotiators over their previous performance compared to subtractive counterfactuals, both in terms of obtaining value for oneself and conceiving creative agreements. Additive counterfactuals enabled negotiators to more effectively extract lessons from past experiences to improve their current negotiation performance. (shrink)

Animals routinely adapt to changes in the environment in order to survive. Though reinforcement learning may play a role in such adaptation, it is not clear that it is the only mechanism involved, as it is not well suited to producing rapid, relatively immediate changes in strategies in response to environmental changes. This research proposes that counterfactual reasoning might be an additional mechanism that facilitates change detection. An experiment is conducted in which a task state changes over time and the (...) participants had to detect the changes in order to perform well and gain monetary rewards. A cognitive model is constructed that incorporates reinforcement learning with counterfactual reasoning to help quickly adjust the utility of task strategies in response to changes. The results show that the model can accurately explain human data and that counterfactual reasoning is key to reproducing the various effects observed in this change detection paradigm. (shrink)

This article examines the problems and potential of Watsuji’s idea of education as ‘learning one’s place’. It begins with the theoretical foundations of this education in his view of space, time, and the practical nexus of acts, found in Ethics I. It then proceeds to his philosophy of education, first in Ethics II, and then in his heretofore under-researched book entitled Confucius. These will be connected to the contemporary discourse on Bildung and its implications for generality and agency in education. (...) However, Watsuji’s views bear the danger of traditional conservativism and a lack of freedom conferred on the individual, whereas individual freedom is essential to Bildung theory. These problems are explored in Ethics III via the questions of whether cultural and social change are possible as well as the role of individual agency in it. These allow us to arrive at a conditional possibility for Bildung in Watsuji that tries to connect people in a general way, while maintaining various forms of individual agency. (shrink)

Prolonged conflict on the southern Thailand border still continues, especially in four provinces – Pattani, Yala, Narathivat, and Satun. These four provinces are the home base of the Malay-Muslim community. However, conflicts have almost never occurred in the province of Phattalung, particularly in the region called ‘Two Religion Community Life’. This is because people can find solutions to every problem using cultural negotiation. This research aims to describe the results of cultural negotiation and social learning between Muslims and (...) Buddhists in solving daily life problems. The most important data collection techniques are in-depth interviews and observations. There are five critical informants chosen purposively: Islamic and Buddhist religious leaders, community leaders, school principals, and community members in the Tamot and Khaocan regions. The results found that there are several forms of cultural negotiation in Phattalung, including annual ritual prayers conducted together by Muslims and Buddhists, agreement on how to slaughter animals to be served during ceremonies, tradition of food bartering, and agreement on animal caring. Furthermore, social learning to preserve the results of the negotiations is carried out through the establishment of voluntary medical groups whose members consist of young men and women from the Muslim and the Buddhist community, sports and arts activities, commemorations of national holidays, and conducting annual religious rituals at the same place and time. This study also found four important aspects to strengthen the social learning in multireligious society – moderate values derived from their respective religious teachings, moderate values taught by the country, the existence of trust among citizens, and win-win solutions to the emerging problems. Contribution: This research promotes the world that there is a heterogeneous religious community in the Phattalung province, Thailand which has a building construction of tolerance and harmony of locality namely the ‘Two Religion Community Life’ by preserving the cultural negotiation values through social learning. (shrink)

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future and learn (...) about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children's play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary. (shrink)

The 1950s were a frenetic moment in the European integration process during which the European Economic Community (EEC), the ultimately abortive Free Trade Area (FTA), and subsequently the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) were all negotiated. Trade unions showed keen interest in these schemes; moreover, their own highly institutionalised cooperation suggested they might come to play a key role in shaping them. And yet scholars have argued how divergent traditions and domestic pressures precluded the emergence of a coherent trade union (...) platform on European unity. While not rejecting the structural weaknesses of union internationalism in this regard, this article asks why union centres nevertheless continued to engage with one another on the integration question. Focusing on the British Trade Unions Congress (TUC) and deploying a transnational approach to best understand the interaction between the national and international levels, it shows that union linkages still offered the TUC and its counterparts a valuable chance to learn from and persuade others – and even their governments – of their views, objectives and affairs. Such trade union diplomacy was thus in and of itself valuable despite wider union spats and misgivings, and did at times impact the broader language and approach of the countries involved. (shrink)

This article highlights the tension of sustaining tradition versus the need for change within theological education. Within denominations, there is the challenge of maintaining tradition while at the same time wanting to embrace change. If this is not managed properly, the tradition can become out of date when there is a focus on controlling through enforcing tradition and through indoctrination in education. This article presents the Church of the Nazarene, as a case study, where their theological education is tested against (...) an organic and indigenous framework highlighting the need for a contextual driven curriculum. There are various aspects within the tradition that are slow to adapt, where aspects of Western church polity and practices linger on thereby negatively impact the curriculum. However, if a contextual learning programme does not materialise students’ knowledge from the classroom will not match what they need to know once they reach the ministerial setting. This article examines pastoral training in the Church of Nazarene’s southern African region to emphasise the dichotomy between preserving tradition and the need to innovate in order to ensure its long-term viability.Contribution: This article reflects on the important balance of sustainability in a global church tradition, and it serves as a case study of issues commonly found in many denominations. It is about holding on to the core teachings that has stood the test of time but having the ability to be adaptative to the contextual needs of a region. Reasons are provided for the slow pace in change and ways to overcome this. This article contributes to the literature on the Church of Nazarene. (shrink)

Differential academic language proficiency is an issue of major educational concern, bearing on problems varying from pupil performance, to social prospects, and citizenship. In this paper we develop a conception of the language‐acquiring subject, and we discuss the consequences for understanding differential language proficiency in schools. Starting from Wittgenstein's meaning‐as‐use theory we show that learning a language requires an activity that relates the subject both to the community of language users, and to the things language is about. In opposition to (...) Luntley, we contend that this does not mean that linguistic development involves linguistic adjustment to the world ‘as it is’. It is argued that, in as far as linguistic development involves a process of adjustment, this concerns conceptions about the world as it is presupposed to be—a ‘world’ that is subjected to doubt and revision time and again. With respect to dealing with differential academic language proficiency, this approach to linguistic development suggests bringing pupils into situations which require active participation in processes of ‘negotiating meaning’, including negotiating the prevailing presuppositions about what the world is like. This also puts novices in a different position—less assimilatory—recognising their co‐constructive potencies at a more fundamental level. (shrink)

