Planning the first school transition for children with special needs focuses on several objectives: To ensure continuity amongst different children’s life settings; to ease the child’s adaptation and integration in their new environment; to support the school’s preparations in order to better welcome each child with their particularities; to adapt activities according to the child’s needs; and lastly, to encourage full participation of the parents and professionals who know the child. Qualitative-interpretative research (...) allows us to examine the way stakeholders from different sectors, including the parents, planned the transition to kindergarten of children with special needs. Three networks were studied over a period of one year. The results permit us to deepen our understanding of how stakeholders function together, as a network, in order to prepare a quality transition for the targeted children. The article presents a model of the structural and interactional processes involved during these planned transitions; these processes derive from the dynamic created by knowledge-sharing and networking between the stakeholders. The structural processes in turn benefit the stakeholders; specifically by providing opportunities for collective interactions and knowledge-sharing beyond their individual interests. In particular, the stakeholders accepted some shifts in changing roles as they moved from individualistic to collective action. Finally, the time dedicated by the stakeholders, along with the duration of the process, are determined to be key elements contributing to the quality of the entire experience. (shrink)

The article is devoted to revealing the phenomenon of contemporary changes in the language space, in accordance with the processes of transition that take place in the economy of Ukraine in the context of knowledge representation, neuro-modeling and artificial intelligence. The relevance and expediency of the study are due to the uncertainty to some extent of innovative processes occurring in the development of the contemporary Ukrainian language in connection with the transitional processes in the economy. The relevance (...) of the study is determined by: 1) the importance for contemporary linguistics of identifying and describing the structural and typological features of the “dominant” lexical and semantic subsystems of the contemporary Ukrainian language, reflecting the most significant concepts of contemporary Ukrainian conceptosphere; 2) the importance of the lexical subsystem of public administration not only for the contemporary Ukrainian language and contemporary Ukrainian national consciousness, but also for the effective economic policy of the state; 3) a lack of special generalizing research on the problems of formation, development and current state of the Ukrainian vocabulary of state regulation of the economy; 4) the need to clarify and improve the methodology of complex analysis of lexical and semantic systems in the Ukrainian language, methods and techniques of describing lexical units in synchronous and diachronic aspects. 5) current needs in the use of artificial intelligence, based on the principles of neuro-modeling in the representation of knowledge in the conditions of transition economy of Ukraine. (shrink)

IntroductionThere is a significant disparity in the United States between the health care received by children with special health care needs versus physically healthy children.ObjectiveThe objective of the paper is to show that children with special needs receive less than adequate health care overall. This disparity affects the quality of life for these children and influences their ability to live their lives to their full potential.MethodsResearch was conducted by examining multiple (...) studies with a focus on six major factors that play a role in creating this disparity.ResultsThe findings show an alarming trend in the access and delivery of health care to children with special health care needs.ConclusionsSolutions to correcting the disparities are possible, but it will take a full understanding of the issues, perseverance, dedication, and hard work on the part of families, physicians, legislators, and others genuinely interested in creating an equal health care system for all children. (shrink)

Although the obesity epidemic appears to have affected all segments of the U.S. population, its impact on children with special health care needs has received little attention. “Children with special health care needs” is a term used in the U.S. to describe children who come to the attention of health care providers and policy makers because they need different services and supports than other children. Government, at both the federal and (...) state levels, has long felt a particular responsibility for safeguarding the health of children with special needs. The definition “children with special health care needs,” in fact, was developed by a work group established by the U.S. Maternal and Child Health Bureau to assist states in their efforts to develop community systems of services for children with complex medical and behavioral conditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parenting Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Transition to AdulthoodAnonymous One, Anonymous Two, Lorri Centineo, Anonymous Three, Virginia Clapp, Catherine Cornell, Nancy Coughlin, David McDonald, Mark Osteen, Laura Shumaker, Julie Van der Poel, Anonymous FourMy Son's Life with Autistic Spectrum DisorderAnonymous OneThis is the story of how my son, David, has tried to become independent. David is now 25–years–old. His immediate family is his (...) dad, a brother (age 22) and myself (his mother). He was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when he was 13. We looked up all the information and decided not to make a big deal of it. Looking back, he displayed all the classic signs of a high functioning autistic disorder. Would he have been diagnosed with the new DSM 5 guidelines? He probably would have. His life would be much, much different if he had been diagnosed at an early age.I'll start with David at age 13 when he was able to harness his big interest in computer science into a career for himself. He was expelled from middle school for threatening some kid that had been picking on him all year. He had a meltdown and wasn't able to communicate his side of the story and that was it.During the summer of that year he took classes in computer engineering (Microsoft) and became an engineer when he was 13. At that time it was quite an accomplishment because he was the youngest person in the United States to do so at such a young age. (By the way, the administration of the school that expelled him sent him a congratulatory card when he was written up in the paper).His father and uncle are in business running a computer company so David had a ready–made job waiting for him when he graduated from high school and was able to keep it during difficult times. David finished high school (mainstreamed special education as emotionally disturbed) and he also received another engineering certification (Cisco).I have to mention here that I truly did not understand what it was like for my son until one day when he was in high school, as I was lecturing him again for some stupid reason, he said, "You don't know how hard it is for me to not sit in a corner and rock every day." Think about that. ASD individuals get up and keep going every day when they know they are going to be misunderstood and picked on. They all deserve a medal for bravery.David became really upset that he had never had a date and that girls were not even interested in talking to him. He started cutting himself and shaving his head. That got him some attention from the stoner group. He had someone to sit with at lunch anyhow. Parents, I think it's better to have no friends than the wrong friends. They introduced him to drugs.We did not mention any trouble David was having to any relatives. We had lived 800 miles from our families in a very unspoiled part of northern America. In hindsight this was not good either. [End Page 151]Another thing, and I think every parent will agree with this—teachers, school staff, health care industry staff, doctors and every one that comes into contact with an ASD individual—take the time to get to know them. It may be difficult and some may appear non–caring and rude. You must overlook this and look to the person underneath. They are great people. They have been through stuff and it means so much to them. Like I said—parents, you know this. Please remember it when times get tough.During David's senior year he started work release so he could start earning money to buy a car and move out as soon as he turned 18. Things were made easy for David since the company was owned by his father and his uncle and I worked there also. David enjoyed the work but had the occasional meltdown and had difficulties fitting in with other employees. He wasn't able to communicate... (shrink)

Background: The transition to child care is a challenging time in a child’s life and leads to elevated levels of cortisol. These elevations may be influenced by the quality of the mother-child-relationship. However, remarkably little is known about cortisol production in response to the beginning of child care among children-at-risk such as children with an immigrant background. However, attending kindergarten or any other child day-care institution can for example have a compensating effect on potential language deficits (...) thus improving the educational opportunities of these children. Method: Data of a subsample of N = 24 “hard-to-reach” mother-child dyads was collected in the context of the psychoanalytic early prevention project “First Steps”. The project focuses on the earliest integration of children with an immigrant background by supporting parenting capacities in the critical phase of migration and early parenthood. Children’s hair cortisol concentration (HCC) was assessed one week before (mean age = 38.77 months) and three months after kindergarten entry (mean age = 42.26 months). Hair analysis was conducted for both times of measurement, reflecting the first 3 months after kindergarten entry and 3 months prior. Furthermore, the emotional quality of the mother-child-relationship was assessed with the help of the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS) shortly before kindergarten entry when the children were about three years old (mean age = 37.2). Results and Conclusion: Children’s mean cumulated HCC was higher after kindergarten entry than before. The increase correlated negatively with several dimensions of the EAS. Repeated measures ANCOVA revealed that particularly responsive children and children who had experienced less intrusive mother-child-relationships demonstrated lower elevations in HCC after kindergarten entry. Furthermore, a decreased EA score was found in all EA dimensions, besides the dimension “mother’s non-hostility”, indicating problematic EA within the mother-child-relationships of the sample. The results suggest that children with an immigrant background who experience more emotional available mother-child-relationships seem to regulate stress induced by kindergarten entry more effectively, indicated by lower cortisol elevations after entry. This implicates that supporting early mother-child-relationships by intervention may have a positive effect on the children’s ability to regulate stress induced by kindergarten entry thus promoting child development. (shrink)

This paper explores the most important and satisfactory aspects of collaborative partnership from the point of view of parents of children with special needs. The descriptive survey method was utilized to suit the purposes of the study and its objectives. The study sample in its final form consisted of 761 parents of students with special needs (658 fathers, 103 mothers) who had a child with a disability. A questionnaire was used for information (...) collection from the participants to reach conclusions on the questions of the study. The findings showed that the results regarding child-centred relationships revealed the presence of some aspects that mothers and fathers consider to be of high importance and enjoy a high degree of satisfaction. Results revealed differences between the average scores of families of children with special needs, according to the educational level variable, in favour of the educational level (secondary school and below) compared to other age levels. Activating aspects of cooperative participation in the field of special education may predict the quality of life of the disabled person and his family. (shrink)

