Over the past twenty-five years, or so, considerable advances have been made in understanding how learning occurs in the brain, though much of this research is still to make its way into education. One contribution it should be making is to furnish the philosophical critique of past and current theory with supporting empirical evidence. For example, motivation theory and its cognate expectancy-value theory continue to be taught in teacher education, even though their rational cognitivist foundations are philosophically shaky, and their (...) shared representational notion of the mind is incompatible with what is now known about the learning brain. Furthermore, the central claim of motivation theory that children need to be motivated in order to learn is educationally problematic, not least because it incorporates a deficit model of the child as learner. This paper provides a philosophical and educational critique of motivation and expectancy-value theories and begins to sketch out an alternative dynamic systems approach, which argues that value is deeply embedded in the learning process, not only in the value students may or may not attach to their learning, but also neurobiologically. In opposition to motivation and its notion of the learner this paper argues that every student is equipped with a brain that is value-orientated towards learning and will learn, when nested in suitably affordant learning environments. In place of expectancy-value, we argue for value-embedded learning, which provides a non-reductive and biologically plausible account of how value and emotional salience are dynamically interwoven in the learning process. (shrink)

This paper presents an example of a supersimple nonlow theory and characterizes its independence relation.

The present study examined the attitudes of Filipino middle school students toward physical education and the associations between PE attitude and various personal and external correlates of PE. In total, 659 middle school students, aged between 12 and 19 years, participated in the study. The Physical Education Attitude Scale was used to measure affective, cognitive, and motivational/behavioral attitudes of adolescent students toward PE. Results showed that middle school students had moderate general attitudes toward PE. Female students had more favorable attitudes (...) toward PE when their teacher was male than female. When the teacher was female, male students were more satisfied with the PE curriculum than female students. When the teacher was male, female students were more comfortable with the PE curriculum than male students. Finally, students' PE attitude did not decrease as they got older, regardless of student sex. The findings provide a different perspective for the field and underscore the importance of not only the PE curriculum but also the student–teacher relationship. To prevent the decline in students' positive attitude and encourage positive behaviors toward PE and activities, teachers should be very considerate about their interactions with students of the same sex; school administrators, meanwhile, should focus at providing PE teachers with special training courses to enhance both their teaching and communication capabilities. (shrink)

Women’s voices are widely expressed in current movements of rejuvenation of Jewish traditions. These moves raise tensions within the religious world and the civil legal realm. In focus here is a much-debated instance: the nearly thirty-year effort by Jewish women to pray in a group in song and read from the Bible at the holy site of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The group is called the Women of the Wall (WoW). In addition to the women's rights of speech, discussion (...) here highlights the need to recognize duties of respect for the women’s voices. Moral analysis of the Jewish and democratic values which constitutionally define Israel founds the legal basis for this duty of respect. Both Jewish thought and Kantian analysis are seen to conceptualize the essence of freedom as obligation, from which arise duties of respect for the other. Duties of respect indeed are owed to WoW by the other worshippers at the Western Wall, as well as by the rabbinic authorities in control of forms of prayer at the site. That both Jewish and democratic values deem obligation as the essence of freedom lends support to seeing coherence between the two sets of values defining the State of Israel. (shrink)

Patient participation is one of the most prevalent focus areas in the Danish healthcare debate. Patient participation is generally presented as a fundamental democratic right, and is stated in an objective language with legal requirements for healthcare professionals to ensure that patients systematically participate in their own courses of care and treatment. In the research literature, it is not clear what is meant by ‘patient participation’, and several discourses on patient participation exist side by side. This study explores how discourses (...) of patient participation unfold and are at play in the articulations in official legal and political documents and patient records relating to a Danish psychiatric context. The documents and patient records have been analyzed using a Fairclough‐inspired critical discourse approach which is concerned with how power is exercised through language. The research findings show that patient participation within Danish psychiatric healthcare is governed within a neoliberal discourse where underlying discourses; discourse of biomedicine, paternalism, management, evidence and ethics of care are embedded, and a discourse that seems to ascribe stigmatizing traits to mentally ill patients. (shrink)

School quality care has become important in many Western countries. Expectations are high, but little is known about the nature and extent of the use of self?evaluation instruments within schools. From this longitudinal study into the use of a Dutch school self?evaluation instrument, it became clear that schools vary in the extent to which they are able to make use of self?evaluation results. A minority of schools in this study were able to use the self?evaluation results for developing measures at (...) the school and classroom level to improve the quality of education. Potential causes for the findings and alternatives for promoting the utilisation of school self?evaluation instruments are discussed. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 395-409.

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

This study examined the role of religion in xenophobic responses to the threat of Ebola. Religious communities often offer members strong social ties and social support, which may help members cope with psychological and physical threat, including global threats like Ebola. Our analysis of a nationally representative sample in the U.S. found that overall, the more vulnerable to Ebola people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by importance of religion. Those who perceived religion as (...) more important in their lives exhibited weaker xenophobic reactions than those who perceived religion as less important. Furthermore, social connectedness measured by collectivism explained the moderating role of religion, suggesting that higher collectivism associated with religion served as a psychological buffer. Religious people showed attenuated threat responses because they had a stronger social system that may offer resources for its members to cope with psychological and physical threats. The current research highlights that different cultural groups react to increased threats in divergent ways. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the idea of God in the first Critique prefigures but does not imply a theism. It is in his ethical philosophy that this idea is given a theistic interpretation, and that the postulation (or fideic affirmation) of God’s existence, along with immortality, is practically justified as a condition of the possibility of the summum bonum. This paper argues that Kant’s reasoning from his initially austere conception of morality to the summum bonum and to immortality and God’s existence (...) lacks compelling logic. It also argues that Kant’s practical justification of faith, amounting to no more than the claim that practical reason explicates its own inherent need and satisfies this need by faith, fails to satisfy the demand of religious consciousness for an ontology of reason that includes an account of the grounding of reason in what it postulates. (shrink)

독일 철학자의 사회사상과 역사철학, 인식론을 두루 살피며 그의 미학이론을 중심으로 문학, 예술론의 중 요 국면을 면밀히 검토한 현직 교수의 논저. 연구가 일천했던 아도르노의 사상을 칸트, 헤겔, 마르크스 등기존의 사상들과 대비하여 논하였다.