This paper offers two novel conceptual tools: one concerning the semantics of counterfactuals and what should be held fixed when assessing them (the modal moat), and the other concerning the pragmatics of counterfactual assertions and how to avoid the potential pitfalls of meaning more than we say (antecedent gluttony). These allow us to address existing issues with the assessment of backwards counterfactuals within a framework that applies equally to forwards cases. In addition to solving a thorny problem from the time (...) travel literature, what we learn teaches us something quite general about our evaluation of counterfactuals. (shrink)

This case study explores the use of collaborative book clubs and word sorts to influence teacher positionality in an undergraduate social studies methods course for pre-service teachers. Drawing upon existing literature that suggests the effectiveness of dialogue as a means of navigating prior beliefs and the benefits of collaborative spaces for teachers to engage in collegial discussions, the study utilized books surrounding socio-political themes and educational inequalities to prompt conversation among participants. Results of the study suggest that dialogic and collaborative (...) activities like word sorts and book clubs provide productive opportunities for pre-service teachers to (re)negotiate their positionalities and grapple with their existing assumptions as they learn and co-construct meaning from and with one another. At the same time, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of privilege and identity seem to remain somewhat unexamined and the teachers remain hesitant about the practical reality of working to dismantle inequalities in their own classrooms. (shrink)

In four experiments, we explored the inferences people make when they learn that counterfactual thinking has occurred. Experiment 1 showed that knowing that a protagonist had engaged in counterfactual thinking resulted in participants inferring that the past event was closer in time to the protagonist, but there was no difference in inferring how close the past event was between knowing that a protagonist made many or a single counterfactual statement. Experiment 2 confirmed that participants were not affected by the number (...) of counterfactual statements they read when inferring temporal closeness. Experiment 3 demonstrated that participants who learned that a protagonist had engaged in counterfactual thinking were more likely to infer that the protagonist experienced the controllable event. Experiment 4 indicated that participants who learned that a protagonist had engaged in counterfactual thinking were more likely to infer that the protagonist experienced the exceptional event. We concluded that the existence of counterfactual thoughts can lead people to infer that events were close, exceptional, and controllable, which suggests that the relations between closeness/controllability/exceptionality and counterfactual thinking are bidirectional. These results showed that as well as making inferences based on facts about the real world, people also make inferences about the real world based on hypothetical worlds. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ perceptions of teaching and learning in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of engaged pedagogy and the ideas of bell hooks. It aimed to explore the different ways that teachers experienced teaching and learning during this time and the impact this may have had on teacher identity. Sixty teachers and head teachers were interviewed using MS Teams in the period April-June, 2020. For this paper, 18 transcripts were analyzed by members (...) of the research team. Four key themes emerged from the interview data: Working from home, parental engagement, teacher identity, and changes in pedagogy. Each of these themes were discussed in terms of concepts such as engaged pedagogy, agency, self-actualization, recognition and boundary transgression situated in the work of bell hooks. The idea of boundaries wove itself throughout our data as teachers expressed how the transgression of boundaries was occurring in multiple, and often contradictory, ways in pedagogical, professional, institutional and personal spaces and systems. We see in our data evidence of a shift in practice not just in the way teachers are ‘doing’ education but also, perhaps, in the way that teachers are ‘being’ as educators as they adapt to different ways of knowing. This study provides a unique exploration of a time and space in Scotland during 2020. However, the themes and understandings that emerged are of relevance to educators internationally. Schools across the world were impacted by various lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and teachers faced a common set of challenges that were resolved via re-negotiation and recognition of individual and collective agency to create new pedagogies. (shrink)

The Brundtland Report popularized the concept of sustainable development as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability for future generations to meet their own needs.” Twenty years later a United Nations report argued that current development strategies are inadequate for achieving sustainable development beyond 2015. Any approach to sustainability requires the negotiation and reconfiguration of resources, the consideration of the different stakeholder perceptions to uncertainty and its communication and the continuous recognition of potential threats. This paper (...) aims to enhance current frameworks on sustainability and contribute to management decision making by drawing upon the teachings of the Sikh Gurus. The paper begins with a summary of the main challenges in implementing the sustainability agenda; it then discusses a number of common sustainability frameworks and draws out a set of common limitations. The teachings of the Sikh Gurus are then introduced to provide unique insights into how their understanding of the universe might contribute to some general lessons that can support current sustainability frameworks and related decision making. Next, the paper considers System Archetypes, and in particular the “Limits to Growth”, as mechanisms for gaining insight into the patterns of behaviours that underpin the potential for less unsustainable futures. The paper combines the sustainability frameworks and Sikh teachings to suggest an integrated whole systems approach, across time and space that can throw a new light on the nexus of sustainable development. (shrink)

Clinicians and administrators have a professional obligation to contribute (OTC) to improvement of healthcare quality. At the same time, participation in embedded research poses risks to healthcare institutions. Disclosure of an institution’s sensitive information could endanger relationships with patients and undermine its reputation. The existing ethical framework (EF) for learning healthcare systems (LHSs) does not address the conflict between the OTC and institutional interests. Ethical guidance and policy regulation are needed to create a safe environment for embedded research. In this (...) article we analyse the EF for LHSs and the concept of professionalism. We suggest that the EF should be supplemented with an obligation to protect provider’s legitimate interests. We define legitimate interests as those that enable providers to discharge their primary duties. We argue that both the OTC and the obligation to protect legitimate interests are grounded in the concept of medical professionalism and can be understood as a matter of contract between a democratic society and medical professionals. The proposed supplemented EF can be implemented into a regulatory system in three different ways: theself-regulating: where providers decide themselves how to balance the ethical claims, the centralised: where a governmental institution decides the right balance between providers’ interests and interests of a health system; and themediating: where medical professionals, the state and patients negotiate their interests. Our article contributes to the discussion on ethical relevance of providers’ interests and the regulatory model for weighing opposite interests in LHSs. (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)