This special issue explores an interdisciplinary topic that lies at the heart of Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology. The life science industry is increasingly recognised as a key sector in the growth and development of many economies. As it gains momentum, policymakers are confronted with the need to facilitate growth whilst dealing with important ethical and regulatory challenges arising from new technosciences addressing human health and the environment. Such activities present special opportunities and threats to (...) emerging economies such as those in Central and Eastern Europe . Countries transitioning from state-run to free market economies are confronted with the need to engage with new actors within the innovation system, such as transnational corporations and public-private partnerships while finding a place within processes of scientific and academic globalisation. At the same time science throws up new social and ethical dilemmas connected with issues such as genetic databases, drug trials and GM crops. The special issue emerged from a workshop held in Prague in October 2007 that attempted to map a number of these dynamics within the region, and explore cases from outside of it that might inform life sciences development. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reveal with an overall approach, how the psycho-social background, starting from woman image in first periods and reach modern day, is embraced by outstanding theorists of modern psychology, and also how these collected works are reflected in their definitions of woman. If it is considered that woman has been discussed with reflections against and not from primary sources throughout history, it can be seen that the most essential roots of woman narrations (...) can be found in oral culture and the parts of written texts are made over symbol, metaphor, proposition and story. However myths (stories) that take place in oral and partly written culture about primitive man, are sacred tales, they will also present data regarding human image. Therefore with a limited effort of human being to understand the infinite, it can be understood what human being think, feel and how they interpret rather than gods/goddesses ontology. From this point of view, this article that consists of two parts, first of all will mention especially about perception of Goddess in those reflected to image of God, maintaining its efficiency in conscious or unconscious as a system of symbols intrinsic to human nature and cultural code background and then the woman image will be roughly discussed with a descriptive style over the world of mythology, psychology and faith. In the second part, it will be examined in detail how all the written and oral information about understanding woman by modern anthropologists are interpreted with the perspective of modern psychology specific to theorists such as Freud, Jung and Fromm. Eventually, it will be emphasized that past and future are integrated with information, experience and feelings with an active relationship; perception and approach of woman have stayed up to date in time continually; mythology, psychology and religion are important factors within this matter.Summary: Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy. Despite the dominance of male gender in the images of God in these analogies which are the products of human experience, female Gods that is to say Goddesses are not few. The matter of how the image of goddess come to the fore in a distinctly male-dominant society is a noteworthy matter. The narration of Earth Mother over female symbol in myths in which the harmony is constantly secured within the inner and exterior world and mention about living in harmony with the universe is an important data in order to understand female characteristics attributed to God. Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy.The woman subject is influenced by transferred life experience within the historical process, and it is an undeniable fact that ancient “woman perception” has reflections to the present day. Within the history of humanity, striking definitions about woman can be seen in sacred statements in symbol language. Therefore, it is proper to examine primarily the image of sacred and then examine female meaning that is charged on that image. The aim of this study can be summed up with two themes: a) try to understand the general framework of reflections of the present image of woman, style of narration and comprehension in psychological, sociological, and religious terms by getting help from myths which mention about ancient image of God, although there is centuries old difference between those stories and us, b) reveal the image of woman in Freud, Jung, and Fromm’s approach which establishes a bond between mythology that is a system of symbols special to human nature and human psychology and discuss this subject by using psychology of religion.When reviewed ancient Far East and Middle East myths and also Ancient Greek mythology, it can be seen that gods are not cloistered supernatural beings who do not have abstract personalities and also do not lead a wholly metaphysic life. The crucial issue here is; the reality that Gods and Goddesses are shown as a model to both man and woman. Psychologists who examine religion in terms of psychology state that first outcomes about the image of God come up not with behavior but with emotion. The attributions of gender, related to the emotion in question are cited during the transfer of those emotions as well. Therefore; philosophers, culture and religion historians, theologians, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and sociologists have contributed to this transfer when they discuss the cult of God or Goddess throughout the history. It is interesting that the usage of the term of God maintains while the usage of the term of Goddess decreases. Civilization historians claim that the appearance of divine religions particularly quickens the course of transition from goddess to god. According to them, during this period in which there is a transfer from polytheist image of God to monotheist image of God, the quantitative change in the perception of God comes with a qualitative change. According to Fromm, during this power gathering period, there has been a transfer from mother and feminine (woman) centered religion to father and masculine (man) centered religious experience/ God image. According to him, in the second stage of humanity development, “the children of Earth Mother turn into the children of divine father”, there is a transition from unconditional love of mother to authoritarian sympathy of father, from an image of supplemental and surrounding Goddess to authoritarian image of God who makes requests by his nature, lays down principles and laws, and supports the power and search for a successor to deliver the power.The perception of women who led to Prophet Adam deviated from the truth and expelled from heaven is spread around especially the regions of one-God religions. This has strengthened the idea that divine religions have a negative view towards women. Including Islam, the reason of all divine religions’ encountering with claims that they have a negative approach against woman stem from applying to that religions’ human resources rather than essential religious sources which are existing or lost earliest forms.Oedipus complex is an important thesis of Freud which explains the development of religion and morals; establish the base of his psychology, and in fact, important in terms of his making connection with difference of kinds and flow or non-flow of request and needs while explaining human behaviors. According to Freud who points to sexuality and aggression which are the most powerful two instinct in the biology of male or female; the first three or five years of a newly born human- this is the period in which the basic part of personality is formed- the definition of self is extremely influenced by his/her gender (in both biological and sociocultural terms). Freud who put forward father-son conflict in the struggle to survive between Zeus and his sons in Moses and Monotheism (1998c) and Totem and Taboo (1998a), makes an explanation about the origin of religion and humanity over two male characters. Jung pays attention to goddess image as much as the image of god and do not approach this situation only as a polytheism or sociocultural explanation or childish appearances of a primitive mind. He accepts goddesses as a reflection of archetypes in human. Male has a feminine side, female has a masculine side, and a unity occurs when both complete each other. According to Fromm, a taxonomy referring to woman and man is primarily a sociology-based approach rather than a biology-based one. Fromm (1995) thinks that the whole depiction shows individuals’ own desire and needs, that is to say, their psychology rather than a theology. Transition from mother (woman) centered religion to father (man) centered religious experience and God image is essentially one of the most important breaking/inversion points of human being, not humanity. As a result, it can be said that it is an important point to clearly understand the story of mankind to examine that intense freshness at hand and centeredness of quantitative and qualitative changes of divine or God image of ancient societies come down after psychological, sociological, religious, economic, political, and cultural changes. (shrink)

In this paper, the author addresses the problem of socialisation of children with a history of disabilities and mental retardation by means of visual arts. It is important to look at the very sphere of life of these categories of children. As a rule, these children, for the most part, live in dysfunctional families, which makes it almost impossible to provide them with a form of socialization. This article focuses on the extent to which and (...) how a programme of socialisation of these children can be achieved through the medium of visual arts. At the moment there are works of modern pedagogues who have devoted their scientific researches to this problem, but there are few teachers-artists who deal with this problem. In this article the author devotes his creative attention to this issue and reflects on what means of fine arts and visual literacy can develop and guide in the right direction the socialization of children and young people with disabilities by means of fine arts. A number of scientific works devoted to this problem are seriously reviewed. The author is actively trying to draw the attention of the teaching community to the problem of prevailing social conditions, to reach an educational and cognitive level and, as a consequence, to a better product of the set task of socialization of children with special needs and disabilities in the learning process by means of subject disciplines: drawing, painting, composition, printmaking, etc. (shrink)

The paper describes an innovative structured workshop methodology in garden-based-learning called “Nature in Your Face” aimed at provoking a change in citizens behavior and engagement as a consequence of the emotional activation in response to disruptive artistic messages. The methodology challenges the assumption that the change needed to meet the carbon targets can be reached with incremental, non-invasive behavior engineering techniques such as nudging or gamification. Instead, it explores the potential of disruptive communication to push citizens out of their (...) comfort zones and into creative modes of re-creating futures. This is done by confronting us with consequences of consumption by means of art and eco-visualizations. The aim being to achieve awareness, mental flexibility, and spurring debate. Thus, we invite them to react – and act upon these reactions by communicating their feelings or thoughts. This is used as an entrance point for broader and/or deeper engagement in a structured three-step methodology; Framing: A disruptive element is introduced into the local environment. This triggers an emotional reaction, which then is taken up in a process of framing the problem and working with solutions. Twisting: in a guided process, the initial energy from the emotional confrontation is twisted into a creative exploration of innovative solutions, from the perspective of the children. Using: The last stage is using the developed solutions in the local social system. The methodology is being applied in cooperation with a primary school, and is iteratively adjusted and evaluated in a formative, action-research based approach scenario. NiYF is to stimulate societal engagement through deliberately confronting stakeholders with unexpected and potentially upsetting appearances of nature, climate effects, or carbon-neutral lifestyle scenarios. We have verified the practical usefulness and potential of the methodology and found that NiYF triggers societal engagement and transition, negotiating responsibilities and unlocking action potentials. We also found that eco-anxiety, denial, self-efficacy and cognitive dissonance form children’s understanding of plastic. The project marks a paradigm shift from creating knowledge to using knowledge to create action, and a focus on learning from evaluating and adapting the approach in the field. (shrink)