Cultural appropriation is a timely topic that has been taking up a lot of space in public discussions. The concept is often applied in heated debates aimed at calling out’ different actors and actions as appropriation, or on the other hand to defend against such accusations. This thematic issue seeks to look at the topic from a broader and more nuanced perspective, asking what different expressions of appropriation appear in the field of and in relation to religion and spirituality. What (...) discourses and discussions emerge around instances of religious and spiritual appropriation? And how is appropriation understood, negotiated or problematized within, across and around different religious and spiritual groups? The publication is part of the research project ‘Learning from Religion and Spirituality’ (Academy of Finland 2019-2023) [325148]. (shrink)

The current times call for reforms in educational processes. The Covid-19 pandemic had an unforeseen impact on the educational system in all countries. This need for change requires new pedagogies and new methods for teaching and learning. Understanding the need for change is essential for the formulation of adaptive proposals, as well as for the generation of training activities to complement the teaching curriculum. New educational practices lead to a vision of educational quality, with new approaches that allow the continuous (...) integration of knowledge and permanent interaction with the student. This paper presents an analysis of the new teaching methodologies in times of confinement due to the pandemic caused by Covid-19. Keywords: Teaching methodologies, educational system, learning process. References [1]É. Tremblay-Wragg, C. Raby, L. Ménard y I. Plante, «El uso de estrategias didácticas diversificadas por cuatro profesores universitarios: ¿qué contribución a la motivación de aprendizaje de sus alumnos?,» Docencia en educación superior, vol. 26, nº 21, 2021. [2]L. Czerniewicz, R. Mogliacci, S. Walji, A. Cliff, B. Swinnerton y N. Morris, «Enseñanza y aprendizaje académico en el nexo: desagregación, mercantilización y digitalización en la educación superior,» Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 26, nº 2021, p. 16, 2021. [3]S. Dogan y A. Adam, «Aumentar el efecto del desarrollo profesional en la instrucción efectiva a través de comunidades profesionales,» Docentes y docencia: teoría y práctica, vol. 26, nº 3-4, pp. 326-349, 2020. [4]I. M. Torres Salas, «La enseñanza tradicional de las ciencias versus las nuevas tendencias educativas,» Educare, vol. 14, nº 1, pp. 131-142, 2010. [5]B. Fabio, J. Antonio Palomino y J. González Henríquez, «Evaluación y contraste de los métodos de enseñanza tradicional y lúdico,» Revista de Educación física y deportes, vol. 13, nº 94, pp. 29-36, 2008. [6]Y. Benítez y C. Mora, «Enseñanza tradicional vs aprendizaje activo,» Revista Cubana de Física, vol. 27, nº 2A, pp. 175-179, 2010. [7]P. Morales Bueno y V. Landa Fitzgerald, «Aprendizaje basado en problemas,» Theoria, vol. 13, nº 1, pp. 145-157, 2004. [8]R. Gil-Galván, I. Martín-Espinosa y F. Gil-Galván, «University student perceptions of competences acquired through problem-based learning,» Educación XXI, vol. 24, nº 1, pp. 271-295, 2020. [9]E. Ortiz Cermeño, «El aprendizaje basado en problemas,» Perfiles Educativos, vol. 41, nº 164, pp. 208-213, 2019. [10]E. Araos-Baeriswyl, C. Moll-Manzur, Á. Paredes y J. Landeros, «Aprendizaje invertido: un enfoque pedagógico en tiempos de pandemia,» Rev. Atención Primaria, vol. 53, nº 1, p. 117, 2021. [11]V. León-Carrascosa, M. Belando-Montoro y S. Sánchez-Serrano, «Design and validation of a questionnaire to evaluate the service-learning methodology,» Rev.Estudios sobre educación, vol. 39, nº 1, pp. 247-266, 2020. [12]J. Collado-Ruano, M. Ojeda, M. Malo y D. Amino, «Educación, arte e interculturalidad: El cine documental como lenguaje comunicativo y tecnología innovadora para el aprendizaje de la metodología I + D + I,» Rev. Texto livre, vol. 13, nº 3, pp. 376-393, 2020. [13]P. M. Bueno y V. Landa Fitzgerald, «Aprendizaje basado en problemas,» Theoria, vol. 13, nº 1, pp. 145-157, 2004. [14]J. A. Martí, M. Heydrich, M. Rojas y A. Hernández, «Aprendizaje basado en proyectos: Una experiencia de innovación docente,» Universidad EAFIT, vol. 46, nº 158, pp. 11-21, 2010. [15]L. Rojas y N. M. Jaimes, «Canvas LMS y el trabajo colaborativo como metodología de aprendizaje en entornos virtuales,» de Congreso Ibérico de Sistemas y Tecnologías de la Información, CISTI, Bogotá, Colombia, 2020. [16]B. Bordel y P. Mareca, «Results and Trends in educational MOOCs in the engineering area with MIRIADAX platform. A case study,» de 15th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies, CISTI 2020; Seville; Sevilla, España, 2020. [17]K. Vermeir y G. Kelchtermans, «Innovative practice as interpretative negotiation.A case-study on the kamishibai in Kindergarten.,» Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, vol. 26, nº 3-4, pp. 248-263, 2020. [18]B. Tucker, «The Flipped Classroom: Online instruction at home frees class time for learning,» Education Next, vol. 1, nº 1, pp. 82-84, 2012. [19]M. V. Ledo, N. R. Michelena, N. N. Cao, I. d. R. M. Suárez y M. N. Vialart Vidal, « Aula invertida, nueva estrategia didáctica,» Educación Médica Superior, vol. 30, nº 3, pp. 678-688, 2016. [20]Metodologías activas por medio de las TIC, [Online]. Available: https://www.campuseducacion.com/blog/recursos/articulos-campuseducacion metodologias-activas-por-medio-de-las-tic/?cn-reloaded=1. [Last access: February 14, 2021]. (shrink)