This article presents qualitative interview data to explore the health-related carework of low-income women caregivers with special-needs children and the implications of carework for women’s financial security. The author documents “direct” and “advocacy” carework as two types of caregiving that low-income women carry out in the context of declining government resources for poor disabled children. The author shows that the unique demands of carework responsibilities and the conditions of low-wage work combine to limit caregivers’ employment (...) and education options as well as their long-term prospects for financial stability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionParenting Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders During the Transition to AdulthoodKelly Dineen and Margaret Bultas, Symposium EditorsThis issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics is devoted to the personal stories of parents or guardians whose children with ASDs are transitioning or have transitioned to adulthood. The same parents who navigated the educational and health systems with little support twenty years ago once again find (...) themselves as pioneers in somewhat unchartered territory. Transition to adulthood, again, presents new terrain without well–defined parameters or reliable expectations for individuals with ASD and the parents who support them. At current, very little has been studied or written about the unique perspectives of parents during transition. What does exist suggests that parents of individuals with autism perceive their experiences as novel, even as compared with parents of children with other kinds of disabilities (Woodgate, Ateach, & Secco, 2008).One in 88 children is estimated to have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2012, a 78% increase since 2007 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). Although a variety of factors are certainly involved, the rate of diagnosis of individuals with ASDs has increased dramatically over the last twenty years and by all accounts the level and quality of support in health and social systems have lagged behind.While support and interventions have progressed significantly over time, attention on older populations has played a secondary role to early interventions. The proliferation of young people with ASD has outpaced supportive efforts at all levels. ASDs are usually diagnosed in childhood and funding for and access to research and interventions for children have resulted from, in no small part, the zealous efforts of parents. As this growing population of individuals with ASDs transitions to adulthood, finding appropriate supports and interventions have proven more elusive and more complicated. The hallmark symptoms of ASDs include social skill deficits and communication and behavioral difficulties—all traits that especially strain typical teenage and young adult relationships. Recent research backs up these difficulties and indicates that individuals with ASDs fare relatively poorly in traditional measures of independence such as employment, education and social relationships. Parents like the authors in this symposium continue to work to help their teenage and adult children navigate the demands, challenges and rewards of adulthood and independence with all its uncertainties and surprises.The editors of this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics solicited the personal stories of the parents who have navigated this transition. The call for stories was distributed to autism awareness groups, autism list–serves, bloggers, and social media outlets. Personal appeals to thought leaders and advocacy groups to distribute the call for stories also produced a number of responses. The [End Page 147] people and organizations that passed along our request and responded are too numerous to list here but our gratitude is sincere: their help made this issue possible.We hope the stories will give readers a sense of what parents find rewarding as well as especially challenging during this time and what actions and supports make a difference for the better. Stories about any aspect of the transition were welcome, ranging from navigating the health system to issues surrounding romantic relationships. We welcomed parents’ thoughts on any topic, including gender, level of function, provider behavior, stigma, friendship, services (existing or needed), decision making, independent living, co–morbidities, expectations, work, school or relationships.These topics and more emerged. Stories primarily came from mothers; however one father and one uncle also contributed. Consistent with diagnostic trends, most tell stories of parenting young men. The 12 stories that were selected for this edition represent just a fraction of the diverse set of issues, needs and commonalities of this growing population of adults. We received more stories than we could put in print. Twelve were selected to represent a range of experiences. Many other stories were so powerful that they will appear on–line in the Project MUSE edition of the journal.Commentators also represent a diverse group of professionals whose work includes direct care and support of individuals with ASD and their families, education, research, scholarship and advocacy. Some of our commentators also have a child or a loved one with ASD.Patricia Bashe... (shrink)

Despite the welfare of the child being afforded special legal and moral importance, it appears that the law is currently not objective in its application to children. There is an undeniable link between healthy child development and education, with the latter greatly impacting on mental health and general well-being. Drawing on the example of the differential treatment of gifted children in an educational context, I argue that the legal framework with regard to learning disabilities and (...) cognitive impairments operates contrary to the proclaimed goal of protecting and promoting the welfare of the child. This, I argue, constitutes unjustified discrimination, especially since there is a case to be made that highly cognitively able children could be considered disabled under a social model of disability. Whilst the group of affected children is small at present, developments in cognitive enhancement technologies mean that many more children might in the future be affected. Since the law currently fails gifted children, it will by analogy also likely fail cognitively enhanced children. (shrink)

This study investigates the classroom climate in two settings of the 6th?grade class (a setting of children with special needs and a setting without children with special needs), focusing on aspects of satisfaction and cohesiveness on one side and friction, competitiveness and difficulties on the other. The study results indicate the existence of both positive and negative consequences of the integration of hearing?impaired pupils. Heterogeneity achieved by the presence of children (...) class='Hi'>with special needs included positive benefits for all pupils in the mainstream classroom and helped to prevent friction and a competitive atmosphere, and provided opportunities for accepting exceptionalities, and developing social skills, ethical values and empathic abilities among school peers. On the other hand was concern related to difficulties of cognition, the only dimension on which comparative settings statistically and significantly differed concerning the classroom climate with integrated pupils. (shrink)

Health research has shown that overweight and obesity in children and adults are becoming significant public health problems in the developing world. Evidence suggests that this phenomenon is more marked in urban than rural areas and may be associated with modernization. However, the underlying reasons for this nutrition transition remain unclear. Dietary shifts, often in conjunction with income and time constraints in urban environments, may entail a greater reliance on more convenient sugar and fat-dense food. Also, (...) the necessity of labor-intensive agricultural work to meet rural subsistence needs is supplanted in urban environments by sedentary work. This paper extends the application of human behavioral ecology theory into the realm of international development and policy by applying Kaplan’s embodied capital theory to explore differences in food habits and nutritional status of Indo-Fijian children within the context of urbanization. Urban high-embodied-capital women demonstrate higher rates of wage-earning employment than urban low-embodied-capital or rural women. Findings indicate that urban high-embodied-capital households spend significantly more on food purchases, purchase a greater proportion of processed foods, and have children with higher body mass indexes (BMI) than do urban low-embodied-capital or rural households. This suggests that urban high-embodied-capital mothers, who tend to be employed, may be making trade-offs between income and food choices. (shrink)

_Growing up with Parents who have Learning Difficulties_ uses a life-story approach to present new evidence about how children from such families manage the transition to adulthood, and about the longer-term outcomes of such an upbringing. It offers a view of parental competence as a social attribute rather than an individual skill, assessing the implications for institutional policies and practices. The authors address the notion of children having to parent their disabled parents and argue for a (...) shift in emphasis from protecting children to supporting families. This innovative book provides a fresh approach to a subject rife with prejudice and challenges us to think again about many taken-for-granted ideas about the process of parenting and the needs of children. It also demonstrates the power of narrative research and its capacity for bringing alive people's experience in a way that enables us to better understand their lives. (shrink)

Healthcare delivery and access, both in the United States and globally, were negatively affected during the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was particularly true during the first year when countries grappled with high rates of illness and implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions such as stay-at-home orders. Among children with special healthcare needs, research from the United Kingdom (U.K.) has shown that the pandemic response uniquely impacted various aspects of their care, including decreased access to care, delays (...) in diagnosis, and poorer chronic disease control. In response to these findings, and to begin to comprehend whether the concerning findings from the nationalized system of healthcare in the U.K. extend to the highly dissimilar United States (U.S.) healthcare context, we reviewed the literature on alterations in access to and delivery of care during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic for children with special healthcare needs in the U.S. We then utilize these findings to consider the ethical and policy considerations of alterations in healthcare provision during pandemics and crisis events in the U.K. and U.S. and make recommendations regarding how the needs of CSHCN should be considered during future responses. (shrink)

Background:Moving into the last phase of life comprises a developmental transition with specific needs and risks. Facilitating transitions is an important component of the work of nurses. When curative interventions are no longer helpful, nurses enact key roles in caring for patients and families.Aim:The aim of this study was to examine the experiences of registered nurses in acute care settings as they worked with patients and families to facilitate transition to comfort-focused care.Research design:Sampling, data collection, (...) and data analysis were guided by constructivist grounded theory, chosen because of its strength in identifying and explicating social processes.Participants and context:A purposeful sample of 26 registered nurses working in acute care hospitals in one community in the northeastern United States participated in this study through semi-structured interviews.Ethical considerations:The study received approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects. Participants provided informed consent.Findings:Nurses facilitated transition to comfort-focused care by enacting their moral commitments to patients and families. They focused on building relationships, honoring patient self-determination, and maintaining respect for personhood. In this context, they discerned a need for transition, opened a discussion, and used diverse strategies to facilitate achieving consensus on the part of patients, family members, and care providers. Regardless of how the process unfolded, nurses offered support throughout.Discussion:Achievement of consensus by all stakeholders is critical in the transition to comfort-focused care. This study deepens our understanding of how nurses as moral agents utilize specific strategies to assist progress toward consensus. It also offers an example of recognizing the moral agency of nurses through listening to their voices.Conclusion:Increased understanding of effective nursing strategies for facilitating transition to comfort-focused care is essential for developing needed evidence for excellent care and strengthening end-of-life nursing education. (shrink)

This commentary explores Medicaid's role for children with special health care needs today and considers how changes to Medicaid's federal financing structure under a per capita cap or block grant could affect coverage for these children.