Meeting others abroad and/or online is considered important in the broad field of intercultural communication education (amongst others: international education, minority and migrant education, but also teacher education, language education) to test out one’s learning about interculturality. For several weeks, a group of university students from China and a group of local and international students studying at a Finnish university met regularly online to talk about global educational issues. Using a specific lens of interculturality, which focuses on the discursive co-construction (...) of identities, we explore their initial interactions, how they deal with the uncertainty and potential awkwardness of their very first encounters, before they start working on their educational tasks. Based on the students’ self-disclosure (practices, thoughts, identity construction), and adopting a dialogical discourse analysis, the authors examine their co-construction of interculturality. The results show that the students try to facilitate interculturality while promoting it together more or less successfully. Reasons are discussed. The authors argue that research on the underexplored case of online initial interactions, which represent crucial moments in establishing and negotiating interculturality, could provide important research and pedagogical input for intercultural telecollaboration. (shrink)

Using a multiple-trial stock market decision paradigm, the possibility that counterfactual thinking can be dysfunctional for learning and performance by distorting the processing of outcome information was examined. Correlational (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) evidence suggested that counterfactuals are associated with a decrease in experiential learning. When counterfactuals were made salient, participants displayed significantly poorer performance compared to their counterparts for whom counterfactuals were relatively less salient. A counterfactual salience ? need for cognition (NFC) interaction qualified these findings. High (...) NFC participants outperformed their counterparts when counterfactuals were not salient. Evidence for a memory-based mechanism was also supported. (shrink)

The WTO’s nine day sprint in July 2008 was an attempt to break the logjam on “modalities” for agriculture and NAMA in the marathon Doha Round negotiations. All that observers can know for certain is that the parties did not agree, but understanding the failure is an essential prelude to any attempt to relaunch the Round. This paper is a counterfactual analysis of the various explanations that have been offered for the failure. I consider factors exogenous to the negotiation (...) process, such as the macroeconomic context; and factors endogenous to the process such as the timing and level of participation in the meeting, and the nature of the issues under discussion. I conclude that sprinting during a marathon is unwise. The London G-20 Summit commitment to a balanced outcome is achievable, but assembling a package with so many issues involving 153 members takes time and patience. (shrink)

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples (...) as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between regret and episodic memory, the temporal structure of ‘regretful memory’, the affective and evaluative dimension of regretful memory and the counterfactual dimension of regretful memory. Based on Husserl’s phenomenology, I offer an analysis of regret’s complex structures of intentionality and time-consciousness. Husserl held that episodic memory requires two temporal orientations on one’s own experience: the past now that one relives and the present now in which one does the reliving. If (...) memory generally entails two temporal perspectives, regretful memory brings in a third point of temporal reference: that now that could have been. Drawing on Hoerl and McCormack, I give an account of regret as a mnemic and counterfactual form of intentional consciousness that confronts an alternative past and attempts to negotiate between two essential yet conflicting features of its actual past: its contingency and its irreversibility. On this basis, I then draw on Bagnoli to offer a phenomenological theory of regretful memory as an emotional mode of valuing possibilities that belong to the past. (shrink)

In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1–3). The more that participants reported having mentally simulated morally better ways in which they could (...) have acted, the stronger their intentions were to improve in the future (Studies 2 and 3). Implementing an experimental manipulation, we then found that making accessible a morally upward counterfactual after committing a moral transgression strengthened reported intentions for moral improvement—relative to resimulating the remembered event and considering morally worse ways in which they could have acted instead (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these results for competing theoretical views on the relationship between memory and morality and for functional theories of counterfactual thinking. (shrink)

Collaborators generally coordinate their activities through communication, during which they readily negotiate a shared lexicon for activity-related objects. This social-pragmatic activity both recruits and affects cognitive and social-cognitive processes ranging from selective attention to perspective taking. We ask whether negotiating reference also facilitates category learning or might private verbalization yield comparable facilitation? Participants in three referential conditions learned to classify imaginary creatures according to combinations of functional features—nutritive and destructive—that implicitly defined four categories. Remote partners communicated in the Dialogue condition. (...) In the Monologue condition, participants recorded audio descriptions for their own later use. Controls worked silently. Dialogue yielded better category learning, with wider distribution of attention. Monologue offered no benefits over working silently. We conclude that negotiating reference compels collaborators to find communicable structure in their shared activity; this social-pragmatic constraint accelerates category learning and likely provides much of the benefit recently ascribed to learning labeled categories. (shrink)

The real-world navigation of ethics-in-practice versus the bureaucracy of institutional ethics remains challenging. This is especially true for research with children and young people who may be co...

Recent work has shown that the input-output behavior of some common machine learning classifiers can be captured in symbolic form, allowing one to reason about the behavior of these classifiers using symbolic techniques. This includes explaining decisions, measuring robustness, and proving formal properties of machine learning classifiers by reasoning about the corresponding symbolic classifiers. In this work, we present a theory for unveiling the _reasons_ behind the decisions made by Boolean classifiers and study some of its theoretical and practical implications. (...) At the core of our theory is the notion of a _complete reason,_ which can be viewed as a necessary and sufficient condition for why a decision was made. We show how the complete reason can be used for computing notions such as sufficient reasons (also known as PI-explanations and abductive explanations), how it can be used for determining decision and classifier bias and how it can be used for evaluating counterfactual statements such as “a decision will stick even if...because....” We present a linear-time algorithm for computing the complete reasoning behind a decision, assuming the classifier is represented by a Boolean circuit of appropriate form. We then show how the computed complete reason can be used to answer many queries about a decision in linear or polynomial time. We finally conclude with a case study that illustrates the various notions and techniques we introduced. (shrink)

This study proposes a push notification system that combines digital real-time learning, roll-call, and feedback collection functions. With the gradually flourishing online real-time learning systems, this research further builds roll-call and feedback functions for students to enhance concentration and provide opinions. Additionally, the lecturers can do a roll call irregularly and randomly through the push notification function, avoiding students logging in but away from the keyboard. Lecturers can also send questions to a specific student or invite all students to answer; (...) the replies can show students' learning performance. The system will store each notification in a database and analyse messages automatically to record roll calls. Moreover, the system can record the time and intervals of student feedback, enabling lecturers to check students' attention and learning conditions. Currently, most online digital systems depend on the lecturer to be responsible for the entire system; taking a roll call and asking questions will consume the lecturer's teaching time and strength. The system developed in this article can do roll calls and feedback by push notifications, reducing lecturers' workload. Furthermore, the roll-call and automatic record functions can save the time of paperwork after a course. (shrink)