As early as 1884, while tutoring a boy with special needs, Steiner began a lifelong interest in applying spiritual knowledge to the practical aspects of life. Steiner originally published the essay at the core of this book in 1907. It represents his earliest ideas on education, in which he lays out the soul spiritual processes of human development, describing the need to understand how the being of a child develops through successive "births," beginning with the physical (...) body's entry into earthly life, and culminating in the emergence of the "I"-being with adulthood. Also included are several early lectures on education, ranging from 1906 to 1911, well before the birth of the Waldorf movement in 1919. ORIGINAL SOURCES The essay "The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science," translated by George and Mary Adams, appeared originally in German in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis (nr. 33), 1907, under the title "Die Erzieuhung des Kindes vom Geschictspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft." It is included in vol. 34 of the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland, 1987. The lecture "Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight," translated by Robert Lathe and Nancy Whittaker, is included in Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft, vol. 96, as "Erziehungspraxis auf der Grundlage spiritueller Erkenntnis"; the lecture "Education in the Light of Spiritual Science," translated by Rita Stebbing, appeared as "Die Erziehung des Kindes vom Standpunkt der Geisteswissenschaft"; and the lecture "Education and Spiritual Science," translated by Rita Stebbing, appeared as "Schulfragen vom Standpunkt der Geisteswissen-schaft" in Die Erkenntnis des Ubersinnlichen in unserer Zeit, vol. 55; the lecture "Interests, Talent, and Education," translated by Robert Lathe and Nancy Whittaker, is included in Antworten der eisteswissenschaft auf die grossen Fragen des Daseins, vol. 60, as "Anlage, Begabung und Erziehung des Menschen," all of which are in the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland, 1987. The lecture "Interests, Talents, and Educating Children," translated by Robert Lathe and Nancy Whittaker, appeared originally in the magazine Die Menschenschule, vol. 31 (nr. 6),1957 and vol. 48 (nr.1), 1974. (shrink)

IntroductionThis study reports the findings on how Child life specialists implemented an innovative approach to providing therapeutic support to pediatric patients.MethodsPart of a larger study that uncovered themes about CLSs’ experiences while working with MEDi®, this study reports the reflections that CLSs have about the process of implementation. Seven CLSs participated in semi-structured interviews. Content analysis was conducted on interview data and three themes were generated.ResultsThe first was in regards to the adoption process whereby CLS challenges, successes, and surprises (...) were revealed. Second, CLSs explained how using MEDi® aligned with the roles and responsibilities of their profession. The third area of understanding was in CLS explanation of the friendly emotional impact MEDi® seems to have on the hospital environment.ConclusionChild life specialists are encouraged to use the MEDi® robot to support children at the bedside. (shrink)

Dār al-Funūn Theology founded in 1924 was a modern educational institution which adopted both traditional and modern approach to Islamic Sciences. The changes in the field of hadīth during the process of transition to the university caused a change in the definitions and the titles of the courses such as from hadīth al-sharīf and usul al-hadīth to hadīth and the history of hadīth and the time allocated to each course was gradually reduced. The preparation of the texts by the (...) teachers in the hadith history courses and their content will answer the question of whether there is a transformation in the field of hadīth in the early years of the Republic of Turkey. As a matter of fact, Izmirli İsmāʿīl Ḥaqqī’s History of Ḥadīth and Ḥuseyin ʿAvnīʿ Arapkīrli’s al-Buġya al-Hasîs fī Tārīh al-Hadīth which were written in this period, pioneered the studies based on the field of the history of hadīth in Turkish hadīth literature. In addition, these works are the main source in understanding the period. In this study, the mentioned works will be textually analysed through the induction method. Therefore, the subjects that would reflect the ideas of the teachers will be discussed. Thus, it will be tried to determine whether the courses of the history of hadīth are closer to tradition or modern ideas and, how the education of hadīth is practised.Summary: After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Faculty of Theology was opened at Istanbul University as a result of the abolition of madrasas issuing a law regarding to the Unification of Education announced in 1924. With the opening of this faculty, the education in the field of Religious Sciences continued its presence on a new foundation, which can be considered modern, until 1933. In this study, it was attempted to trace the courses of Ḥadīth and the History of Ḥadīth given in the Faculty of Theology at Istanbul University between 1924 and 1933. Firstly, a brief history of the courses will be given, and then it is among the purposes of this study to perform a textual analysis of the works written by the teachers of these courses. While doing this, Izmirli Ismail Hakkı's History of Ḥadīth, which was written as course notes and Huseyin Avni Arapkirli's al-Buġya al-Hasîs fī Tārīh al-Hadīth, which has not been known until discussed it this article for the first time, were focused on. These works are very important in terms of initiating the History of Ḥadīth literature. Furthermore, these are the first works in the field of hadīth in the Turkish Republic, and they are very important sources for revealing the ideological infrastructure of the period. To begin with, it is necessary to attract attention to the change in the course names and duration if there is a need to briefly mention the history of hadīth courses in University. In the universities founded before the opening of the Faculty of Theology, the courses were named as Ḥadīth al-sharīf and usul al-hadīth. Besides, these courses were included in the curriculum for four years, which constituted the duration of the education. In the university founded in 1924 after the proclamation of the Republic, the name was changed as Ḥadīth and the History of Ḥadīth. It is seen that the courses of Hadīth and the History of Hadīth were taught three hours a week for two years from the opening of the Faculty of Theology until 1931. From 1931 until 1933, when the faculty was closed, the courses continued to be given two hours a week. When the content of the works is viewed, it can be seen that Izmirli İsmāʿīl Ḥaqqī followed a historical system in his work History of Ḥadīth. Beginning the subject with the classification of sciences, Izmirli touches upon the topics such as the writing and codification of hadīths. Afterwards, he also deals with the methodology of in detail. He then mentions about the history of hadīth by Shiʿā and draws a general map of the history of hadīth as of the third century of the Islamic calendar. This work differs from the previous tradition of the education of hadīth in terms of including the Shiʿā’s the history of hadīth and especially of ahl al-raʾy’s understanding of the hadīth. In addition, the detailed discussion of hadīth practice in the work is significant in terms of showing that the content of the course did not only cover the history of hadīth.Moreover, it is observed that Izmirli touched upon controversial topics in his work such as the writing of hadīth, Bukhari's criticism and hadīth-history relation. However, Izmirli does not express his approach to these topics so clearly. In doing so, he hides his views between lines, using ambiguous statements related to the topics while trying to base the views on authority. For instance, he says that the hadīths were written on the special pages of the companions in the early periods when it comes to writing hadīths, which was one of the most important topics of the history of hadīth. Even though this gives an impression that the hadīths were written in the companion period, it is stated in the following explanations that the hadīths had not been gathered and written down in one place. Izmirli also says that they refer to the hadīths in the hearts of the companion. In another example, he mentions that there is no doubt about the accuracy of the narrations in Bukhārī's work. However, in the following pages, he states that there are narrators, who are not trustworthy, in Bukhārī's work and says Dāraqutnī's criticisms related to Bukhārī. When the aforementioned two examples are examined, it can be stated that Izmirli acted a bit more cautiously especially in controversial topics. When it comes to Ḥuseyin ʿAvnīʿ Arapkīrli, who starts his work with the classification of sciences as Izmirli does, it is seen that he discusses the part of practice much more briefly. Additionally, he gives more attention to Prophet Muhammad and companion period of the hadīth history. In his work, he also provides detailed information about the formation of the hadīth literature in the third century of the Islamic calendar and afterwards. When the issue is reviewed within the scope of the topics discussed by Ḥuseyin ʿAvnīʿ in his work, it is necessary to mention that the topics related to the history of hadīth were more dominant in the work. Unlike Izmir, he does not allocate much space to controversial topics in his work. However, it should also be noted that he partly touched upon some controversial topics such as hadīth -history relation and writing of hadīths. Ḥuseyin ʿAvnīʿ considers the history of hadīth as a sub-heading of history. Regarding the writing of hadīths, he states openly that the hadīths generally were not written down because of the possibility for them to be mixed up with the Qur’ān in the early periods, and this continued until the time of caliphate ʿÖmer bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Thus, it can be said that both writers, who applied different methods in their works, looked for a new method. However, it should be remembered that these names were a part of the Ottoman educational system and included in a new system together with their background. Consequently, the fact that they were somewhere between old and new. (shrink)