ExtractBrian Skyrms's Signals has the virtues familiar from his Evolution of the Social Contract and The Stag Hunt. He begins with a very simple model of agents in interaction, and in a series of brief and beautifully clear chapters, this model and its successors are explored, elaborated, connected and illustrated through biological theory and the social sciences. Signals borrows its core model from David Lewis: it is Lewis's signalling game. In this game, two agents interact. One agent can observe which (...) of two equi-probable states the world is in, but that agent cannot act directly and profitably on that information. However, the informed agent can act in a way that will be perceptually salient to a second agent: say, by raising a red or a green flag. The second agent does have the capacity to respond appropriately to each state of the world. If that second agent chooses the right option, given the state of the world, both are rewarded. If the second agent fails to choose the right action, neither are. Obviously, the two agents are best off if they have a practice in which the informed agent regularly chooses a distinct, salient cue in response to each of the two world states, and in which the powerful agent uses that cue to select the rewarding act. Less obviously, agents with simple trial and error learning capacities can learn to signal and respond: neither explicit negotiation nor cognitive sophistication are required. Likewise, if individual agents do not have the capacity to learn, but if they breed true but with some variation, the evolutionary version of trial and error learning can take a population to one of the signalling system equilibria. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.A GLASS HALF-FULL: BRIAN SKYRMS'S SIGNALSVolume 28, Issue 1Kim Sterelny DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000120Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle email.@free.kindle.com@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. A GLASS HALF-FULL: BRIAN SKYRMS'S SIGNALSVolume 28, Issue 1Kim Sterelny DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000120Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. A GLASS HALF-FULL: BRIAN SKYRMS'S SIGNALSVolume 28, Issue 1Kim Sterelny DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000120Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Background: Informal coercion, that is, situations where caregivers use subtle coercive measures to impose their will on patients, is common in adult psychiatric inpatient care. It has been described as ‘a necessary evil’, confronting nurses with an ethical dilemma where they need to balance between a wish to do good, and the risk of violating patients’ dignity and autonomy. Aim: To describe nurses’ experiences of being involved in informal coercion in adult psychiatric inpatient care. Research design: The study has a (...) qualitative, inductive design. Participants and research context: Semi-structured interviews with 10 Swedish psychiatric nurses were analysed with qualitative content analysis. Ethical considerations: The study was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. In line with the Swedish Ethical Review Act, it was also subject to ethical procedures at the university. Findings: Four domains comprise informal coercion as a process over time. These domains contain 11 categories focusing on different experiences involved in the process: Striving to connect, involving others, adjusting to the caring culture, dealing with laws, justifying coercion, waiting for the patient, persuading the patient, negotiating with the patient, using professional power, scrutinizing one’s actions and learning together. Discussion: Informal coercion is associated with moral stress as nurses might find themselves torn between a wish to do good for the patient, general practices and ‘house rules’ in the caring culture. In addition, nurses need to be aware of the asymmetry of the caring relationship, in order to avoid compliance becoming a consequence of patients subordinating to nurse power, rather than a result of mutual understanding. Reflections are thus necessary through the process to promote mutual learning and to avoid violations of patients’ dignity and autonomy. Conclusion: If there is a need for coercion, that is, if the coercion is found to be an ‘unpleasant good’, rather than ‘necessary evil’ considering the consequences for the patient, it should be subject to reflecting and learning together with the patient. (shrink)

Recent authors have raised objections to the counterfactual interpretation of the Aharonov-Bergmann-Lebowitz rule of time-symmetrised quantum theory. I distinguish between two different readings of the ABL rule, counterfactual and non-counterfactual, and confirm that TSQT advocate L. Vaidman is employing the counterfactual reading to which these authors object. Vaidman has responded to the objections by proposing a new kind of time-symmetrised counterfactual, which he has defined in two different ways. It is argued that neither definition succeeds in overcoming the objections, except (...) in a limited special case previously noted by Cohen and Hiley. In addition, a connection is made between TSQT and Price's concept of 'advanced action', which further supports the special case discussed. (shrink)

The case of embryo research provides insight into the challenges for historians and philosophers of science who want to engage social issues, and even more challenges in engaging society. Yet there are opportunities in doing so. History and philosophy of science research demonstrates that the public impression of embryos does not fit with our scientific understanding. In cases where there are competing understandings of the phenomena and public impacts, we have to negotiate social responses. Historians and philosophers of science can (...) both inform and learn from engaging in the process, by helping to recognize underlying assumptions and by demonstrating changing ideas over time and what factors have caused the changes. (shrink)

The book addresses for the first time the dynamics associated with the modernization of mathematics in China from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century from a transcultural global historical perspective. Rather than depict the transformations of mathematical knowledge in terms of a process of westernization, the book analyzes the complex interactions between different scientific communities and the ways in which the past, modernity, language, and mathematics were negotiated in a global context. In each chapter, Andrea Bréard provides vivid portraits of (...) a series of go-betweens based on a vast array of translated primary sources hitherto unavailable to a non-Chinese readership. They not only illustrate how Chinese scholars mediated between new mathematical objects and discursive modes, but also how they instrumentalized their autochthonous scientific roots in specific political and intellectual contexts. While sometimes technical in style, the book addresses all readers who are interested in the global and cultural history of science and the complexities involved in the making of universal mathematics. “While the pursuit of modernity is in the title, entanglement is of as much interest. Using the famous ‘Nine Chapters’ as a framework, Bréard considers a wide range of that entanglement from divination to data management. Bréard’s analysis and thought-provoking insights show once again how much we can learn when two cultures intersect. A fascinating read!”. (shrink)

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3-5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children’s and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children’s laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize (...) children’s everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children’s laughter in detail. It was found that children’s laughter tended to be directed to children and adults’ laughter tended to be directed to adults. 87% of children’s laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2,7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground. (shrink)

Dewey in Our Time brings together leading writers from around the world who are actively engaged in applying Dewey's thought to the challenges facing educational systems and teachers in school. Issues concerning equity, social justice, curriculum and pedagogy, teachers' roles and their professional identity are considered, with examples from the Americas, Asia and Europe.

The use of counterfactuals for considerations of algorithmic fairness and explainability is gaining prominence within the machine learning community and industry. This paper argues for more caution with the use of counterfactuals when the facts to be considered are social categories such as race or gender. We review a broad body of papers from philosophy and social sciences on social ontology and the semantics of counterfactuals, and we conclude that the counterfactual approach in machine learning fairness and social explainability can (...) require an incoherent theory of what social categories are. Our findings suggest that most often the social categories may not admit counterfactual manipulation, and hence may not appropriately satisfy the demands for evaluating the truth or falsity of counterfactuals. This is important because the wide- spread use of counterfactuals in machine learning can lead to misleading results when applied in high-stakes domains. Accordingly, we argue that even though counterfactuals play an essential part in some causal inferences, their use for questions of algorithmic fairness and social explanations can create more problems than they resolve. Our positive result is a set of tenets about using counterfactuals for fairness and explanations in machine learning. (shrink)

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system of Britain and (...) in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing Universality:Postcolonial Theory and the Quandary of Ethical AgencyEsha Niyogi De (bio)Living in colonial India, the Bengali thinker and creative writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) often meditated on ways that "concord" (milan) and "harmony" (sāmanjasya) could be established between persons and cultures [BIC 450-51]. Noting that "ruptures in balance and harmony" (bhār sāmanjasyer abhāv) that once were more localized now affected the whole world, he maintained that these reinforced the (...) progressive message of the modern age that the local "problems of a people are a part and parcel of humankind's" (swajātir samasyā samasta mānusher samasyār antargata) [RC 279]. In his view, the means to reestablish harmony in this unequal world lay in social practices and ideas conducing "freedom" (mukti) rather than enforcing "power" (shakti) and "coercive discipline" (shāsan) [SaS 408-09]. He argued that such progressive trends of practice and thought would be found not in one culture alone but through traveling across different cultural "seas of knowledge (jnān)" [SwSm 699]. For only through such conceptual journeys would we enkindle in ourselves "arguments with and doubts about" (yukti tarka o sandeher udbhav) our own cultures, and also learn from all the "voyagers in the path of progress" (unnatipather yātri) who emerge in different locations and times [SJ 39-40].As these comments reveal, Rabindranath maintained that inequalities could be rectified by making individual and collective norms and actions accountable to and measurable in terms of a speculative notion of universal humanity. While alert to the injustices proliferating from European colonization, he insisted that coercive practices and imbalances of power could not be entirely localized, and that in order to correct multiple forms of coercion we must seek across cultures and societies for (partial) achievements of human freedom and harmony. In so viewing transcultural negotiations of a common humane proclivity as the means to decolonize the world, Rabindranath did not stand alone but in a diverse company of anti-imperialist thinkers who adapted modern humanism to their ends: W. E. B. Dubois—who lauded Rabindranath's appropriation of [End Page 42] such liberal notions as democracy and equal opportunity "for greater ends" than were allowed by the "inconsistencies" of a racist European perspective [74]—Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and from Rabindranath's own colonial context, the Bengali Anarchist poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (to name but a few). Reflecting upon worldwide experiences of subjection, these radical modern intellectuals tried above all to avoid reinventing separatism by declaring non-Western cultures to be unilaterally superior to Western imperialist culture. Driven by an activist ethics, they attempted instead to correct the roots of separatism through objectively evaluating, against a common frame of reference, right and wrong, relatively successful or failed practices of human empowerment and community.In this essay, I consider if and how we could characterize as "postcolonial" these evaluative ethics that rationally seek to correct coercive relations between persons and societies through referring to an affirmative idea of a human nature shared by all. If we take postcolonial agency to rest on a thorough critique of and resistance to all political and epistemic maneuvers that subordinate or exclude people and cultures, might this form of resistant agency reside in the ethical normativity of anti-imperialist humanism? This question elicits conflicting responses from contemporary postcolonial theorists.The argument, on the one hand, is that if postcolonial theory is to ethically address the multiple and interlocked hierarchies of a postimperial world, it indeed must take into account how people mobilize against separatism by working through critiques of ethnic divisiveness to negotiate a common human ground. Commenting on the universalism of thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore and W. E. B. DuBois, Edward Said, for example, suggests that "vital" critiques of chauvinistic separatism arise only from viewing "local identity as not exhaustive" but as elaborating in reference to "larger, more generous realities of community between cultures, peoples, and societies" [Culture and Imperialism 217, 229]. His implication is that only through evaluating ourselves on the basis of a notion of noncoercive universality are we able to think against the identity politics that pervade our world, stemming at once from a nativist... (shrink)

A great deal of research has examined computer-mediated communication discussions in educational environments for evidence of learning. These studies have often been disappointing, with analysts not finding the kinds of ‘quality’ talk that they had hoped for. In this study we draw upon elements of discursive psychology as we oriented to what was happening in the talk from the participants’ perspective in addition to what should be happening from the researcher/instructor perspective. We examine the talk of undergraduate nutrition science students (...) within web logs, exploring ways in which the students, when asked to make blog posts on their beliefs about and experiences with dietary supplements, display knowing in dynamic and fluid ways. We analyzed 152 blog posts students were asked to make prior to attending the lecture on the topic. Our findings point to how students negotiate and at times resist doing being a knowledgeable student, using disclaimers such as ‘I don’t know’ and script formulations to minimize accountability for their posts. Our findings highlight how students oriented to the blogs as a venue for institutional talk, responding to the required academic task while simultaneously managing their identities as students. (shrink)