Realities of the formed information society made actual for inclusive education a problem of formation of professionals of the new directions capable to apply information technologies to improvement of interaction between participants of process of distance learning. Until recent time the institute of distance learning had no analogs in our educational system. It has to become one of the most important elements of the organization of remote education. Inclusive education becomes the new strategic direction of modern education in Russia, its (...) program of development to 2020 is designated by the Federal law ‘About the education in the Russian Federation‘ which has come into force on September 1, 2013. Ideas of inclusive training were born from a pressing need of society to help children to be integrated with features of development into society. Without it a creation of a new civilized society, the education system that meets the requirements of the humanistic principles is not possible. In this connection, creation of a substantial and technological basis of the organization of inclusive education of children in the mode of distance learning is an extremely important for today social, moral and pedagogical problem. In its center are the development of the subject, granting equal opportunities to each pupil to build the individual educational trajectory, culturological cultivation of the person capable to take an independent position in relation to external conditions. Distance learning serves as strong and active technology of socialization of such children. However, in the theory and a technique of training, the problem of distance learning of children with disabilities is insufficiently solved that is caused by unavailability of most of teachers to apply these technologies. There is a contradiction between objective practical need of distance learning for children with disabilities and insufficient readiness of a theoretical and technological basis. This is a main problem discussed in the study. In theoretical plan, it is a problem of development of the practical-focused theoretical and technological basis of distance learning of children with disabilities. On the practical level, it is a problem of formation of the subject information and education environment, designing of the contents, definition of methods, pedagogical technologies, the conditions of formation promoting achievement of the planned educational results and development of cognitive independent activity without prejudice to health of children on the basis of the accounting of their individual abilities. Technological effectiveness of the purposes is provided with prediction of educational results, their expression through requirements to actions of pupils. Recent time, children only start studying and mastering remote technologies therefore, first of all, they have to seize rational ways of educational activity and learn to work with information, i.e. priority value has to be allocated for formation of informative and logical and informative and information universal educational actions. (shrink)

In Norway, a system of inter-institutional coordination is used to monitor the families of children with special needs and plan the necessary assistance. It relies on the role of coordinator, assumed by health or social work professionals. This study aims to identify how coordinators perceive their function and the coordination system; it identifies obstacles and facilitators encountered by the coordinators, as well as the potential impact of these factors on families’ access to supports. The qualitative study (...) is based on the analysis of 18 individual interviews and 5 focus-groups with a total of 38 participants. The interviews were conducted in 6 Norwegian municipalities. The results show an unstable, ill-defined professional identity. Commitment of the coordinators varies according to their skills and the available resources allocated to helping families; most of them would like to be more involved. The system functioning often leads to responses that are not adapted to the families’ needs. This discrepancy between prescribed work and reality generates experiences of professional suffering. (shrink)

This South African study investigates the lived experiences of a group of isiZulu mothers of children diagnosed with multiple disabilities. Data collection from regular focus group discussions proceeded with the assistance of a translator skilled in working in isiZulu and English. The phenomenological approach employed revealed the mothers' philosophical acceptance of their child's disability. Issues of concern to the women that emerged include the effects of the child's disability on their lives, the treatment options for their (...) class='Hi'>children, and their perceptions of the causes of the disability. The women reflect on both traditional and Western treatment options and articulate the constraints they experience as caregivers, with limited child-care facilities preventing them from finding employment, difficulties in accessing social service grants exacerbating their position, and various levels of family and community support experienced. The study underlines the need for more adequate service provision for children with special needs and their families, and for intervention programmes to be informed by an understanding of the contexts and ways of making meaning of those whose needs they are intended to serve. (shrink)

In her recent pamphlet Special Educational Needs: a new look (2005) Mary Warnock has called for a radical review of special needs education and a substantial reconsideration of the assumptions upon which the current educational framework is based. The latter, she maintains, is hindered by a contradiction between the intention to treat all learners as the same and that of responding adequately to the needs arising from their individual differences. The tension highlighted by Warnock, which (...) is central to the debate in special and inclusive education, is also referred to as the ‘dilemma of difference’. This consists in the seemingly unavoidable choice between, on the one hand, identifying children's differences in order to provide for them differentially, with the risk of labelling and dividing, and, on the other, accentuating the ‘sameness’ and offering common provision, with the risk of not making available what is relevant to, and needed by, individual children. In this paper, I argue that the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen provides an innovative and important perspective for re-examining the dilemma of difference in significant ways. In particular, I maintain that reconceptualising disability and special needs through the capability approach makes possible the overcoming of the tension at the core of the dilemma of difference, whilst at the same time inscribing the debate within an ethical, normative framework based upon justice and equality. (shrink)

Several insider accounts of the formation of the Sustainable Development Goals suggest that the process (the procedures used and the emergent organizational and governance system features) was as important as the resulting goal-set. The paper looks at both aspects, and relationships between them: the rising influence of Southern nations (seen in the roles played by Colombia, Brazil, some African countries and the G77); the partial transcendence of traditional inter-bloc negotiation, including through adoption of elements of deliberative decision-making; the major involvement (...) of civil society and business organizations, thanks especially to the IT revolution; the adoption of a goals-targets-indicators frame that has flexibility at national level and implicit reliance on intensive further civil society activism and monitoring. The paper considers these features and the implied prospects for the SDGs in relation to various perspectives on global governance, with special reference to norm-setting: Ruggie’s concepts of ‘global public domain’ and ‘polycentric global governance’, Risse and Sikkink’s ‘norms cascade’, Murphy’s posited required elements for progressive global innovation, and Raskin’s model of transition through responses to crises. It concludes with questions for further work, including regarding the possibly problematic absence of an explicit inspirational value-core. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to determine the personal results of students with disabilities and to identify the necessary conditions for effective work with this category of children in distance learning. The analysis of the results revealed the need for the use of subject-oriented technology in the educational process, which contributes to the formation of the subjective position of students, allowing for the individualization of the educational process, maximally compensating for developmental deficits caused by diseases. As (...) a result, the necessity of organizing purposeful career guidance work with disabled children and educational work with parents was revealed. (shrink)

From a cultural-historical perspective, the impairments of a child with a condition like cerebral palsy have biological origins, but the disability evolves from the mismatch between the child and his/her social conditions for development. One example of this dialectical production of disability can be seen in the challenge of the 21st-century welfare state: How to provide economically feasible health and educational services anchored in evidence-based methods and practices. Standardized social service pathways for children with CP illustrates an (...) attempt to address this challenge and moderate the mismatch by acting in the intersection between impairment and society. The aim of the article is to analyze challenges in the practice of connecting research and practice-based knowledge with societal practices in order to diminish the disability of the child. A multidisciplinary group assembled by the Danish National Board of Social Services engaged in a practice of developing a guideline for a social service pathway. Agendas and minutes from their series of meetings provide insight in how the work evolved through conflictual discussions. Rather than a neutral transformation of knowledge into practice, the practice revealed itself as a value-laden process in which the needs of the child and family were at times decentred and the focus shifted to how social services could be realised in complex, structured social practices. While the group managed to overcome several conflicts and agree of a social service pathway, a socio-economic analysis was unable to argue for the comprehensive social service pathway as an economic sound choice for municipal decision-makers. The conflict between the welfare ideology and economic feasibility remains unresolved and can be expected to limit the extent that impairments can be remedied and the mismatch decreased. Overcoming or diminishing the mismatch might never become economic worthwhile. As the political pendulum oscillates between welfare and economic concerns, the experience of disability will likewise diminish or expand. (shrink)

This research examined some characteristics of the learning habits of students with special needs and those without them in programmes of short?term vocational education in five areas: motivation, learning and learning techniques, emotional, social and the area of self?evaluation. The research sample consisted of 140 students from different secondary schools. The Questionnaire on the Learning Habits of Adolescents was used for the purpose of the study. The differences between the means from individual learning habit scales, between the (...) students with special needs or without them, were discovered by one?way analysis of variance. Basic findings of empirical research emphasise that there exist statistically significant differences between the students with special needs and the students without special needs in four areas of learning habits. Among the findings causing concern in connection with learning habits, we would like to underscore the fact that students with special needs are perceived as less efficient at and less competent in coping with learning and work tasks. These students are not familiar with effective methods and strategies for successful learning, which leads to the feelings of frustration and helplessness in case of failure. In order to cultivate an effective and supportive educational environment for students with special needs, short?term vocational schools should develop learning/teaching models that provide a potentially powerful alternative to traditionally directed teaching approaches. (shrink)