Riggs v. Palmerhas become famous since Dworkin used it to show that legal positivism is defective. The debate over the merits of Dworkin's claims is still very lively. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the content of the statute at issue inRiggswas given by thecounterfactual intentionof the legislature. According to arguments from legislative intent, a judicial decision is justified if it is based on the lawmaker's intention. But can legislative intentions be determined counterfactually? More generally, (...) what are the discursive commitments undertaken by a lawyer or a judge, in an exchange of legal reasons, when using this interpretive methodology? This paper addresses these issues considering, in particular, David Lewis's “resemblance” condition and “relevant similarity” between possible worlds in the evaluation of counterfactual statements. The analysis sheds some new light on the debate on theoretical disagreements and shows that Dworkin's conception of law as an argumentative practice is not necessarily at odds with legal positivism. It rather allows us to look at it under a better light. (shrink)

This article analyses the transformation of Robert College, the first American college founded abroad, from 1923 to 1970. Based on a careful investigation of Robert College archives and personal accounts of the College staff, it contends that the school’s missionary character acquired a new identity after the foundation of Republican Turkey. Robert College gradually abandoned its missionary tradition to become an institution of liberal learning in the service of westernizing Turkey. The College presidency and trustees have long elaborated on the (...) new context and trends in liberal education in the United States. At the same time, the Turkish officers and graduates quickly adjusted to this new character immersed in secular values. The College’s transition involved a shared commitment going beyond political partnership, reflecting an intellectual vision that came out of long years of negotiations within the College establishment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross as Teacher, Mentor, FriendKathleen M. ErndlI have been asked to speak about the work of Rita Gross from the point of view of someone who was once her student. Not only was I her student, I was one of her very first students. She was my first teacher of religious studies during my first semester of college in the first semester of her first full-time academic position. (...) The year was 1971; the place was New College, a small, alternative liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. As the eldest child in the second generation of a working-class immigrant family, I was the first person in my family to pursue higher education. While none of my grandparents had completed high school, both of my parents were high school graduates and my father had risen to a professional level as an engineer through on-the-job training and his own diligence, so my attending college was perhaps the next logical step in achieving the "American dream." However, my choice of college was a bit unusual.New College, as might be expected by its name (though I later discovered was named after a college at Oxford), was new and relatively unknown, lacking a football team and an engineering school, which my parents, with their limited knowledge of higher education, considered essential. But by this time I was somewhat of an educational radical, having been influenced by Angela Davis and Paolo Freire.1 A local newspaper article of the time described New College students as "rich, radical, and hedonistic" (I can only attest to ever having been one of the above). The Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice2 described New College as a place where students taught the classes and where "chicks suffer from underwear famine." While this was somewhat of an overstatement, it was the kind of place where students initiated courses, were largely free from required courses, conducted unusual independent research, came to class barefoot, and sat on the floor. In any case, as the first in my working-class immigrant family to attend college and as an idealist who had chafed against a system that I felt, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, allowed schooling to interfere with education, I was excited to be in any college and especially in one with a reputation for experimental modes of learning.When I went to meet my assigned faculty advisor to figure out my schedule and negotiate a "contract" of study, I was told that I had been reassigned to a new faculty member who was "young and full of energy." This, of course, was Rita Gross. Asian religious and cultural traditions place a strong significance on the first meeting with [End Page 57] one's teacher. To be honest, I do not remember much about our first meeting, but I can say in retrospect that it was life changing. After meeting with her, I decided to take her course, Indian Religions I, as well as courses in philosophy, literature, and constitutional law. On my first day of college, my initial plan had been to major in philosophy, with a focus on legal philosophy, with the eventual goal of law school and practicing constitutional, civil rights, or public interest law. But my experience in that Indian Religions I course changed that plan forever. I subsequently took Indian Religions II, then Indian Religious III, and by that time I was hooked. I took several other courses with Rita, including East Asian Religions and a tutorial on Primal Religions. In January of my second year, at Rita's encouragement, I went to Sri Lanka on a study program, doing a project under Rita's direction on lay Buddhist practices. By the time I returned to New College for my third and final year, Rita had already left for the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, but that was not the end of our association. We have stayed in contact for almost forty years now, meeting at the AAR, visiting each other's homes, and talking about each other's work and lives. I have hosted lectures or workshops by Rita at all three institutions where I have taught. I... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; to (...) rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