This book offers current international initiatives, developed for working with children from "Birth to Eight" by a diverse group of noted professional authors. Their readings present an overview of early education as it evolved from the Froebelian kindergarten to today's practices in various Early Education settings around the globe. The international voices of the authors represent a balanced perspective of happenings in various nations and lend a conversational approach to each chapter. The chapters analyze the Universal Preschool Education (...) movement promoted by various countries, states, and agencies; examine model curriculum programs in a variety of teaching/learning settings; and identify directions the community can take in promoting effective early education programs. Particular attention is given to key issues and concerns faced by practitioners and families world-wide. Studies reveal successful approaches to bilingual education in a Chilean kindergarten, research findings on gender differences in primary school girls for learning science in Wales, literacy development strategies for teaching in UK multicultural classrooms and childhood centres, the process of integration special education with early childhood practices in China, and exemplars of community outreach to improve the well being of children through advocacy for governmental changes in early education policies and professional development. This book is for everyone interested in the well being of young children moving forward in a global age to meet the challenges of early citizenship in their world. (shrink)

This paper tries to characterize the factors determining human relations with its environment and to identify the drives of those behavioral patterns and “praxis”. One scrutinizes the physiological and psychological factors that influence those drives, and tries to determine ways of overriding instinctive drives in favor of rational, sustainable ones. It focuses its attention on the way the different ecosystemic, economic and socio-cultural systems work, and pin-points the critical issues in view of the development of sustainable behavioral patterns. Also (...) the values that must build the new behavioral paradigm, as well as the ways to ensure the evolutionary quantum-leap necessary to ensure this sustainable condition, and the fulfilment, at every level, the different needs of humans and human societies, are analyzed. In conclusion, it stresses the fact that any reliable and long lasting change towards a sustainable behavior must start at the individual and the close social groups levels, and of the development of new factors of self-fulfillment and gratification, able to support and foster that change. The proposed epistemological approach is particularly innovative, precisely because of this emphasis on the individual drives and the way they determine the global patterns of environmental use, as well as the way they can evolve into a more rational character. In short, the paper focuses itself in the way man can evolve from its natural animal instincts and drives toward more rational ones, humanizing its behavior and turning, therefore, into an able actor of the process of sustainability building. (shrink)

In 2020, our research collective facilitated a photovoice project titled “Picturing Our Realities: Arts-based Reflections with Central American Youth in Canada,” which brought together young, second-generation, and one-and-a-half-generation (born in another country and moved at a young age) Central American identifying people in Toronto to talk about their experiences growing up as children of immigrants. This photovoice project reveals the ways the civil war and migration process is a haunting presence in the lives of second and 1.5 generation (...) Central American Canadians as they grow up and carve their paths as adults. We can see how unresolved social conflict emerges and shapes family memory, sense of self, understandings of community, and means of engaging in community activism and community work. We argue that this act of remembering and paying homage to previous generations is a means of confronting and resisting past injustices and forming ways of healing from the afterlives of violence. This recognition of the afterlives of mass violence, and the calls of action that this recognition entails, may form a powerful catalyst for community organizing and creating community spaces to respond to historical hauntings and structural violence. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed widespread agrarian transitions in mainland Southeast Asia. This paper examines how agrarian transitions are shaped by multiple drivers of change, and how these interwoven processes have triggered shifts in agricultural extension practices in three countries in the Lower Mekong Basin: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Drawing on interviews with experts working on the fields of agrarian studies and rural development, this paper argues that agrarian transitions not only put a strain on agricultural extension systems in responding (...) to evolving needs, but they also stimulate the co-production of innovative agricultural extension models to address gaps left by the limited presence of extensionists. The study gains insight into challenges faced by extensionists, including a lack of resources, skills, and capacities to meet growing needs, which simultaneously urged them to excel in their work performance. The paper highlights the proactive role of ‘champions’ in orchestrating collective efforts towards the co-production of innovative agricultural extension models (e.g. Metkasekor), and the formulation of pluralistic extension platforms in enabling such ‘co-learning-to-act’ practices. By translating these insights into the broader contexts of agricultural and rural development in the Mekong region and beyond, this paper aims to make a two-fold contribution. First, it will assert how the ‘business-as-usual’ extension model has failed to adequately address emerging needs as a result of agrarian transitions. Second, it will provide pathways for the recognition and legitimisation of the pluralistic extension approach that fosters stakeholders’ co-learning and productive engagement in extension practices. (shrink)

Children with special educational needs achieve lower educational levels than their peers without special needs, leading to a higher risk of social exclusion in the future. Inclusive education aims to promote learning and to benefit the cognitive development of these students, and numerous research studies have indicated that interactive environments benefit inclusion. However, it is necessary to know how these inclusive environments can positively impact the academic improvement and development of these students' cognitive skills. (...) This article provides a review of the scientific literature from Web of Science, SCOPUS, ERIC, and PsychINFO to understand the impact of interactive environments on the academic learning and cognitive skill development of children with SEN. A total of 17 studies were selected. Those studies showed the effectiveness of interactive learning environments in promoting instrumental learning, increasing academic involvement, and improving the cognitive development of children with disabilities. Based on these results, it can be concluded that interaction-based interventions with an inclusive approach nurture the learning and cognitive development of students with SEN. (shrink)

A balance needs to be struck between facilitating compassionate access to innovative treatments for those in desperate need, and the duty to protect such vulnerable individuals from the harms of untested/unlicensed treatments. We introduced a principle-based framework to evaluate such requests and describe its application in the context of recently evolved UK, US and European regulatory processes. 24 referrals were received by our quaternary children's hospital Clinical Ethics Committee over the 5-year period. The CEC-rapid response group evaluated individual (...) cases within 48-hours; the main referrers being haematology/oncology, immunology or transplant services. Most requests were for drug/vaccine/pre-trial access or biological/cellular therapies. The majority of individual requests were approved ; neutral or negative opinions were given in 5, including 3 group requests. Recently evolved regulatory processes share common criteria and conditions to our framework including: demonstration of clinical need; sound scientific basis with lack of viable alternative; risks-benefit/best interests evaluation; arrangements for fully informed consent; no compromise of arrangements to test treatment for licensing purposes; consideration of resource implications. There are differences between individual processes and with our framework, with respect to procedures, scope, application format, costs and obligation to make available all outcome data. Our experience has emphasized the need for an independent, principled, consistent, fair and transparent response to the increasing demand for innovative treatment on a compassionate basis. We believe that there is a need for harmonization of the recent proliferation of regulation and legislation in this area. (shrink)

Clinical reports suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle with time perception, but few studies have investigated this. This is the first study to examine these children’s understanding of before and after. These temporal conjunctions have been argued to require additional cognitive effort when conjoining two events in a clause order that is incongruent with their order in time. Given the suggested time perception impairment and well-established cognitive deficits of children with (...) ASD, we expected them to have difficulties interpreting temporal conjunctions, especially in an incongruent order. To investigate this, the interpretation of before and after in congruent and incongruent orders was examined in 48 children with ASD and 43 typically developing (TD) children (age 6–12). Additional tasks were administered to measure Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory (WM), cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, IQ, and verbal ability. We found that children with ASD were less accurate in their interpretation of temporal conjunctions than their TD peers. Contrary to our expectations, they did not have particular difficulties in an incongruent order. Furthermore, older children showed better overall performance than younger children. The difference between children with ASD and TD children was explained by WM, ToM, IQ, and verbal ability, but not by cognitive inhibition and flexibility. These cognitive functions are more likely to be impaired in children with ASD than in TD children, which could account for their poorer performance. Thus, the cognitive factors found to affect the interpretation of temporal language in children with ASD are likely to apply in typical development as well. Sufficient WM capacity and verbal ability may help children to process complex sentences conjoined by a temporal conjunction. Additionally, ToM understanding was found to be related to children’s interpretation of temporal conjunctions in an incongruent order, indicating that perspective taking is required when events are presented out of order. We conclude from this that perspective-taking abilities are needed for the interpretation of temporal conjunctions, either to shift one’s own perspective as a hearer to another point in time, or to shift to the perspective of the speaker to consider the speaker’s linguistic choices. (shrink)

PurposeThe main goals of this study are identifying the information needs of new North American immigrants to Israel and to ascertain which channels of information are used by the immigrants before and after immigration to try to satisfy their information needs.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative research approach was used for this study. Qualitative interviews were implemented as the primary strategy for data with the application of the grounded theory method for analysis.FindingsGeneral information needs categories included: housing, schooling, health, banking (...) and finances, drivers licenses, government‐related issues, legal issues and practical information. Personal information needs related to problems of “split” or prior immigration, changing over professional licenses, starting a business, children with special needs, and alternative medicine. Many of these needs were satisfied either prior to immigration or during the absorption process while others were left open leaving the immigrants with gaps in their knowledge, feelings of uncertainty and, at times, anxiety. During the preparations for immigration the greatest source of information came from the internet. After immigration, during the absorption process, word‐of‐mouth and personal contacts were the main sources for the immigrants to satisfy their information needs.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional research regarding immigration and immigrants from all different backgrounds is needed. Such research will help us learn more about other specific group's information needs and information seeking behavior.Practical implicationsBy learning and studying the information needs of immigrant's governments and immigration organizations can have a better understanding of how to assist immigrants have a successful integration into their new society.Originality/valueProspective immigrants, governments and immigration organizations can gain a deeper understanding of immigrant information needs and the channels used to satisfy those needs. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of supervisor support on the relationship between the need to be unique and the innovative behavior. People not only strive to belong to a group but also want to be unique from others and feel exceptional. Individuals’ innovative behavior is one of the things that makes them feel different from other people. Because developing a new idea, supporting this idea, putting this idea into practice, and the positive achievements of (...) this idea distinguish people who exhibit innovative behavior from others. It depends on the behavior of supervisors whether people who break away from typical practices and procedures to feel unique and special continue to act in innovative ways. In this context, it is vitally essential for supervisors to support people who display innovative behavior. The research was conducted on employees working in the education sector in Mersin. We employed the confirmatory factor analysis to examine the fitness of the model and moderation was tested. As hypothesized, the need to be unique had a significant and positive effect on innovative behavior. This finding is consistent with existing literature and thus advance knowledge on need to be unique and innovative behavior, particular in education sector. Nonetheless, it has been determined that supervisor support doesn’t have a moderator role on the relationship between the need to be unique and innovative behavior. Although there are some researches in the literature on consumer experiences about the need to be unique and innovative behavior, but literature on education section is sparse and still long way to go to evaluate its’ reflections on the workplace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Underplayed Ethics and the Dilemmas of Psychiatric CareChong Siow Ann and Tamra LysaghtThe practice of psychiatry is fraught with uncertainty. The exact causes and the biological substrates underlying mental disorders remain to be elucidated; even the diagnosis of these disorders is descriptive and not based on an etiological understanding and no biological diagnostic markers have been validated. The manifestation of almost all mental disorders results from a complex (...) interaction of biological and environmental factors which encompasses the patient’s unique life history, experiences and relationship with others and the community. In the face of such uncertainties — at times extending to the types of treatment (psychiatry is generally acknowledged not be an exact science) — it has been argued that adopting a pragmatic approach is necessary.1 Accordingly, this approach necessitates high ethical standards among mental health practitioners.Some mental illnesses are associated with varying degrees and types of cognitive impairments. Others have certain symptoms like auditory hallucinations and delusions that might severely compromise the patients’ autonomy, distort their sense of reality, increase the risk of harm to themselves or others and render them incapable of making informed decisions in their treatment and participation in research.Consequently, there are issues that are particular to the provision of mental healthcare. These include the need for enforced involuntary treatment with the corollary of depriving a patient of his personal liberty even [End Page 173] though it is often justified on the grounds that it is in the patient’s best interests. However, at times, it is the legal and societal obligation of mental health practitioners to protect those who might be harmed from the patient’s action that might seem to be more pressing. In this situation of double agency, lies the tension of providing confidential care for patients and acting as “an agent of the state” where that patient’s confidentiality might be breached and his liberty infringed upon. This situation is further aggravated by the stigma that clings ever so tenaciously to those who suffer from mental disorders and where it is the norm to stereotype them as dangerous and unpredictable.Consideration of a patient’s autonomy is also challenged by characteristics that are unique to the practice of psychiatry. The prescription of certain psychotropic medications can alter how people think and feel, while psychotherapy works towards changing the patient’s views and values. The philosopher, Jennifer Radden, describes this process as “re-forming the patient’s whole self or character … akin to the responsibilities of raising children”.2 The psychotherapeutic relationship is thus particularly personal and intimate because patients are asked to provide information that often reveals their innermost feelings, fears and fantasies. This information is provided on the basis of trust and assurance of confidentiality, and with expectation of being helped.Jeremy Holmes and Gwen Adshead have elaborated on the vulnerability of patients seeking psychotherapy: they might be particularly susceptible to exploitation because their past experiences of being exploited have led to their distress and help seeking — their dependency and the extreme privacy of the therapeutic relationship make any transgression difficult to be uncovered.3 There is a calamitous combination of the “unconscious wish in the patient to be used” with the complicity of an unethical therapist seeking to fulfil his own interests.4As in any other doctor-patient relationship, the relationship between the mental healthcare practitioner and the patient is one of unequal power where the former is ascendant. While that power should be exercised to heal and to relieve suffering, it also gives the practitioner tremendous power “to harm, reject, misunderstand, or exploit patients who struggle with the experience of mental illness, which itself may generate helplessness, despair, distress, and exceptional dependence on the clinician”.5 Given the potential of doing good and harm coupled with the likelihood of being so significant in the life of the patient,6 providing care for those with mental disorders and distress is necessarily ethically exacting — arguably more so than in other medical practice settings. [End Page 174]This precariousness has led to the suggestion that ethics in psychiatry should have a special status and that the more general principles of biomedical ethics are too limited in scope to... (shrink)