One of the ṣaḥābīs of Prophet Muḥammad is ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd from the Ṭāʾif tribe of Thaqīf. He belongs to the Ahlâf part of the Thaqīf tribe and he is the ruler of this part. ʿUrwa’s ancestry is known without any controversy until Kasî (Thaqīf). According to a narrative his epithet was Abū Yaʿfur and another of his epithet was Abū Masʿūd. Father of ʿUrwa an important person too. He is one of the leaders of his tribe and he commanded (...) his part (Aḥlāf) in wars of Fijār. Mother of ʿUrwa is Subay’a bt. ʿAbd Shams from Banū Umayya. In this way ʿUrwa has kinship both with Banū Umayya and Prophet Muḥammad. So ʿUrwa has a very important position because of his lineage, his mother and father. Thefore, his connections with Mecca and Quraysh strengthens his position. In our sources there is no information about his dates of birth and death. It is likely to be over middle age when he became a muslim, considering that he was the leader of his tribe and his son become a muslim after he died. There is too little information about weddings of ʿUrwa. According to narratives, he had ten wives before becoming Muslim. After becoming a Muslim Prophet Muḥammad warned from him to prefer four out of ten wives. One of his four wives is the daughter of Abū Sufyān. Howev-er, there is no information about the names of his wives. Names of his sons: ʿĀṣim, Abū Murra, Abū Mulayḥ, Dāwūd, Hammām and Hishām and names of his daughters: Umm Saʿīd (married with Ḥaẓrat ʿAlī) and Ḥalīma. We could see he served as embassy before the treaty of Hudaybiyah. His embassy duty shows us the superiority of his position. Also, this embassy duty was very effective at peace negotiations. He mentioned kinship relations which connects about Mecca. He said that it could be beneficial to talk to Prophet Muḥammad himself. The Meccans mentioned about their trust in ʿUrwa. During the time of his embassy, he expressed that both sides should be away from war. In this context, he told the Meccans: The people around Prophet Muḥammad are very loyal to him and he told to Prophet Muḥammad: People around him could disintegrate easily. This mission shows us he is intelligent, respectable and had high persuasion skills. ʿUrwa, observed loyalty of ṣaḥābīs to Prophet Muḥammad. He confessed this loyalty can not be for any ruler. This observa-tion probably affected ʿUrwa’s conversion to Islam. Because of the conquest of Meccah and the events that followed, the people of Ṭāʾif were very worried. Because of this reason people of Ṭāʾif took part in the side of Hawāzin’s and they bat-tled with Muslims. In this time they sent ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd and Ghaylān b. Salama to the city of D̲j̲aras̲h̲ of Yemen, to learn about some war machines and techniques. Therefore they did not join wars of Hunayn and Ṭāʾif. Prophet Muḥammad ended the siege of Ṭāʾif and went to Medina. Meanwhile, ʿUrwa and his friend returned from Yemen. According to narratives when the Prophet Muḥammad returned Medina or he was way in Medina ʿUrwa visited him and became Muslim. Some people tell about the date of ʿUrwa’s being Muslim at before or after Abū Bakr’s emirate of Hadj. However, when the narrations are examined, it can be said he became Muslim after four or five months from Prophet’s siege of Ṭāʾif and before three or four months from Tabūk expedition of Rabīʿ al-awwal or “Rabīʿ al-ākhir” (July or August) in the year 9/630. As for the conversion of ʿUrwa, basic sources report that “Allah, inspired Islam to the heart of ʿUrwa and he changed his situation. He went to the Messenger of Allah and he became Muslim.” They do not give a specific reason. But after this period the narratives tell the reason for ʿUrwa’s becoming a Muslim as due to an experience he had while travelling to Najrān for trade. In this travel, two mysterious young girls and the priest in Najrān said the last prophet came and ʿUrwa must be subject to him and ʿUrwa became Muslim after he returned. But this narrative is prob-lematic with regard to evidence and text. After being Muslim, ʿUrwa wanted permission from the Prophet to invite his tribe to accept Islam. The prophet did not want to accept this at first. Because the people of Ṭāʾif had an arro-gant stance against Islam, and he said that the people of Thaqīf could kill ʿUrwa. Eventually ʿUrwa went to his hometown with permission of Prophet and invited people to Islam and they did not accept this invitation and cursed ʿUrwa. The next morning ʿUrwa read adhan of fajr and people of Ṭāʾif killed him. ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd was likened to Prophet Jesus by the Prophet Muḥammad. It is generally accept-ed that ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd el-Thaqafī is “one of the biggest from two cities” expressed in sūra Zukhruf. Only two weak narrations were reported of Urwa who could live as a Muslim for a few days and was matyred by his tribe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education: From Understanding to Application by Vicky R. Lind and Constance L. McKoyEric ShiehVicky R. Lind and Constance L. McKoy, Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education: From Understanding to Application (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).In the book’s penultimate chapter, titled “Community,” we encounter a teacher who agrees to a student’s request to start a mariachi band and gets “more than he bargained for.”1 (...) We hear from a teacher who seeks a greater understanding of the context for her Black students and finds herself the only White person in many of the community events she attends. We learn about a teacher who has her marching band, predominantly comprised of Latinx students, march in annual Korean and Black community parades in the city and why she does this. What to make of these stories—inspiring, provocative, suffused with honesty? I found myself restless to share these narratives with my own teaching colleagues, to ask not simply “What do you see happening here?” but also “Where would something like this take us?”What is notable about Vicky Lind and Constance McKoy’s achievement here is that they have given us a very full book and one that provides many different points of entry—stories and theories and activities and questions—through which to engage with ideas of culturally responsive teaching. In just under 150 [End Page 210] pages with index and references, the book encompasses four chapters that review various academic traditions connected to culturally responsive teaching, concludes with three chapters that relay narratives and vignettes from K-12 music teachers, and includes throughout lists of reflection questions and teaching strategies. The primary audience is pre-service and in-service K-12 music teachers. If a key requirement for culturally responsive teaching is continuous reflection over the impacts our pedagogies have on our students and ourselves as teachers, this book’s wide-ranging engagement is indeed a welcome one.What I offer here in terms of review, then, is first a consideration of the book’s various components and where they might lead us. Second, I bring its ideas of cultural responsiveness into dialogue with ideas more commonly found in anti-racist and social justice approaches to education—traditions the book does not directly engage with but which certainly have a place in conversations around it. This is a particularly relevant time, I suggest, to engage with questions of cultural responsiveness alongside perhaps more politically-minded approaches: this book will be read, I hope, by teachers grappling with our age of renewed and visible racial struggle, increased forced migration, and cultural insecurity.The first half of the book is explicitly dedicated to “understanding” culturally responsive teaching. Its chapters present a historical overview of its conceptual development, explicate the centrality of culture and cultural competence to teaching, and discuss the connection between music and identity in young people. The authors center their conceptualization of culturally responsive teaching around Geneva Gay’s framework, outlined in her Culturally Responsive Teaching, as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.”2 “Effective,” here, is understood broadly and includes academic competence, self-efficacy, social critique, and the freedom to be “ethnically expressive.”3In laying this foundation, the authors negotiate thoughtfully a number of tensions inherent in this work that are too often simplified in the classroom. They recognize, for example, the need to acknowledge culture as a category through which human experience is mediated, but also one that too easily gives way to stereotyping. When discussing issues of music and identity they remind readers that musical identities are multiple and suggest that musical identities might be viewed as both “bottom-up” and “top-down”—constructed through a variety of ongoing experiences as much as they are constituted by national or ethnic affiliation.4 They also do not shy from language such as “high expectations” and “academic competence” when discussing the need for comprehensive and supportive classrooms, despite the uneasiness with which these terms often sit in arts education and alongside purposes of engendering social critique... (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of the language used when teaching mathematics to young children. It proposes that an important part of the teaching of a mathematical concept is the introduction of specific terminology. Children may need to be taught new meanings for already familiar words. The timing of these introductions to new words or meanings is critical to their understanding of the concepts being taught. It will be argued that there are two aspects of the children's learning that need (...) to be considered. First, their understanding of the concept being introduced, and secondly, their learning the appropriate word to describe that concept. By assessing children's understanding of new mathematical concepts through their own use of the terminology, the teacher can then negotiate new meanings with them through practical experiences, introducing new word meanings only when the concepts have been understood. (shrink)