Background: Scholarly work is needed to develop the conceptual and theoretical understanding of trust to nursing practice. The transition from hospital care to complex pediatric homecare involves nurses in myriad roles, including management and care provision. Complex pediatric homecare transforms children, families, professionals, and communities, but its exact implications are unclear. Research objectives: To conduct an ethical inquiry into the role and responsibilities of nurses in the qualitative experience of adults involved in the hospital-to-home transition of young, (...) ventilator-dependent children. Research design: We followed methods described by Franco Carnevale. We used a sociologically grounded theoretical orientation—trust—to re-interpret qualitative data for an ethical inquiry into a specific facet of that data. Participants and study context: The participants included 26 adults, including 14 nurses, involved in the hospital-to-home transition in a Canadian province. Participants represented family, hospital, home, and government. Ethical considerations: The Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary approved this study. Findings: First, the concept and practice of trust was salient to the experience of transition. For example, responsibilities’ allocation between hospital-based professionals to mothers, home-based nurses, and non-professionals necessitated reliance and vulnerability. Second, the consequences of distrust connected to recognized challenges. For example, tensions along rural–urban, medical-family, and professional–personal divide each revealed suspicion and uncertainty that led to isolation and anxiety for all involved. Third, recommendations to improve the experience and mitigate the challenges of transition can be grounded in trust promotion. For example, transition-specific education programs and codes of ethics would promote openness, recognize mutual vulnerability, and advance trust in transition. Conclusions: The challenges to transition evidenced distrust, while trust represents a powerful tool to counter these challenges and their implications. A climate of trust could bridge divides between mothers and professionals; rural and urban professionals; and professionals with differing relationships with the family. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to justify the belief that there are biological normative mechanisms that fulfill non-trivial causal roles in the explanations (as formulated by researchers) of actions and behaviors present in specific systems. One example of such mechanisms is the predictive mechanisms described and explained by predictive processing (hereinafter PP), which (1) guide actions and (2) shape causal transitions between states that have specific content and fulfillment conditions (e.g. mental states). Therefore, I am guided by a specific (...) theoretical goal associated with the need to indicate those conditions that should be met by the non-trivial theory of normative mechanisms and the specific models proposed by PP supporters. In this work, I use classical philosophical methods, such as conceptual analysis and critical reflection. I also analyze selected studies in the field of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neurology, information theory and biology in terms of the methodology, argumentation and language used, in accordance with their theoretical importance for the issues discussed in this study. In this sense, the research presented here is interdisciplinary. My research framework is informed by the mechanistic model of explanation, which defines the necessary and sufficient conditions for explaining a given phenomenon. The research methods I chose are therefore related to the problems that I intend to solve. In the introductory chapter, “The concept of predictive processing”, I discuss the nature of PP as well as its main assumptions and theses. I also highlight the key concepts and distinctions for this research framework. Many authors argue that PP is a contemporary version of Kantianism and is exposed to objections similar to those made against the approach of Immanuel Kant. I discuss this thesis and show that it is only in a very general sense that the PP framework is neo-Kantian. Here we are not dealing with transcendental deduction nor with the application of transcendental arguments. I argue that PP is based on reverse engineering and abduction inferences. In the second part of this chapter, I respond to the objection formulated by Dan Zahavi, who directly accuses this research framework of anti-realistic consequences. I demonstrate that the position of internalism, present in the so-called conservative PP, does not imply anti-realism, and that, due to the explanatory role played in it by structural representations directed at real patterns, it is justified to claim that PP is realistic. In this way, I show that PP is a non-trivial research framework, having its subject, specific methods and its own epistemic status. Finally, I discuss positions classified as the socalled radical PP. In the chapter “Predictive processing as a Bayesian explanatory model” I justify the thesis according to which PP offers Bayesian modeling. Many researchers claim that the brain is an implemented statistical probabilistic network that is an approximation of the Bayesian 7 rule. In practice, this means that all cognitive processes are to apply Bayes' rule and can be described in terms of probability distributions. Such a solution arouses objections among many researchers and is the subject of wide criticism. The purpose of this chapter is to justify the thesis that Bayesian PP is a non-trivial research framework. For this purpose, I argue that it explains certain phenomena not only at the computational level described by David Marr, but also at the level of algorithms and implementation. Later in this chapter I demonstrate that PP is normative modeling. Proponents of the use of Bayesian models in psychology or decision theory argue that they are normative because they allow the formulation of formal rules of action that show what needs to be done to make a given action optimal. Critics of this approach emphasize that such thinking about the normativity of Bayesian modeling is unjustified and that science should shift from prescriptive to descriptive positions. In a polemic with Shira Elqayam and Jonathan Evans (2011), I show that the division they propose into prescriptivism and Bayesian descriptivism is apparent, because, as I argue, there are two forms of prescriptivism, i.e. the weak and the strong. I argue that the weak version is epistemic and can lead to anti-realism, while the strong version is ontic and allows one to justify realism in relation to Bayesian models. I argue that a weak version of prescriptivism is valid for PP. It allows us to adopt anti-realism in relation to PP. In practice, this means that you can explain phenomena using Bayes' rule. This does not, however, imply that they are Bayesian in nature. However, the full justification of realism in relation to the Bayesian PP presupposes the adoption of strong prescriptivism. This position assumes that phenomena are explained by Bayesian rule because they are Bayesian as such. If they are Bayesian in nature, then they should be explained using Bayesian modeling. This thesis will be substantiated in the chapters “Normative functions and mechanisms in the context of predictive processing” and “Normative mechanisms and actions in predictive processing”. In the chapter “The Free Energy Principle in predictive processing”, I discuss the Free Energy Principle (hereinafter FEP) formulated by Karl Friston and some of its implications. According to this principle, all biological systems (defined in terms of Markov blankets) minimize the free energy of their internal states in order to maintain homeostasis. Some researchers believe that PP is a special case of applying this principle to cognition, and that predictive mechanisms are homeostatic mechanisms that minimize free energy. The discussion of FEP is important due to the fact that some authors consider it to be important for explanatory purposes and normative. If this is the case, then FEP turns out to be crucial in explaining normative predictive mechanisms and, in general, any normative biological mechanisms. To define the explanatory possibilities of this principle, I refer to the discussion of its supporters on the issue they define as the problem of continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. A critical analysis of this discussion and the additional arguments I have formulated have allowed me to revise the explanatory ambitions of FEP. I also reject the belief that this principle is necessary to explain the nature of predictive mechanisms. I argue that the principle formulated and defended by Friston is an important research heuristic for PP analysis. 8 In the chapter “Normative functions and mechanisms in predictive processing”, I start my analyzes by formulating an answer to the question about the normative nature of homeostatic mechanisms. I demonstrate that predictive mechanisms are not homeostatic. I defend the view that a full explanation of normative mechanisms presupposes an explanation of normative functions. I discuss the most important proposals for understanding the normativity of a function, both from a systemic and teleosemantic perspective. I conclude that the non-trivial concept of a function must meet two requirements which I define as explanatory and normative. I show that none of the theories I have invoked satisfactorily meets both of these requirements. Instead, I propose a model of normativity based on Bickhard's account, but supplemented by a mechanistic perspective. I argue that a function is normative when: (1) it allows one to explain the dysfunction of a given mechanism; (2) it contributes to the maintenance of the organism's stability by shaping and limiting possible relations, processes and behaviors of a given system; and when (3) (according to the representational and predictive functions) it enables explaining the attribution of logical values of certain representations / predictions. In such an approach, a mechanism is normative when it performs certain normative functions and when it is constitutive for a specific action or behavior, despite the fact that for some reason it cannot realize it either currently or in the long-term. Such an understanding of the normativity of mechanisms presupposes the acceptance of the epistemic hypothesis. I argue that this hypothesis is not cognitively satisfactory, and therefore the ontic hypothesis should be justified, which is directly related to adopting the position of ontic prescriptivism. For this reason, referring to the mechanistic theory of scientific explanations, I formulate an ontical interpretation of the concept of a normative mechanism. According to this approach, a mechanism or a function is normative when they perform such and such causal roles in explaining certain actions and behaviors. With regard to the normative properties of predictive mechanisms and functions, this means that they are the causes of specific actions an organism carries out in the environment. In this way, I justify the necessity of accepting the ontic hypothesis and rejecting the epistemic hypothesis. The fifth chapter, “Normative mechanisms and actions in predictive processing”, is devoted to the dark room problem and the related exploration-exploitation trade-off. A dark room is the state that an agent could be in if it minimized the sum of all potential prediction errors. I demonstrate that, in accordance with the basic assumption of PP about the need for continuous and long-term minimization of prediction errors, such a state should be desirable for the agent. Is it really so? Many authors believe it is not. I argue that the test of the value of PP is the possibility of a non-trivial solution of this problem, which can be reduced to the choice between active and uncertainty-increasing exploration and safe and easily predictable exploitation. I show that the solution proposed by PP supporters present in the literature does not enable a fully satisfactory explanation of this dilemma. Then I defend the position according to which the full explanation of the normative mechanisms, and, subsequently, the solution to the dilemma of exploration and exploitation, involves reference to the existence of constraints present in the environment. The constraints 9 include elements of the environment that make a given mechanism not only causal but also normative. They are therefore key to explaining the predictive mechanisms. They do not only play the role of the context in which the mechanism is implemented, but, above all, are its constitutive component. I argue that the full explanation of the role of constraints in normative predictive mechanisms presupposes the integration of individual models of specific cognitive phenomena, because only the mechanistic integration of PP with other models allows for a non-trivial explanation of the nature of normative predictive mechanisms that would have a strong explanatory value. The explanatory monism present in many approaches to PP makes it impossible to solve the problem of the dark room. Later in this chapter, I argue that the Bayesian PP is normative not because it enables the formulation of such and such rules of action, but because the predictive mechanisms themselves are normative. They are normative because they condition the choice of such and such actions by agents. In this way, I justify the hypothesis that normative mechanisms make it possible to explain the phenomenon of agent motivation, which is crucial for solving the dark room problem. In the last part of the chapter, I formulate the hypothesis of distributed normativity, which assumes that the normative nature of certain mechanisms, functions or objects is determined by the relations into which these mechanisms, functions or objects enter. This means that what is normative (in the primary sense) is the relational structure that constitutes the normativity of specific items included in it. I suggest that this hypothesis opens up many areas of research and makes it possible to rethink many problems. In the “Conclusion”, I summarize the results of my research and indicate further research perspectives. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the value of embracing digital technology in order to effect positive change in a non-governmental charity organisation, in this case the Irish Charity Crosscause. The outcome of the research was the creation of a charity video, Crosscause: Making a Difference, to showcase humanitarian work in Ireland and Romania with a view to inspiring others to contribute in some capacity to this cause. Video is an important medium to provide connections with a wider audience, as it (...) gives humanitarian workers and marginalised communities an opportunity to tell their story by making a compelling and evocative case to others. Visual media not only makes connections with an audience, but can also positively challenge people to consider what is happening in the world around them. The research process incorporated an entrepreneurial methodology - an Educational Entrepreneurial approach to action research-with four steps: Exploring, Understanding, Creating and Transforming, which is designed to guide practitioner-researchers as they embrace digital technology to resolve an identified need in a workplace context, including people in disadvantaged settings. In this research, there was an identified need for a charity video to link the giving in Ireland to the receiving in Romania, so that viewers could see the tangible effects of their contributions. A further aim of the research was to illustrate how volunteering can inspire solidarity among Irish and Romanian communities. (shrink)

Evidence is mounting that nature-based learning (NBL) enhances children’s educational and developmental outcomes, making this an opportune time to identify promising questions to carry research and practice in this field forward. We present the outcomes of a process to set a research agenda for NBL, undertaken by the Science of Nature-Based Learning Collaborative Research Network, with funding from the National Science Foundation. A literature review and several approaches to gathering input from researchers, practitioners and funders resulted in recommendations (...) for research questions and methodological improvements to increase the relevance and rigor of research in this field. Some questions seek to understand how learning in nature affects what children learn, how they learn, and how it varies based on age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnic background, special needs and individual differences. Outcomes of interest cover academic performance, practical skills, personal development, and environmental stewardship. Other questions seek to find causal explanations for observed outcomes. To create optimal conditions for NBL, the research agenda includes practical questions about how to prepare teachers to work successfully in nature and how to support their adoption of this approach. Not least, the research agenda asks whether learning in nature can address major societal issues by moderating the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage on children’s academic achievement, personal development and wellbeing, and how these benefits might be attained at reasonable costs. A deeper understanding of how, why and for whom different forms of nature contact enhance learning and development is needed to guide practice and policy decision-making. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an introduction to the special issue on the Philosophical Novel for Children by pointing to a lacuna in the theoretical field of philosophy for/with children, suggesting that the field is in need of more research on the philosophical novel given its status as the curricular centerpiece of Matthew Lipman’s vision of P4/WC. I describe the genesis of the idea for this special issue, emerging as it did first from a series (...) of questions and experiences which I encountered while working with Lipman’s philosophical novels as a P4/WC practitioner, then through a scholarly exploration of Lipman’s model theory of the philosophical novel for children, and culminating in the presentation of several of the papers published here at a special symposium on the philosophical novel for children at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I conclude with a preview of the papers in this special issue, highlighting several shared themes and concerns. (shrink)