In France and in Quebec, the training objectives of education professionals are now contained in repositories of skills. The French repository is strongly influenced by the figure of the ‘reflective practitioner’ (Schön, 1983). This paper presents a training device for future professionals of teaching and education that focuses on interactions between students through the use of practices writing groups, an inter-student correspondence and ‘cooperative institutions’. By analysing some of the materials collected for research purposes during the training, comprehension assumptions are (...) offered about the subjective rearrangements experienced by students and the device capabilities to promote an appropriate acquisition of professional position. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study is to become acquainted with the educational institutions in Ottoman Empire during and after the 18th century. In this respect, special attention is given to which initiatives were taken in terms of education and which educational institutions were established during the aforementioned period. The need to comply with the West in terms of science, culture, reasoning, and technological advancements has led to the questioning of the current madrasah system. Upon revising the educational system of (...) the madrasah, which had difficulties in being productive and attaining to the necessities of the time, there have been initiatives primarily to establish and structure military schools. These attempts to reform education was intensively seen as from the early 18th century. The above-mentioned changes and progress have gained momentum with the Tanzimat era. It was observed that during this period, many schools were established beyond military; education levels were clarified and; females were given right to study. Similar to Tanzimat era during the first Constitutional Monarchy and Autocracy eras, positive contributions toward educational reforms were made. However, beginning from the middle of the second Constitutional Monarchy era, the economic and social complications that the state was going through had a negative impact on the educational system and the practicality of the educational institutions.Summary: Education has been the most important factor in determining the social, economic, and cultural level of a society. The level of development, which is the determinant of the superiority of the nations to each other over the world, varies according to the importance given to education. To be a pioneer in the scientific sense, to be able to have technological opportunities, to make people live more comfortable and peaceful, to have more power in the economic field and to ensure the continuity of the nation that depending on all these, it will be possible with the understanding of education that can read the time and future well. The fact that world states are superior to each other in different periods of history is directly related to their understanding of education. It can be said that in the centuries following the beginning of the new age, especially the Western nations have taken a more positive step at this subject. The changes in both mental and action spheres such as XVI. century Renaissance movements, XVIII. century enlightenment movement and finally the industrial revolution triggered the development in the scientific and technological field. In these periods the importance given to thinking and the freedom of thought has been the main factor of the progress in the scientific field. The European nations, which went beyond their religion-based bigotry and prioritized the free and secular understanding, have become superior to other nations of the world. However, it is not quite possible to say that in the same periods the Ottoman Empire was able to adapt with the same speed to such accelerations of change and development that placed in Europe. One of the main reasons for this situation and perhaps most importantly is that the educational concept in the Ottoman Empire remained within a static structure in the last centuries. In particular, the matters such as the madrasa being away from productivity, the limitation of the understanding of the science only with religious sciences, has led to the problem of inability to adapt to the rapid transformation that in Europe. The first steps towards eliminating this weakness noticed by the state executives over time has been taken through the improvement and transformation of the Ottoman educational institutions. It is possible to say that the first attempts as to these restructures of education, which is also called as Westernization or modernization by the educational historians, has begun in the period of Sultan III. Selim. In the context of the Nizam-ı Cedid movement, a number of positive initiatives in education, such as the improvement of madrasas, the opening of military schools and translation activities, constitute the core of the changes that will take place in later periods. Immediately afterwards, in the period of II. Mahmut, making the reading and writing education compulsory, opening of Western-style junior high school, establishing medical and vocational schools that provide education at higher education level are considered as positive innovations of the period. The time interval from the proclamation of the Tanzimat edict until the First Constitutional monarchy is the period in which the institutionalization and structuring towards education in the Ottoman Empire is at the highest level. Besides many educational institutions in this process where the ministry responsible for education and training is established and the regulation containing the arrangements regarding this field is put into force, one of the most important initiatives made is laying the foundations of the Dâr al-Fünûn (Ottoman University) which is considered as the first university in this land. The fact that many educational institutions established in this period that are the roots of today's educational institutions is important in terms of demonstrating the accuracy of the initiatives within the mentioned period. In Meşrutiyet (the First Constitutional Monarchy) and the subsequent period of Mutlakiyet (Autocracy), contributions were provided on previous positive structuring. However, the social and economic problems experienced in the country since the second half of II. Meşrutiyet (the 2nd Constitutional Monarchy) have been effective in the inability of continuing innovations towards education. In this study, the educational institutions established in the Ottoman Empire before and after the Tanzimat period were discussed. The aim is not just to reveal what these schools are. It was also aimed to emphasize which areas in which schools are required to be based on which needs, which obstacles are encountered during the change of mentality in education, regulatory activities foreseen to overcome obstacles and to what extent they have been successful. In this regard, the signals of change as to the structure of educational institutions, which could be the source of most of the republic period, started from the beginning of 1700s and continued until World War II period. During this period of more than a hundred years, the political periods related to the structure and functioning of the state have also been influential in the structuring of educational institutions. In fact, the Reorganization (Tanzimat) period, which is known as ‘reform’ in the mentioned process, is considered as the stage where the change and transformation concerning education is the most. It is seen that the process of westernization still continues even though it is not with the same acceleration in the Constitutional Monarchy and Autocracy periods after the Reorganization period. When looking at the facility of educational institutions in chronological order, it is determined that there is a dominated understanding that prioritizes to train military staff in the military field and to have a competent army with the technological possibilities of the time, in other words, to create a strong defence system against the foreign powers of the country. Indeed, for the first time in order to give technical information about modern military, Hendesehane opened and started to operate in İstanbul in 1734 by Mahmut I; Mühendishâne-i Bahrî-i Hümâyûn, the school of the first military maritime was opened in 1775 in order to provide modern education; Mühendishâne-i Berrî-i Hümâyun was founded in 1795 in Istanbul, in order to train artillery and military officer (military engineer); Mekteb-i Harbiye, which was opened in 1835 to train officers, and Menşe-i Küttab-ı Askeri, which was established to train military scribes, contributed to the contemporary construction of the army. In the mentioned period, the most important change outside the military area was in the health area. In this sense, in order to meet the medical doctor needs of the army, Tıbhâne-i Amire was established in 1827. In 1867, the first civilian medical school, Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Mülkiye, started education and training. Another important innovation movement for education was in the field of law. In this context, the School Law was established in 1880. In order to train competent staff in administrative staff, the schools of the Mekteb-i Mülkiye, the schools of teacher, the schools that enable women to do education, the improvement of schools that train the clergy and the regulations based on this take attention as educational activities carried out in the mentioned period. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Experience and Education:Themes and QuestionsDeborah Kerdeman"Being with" music. Attentive responsiveness in teaching. Scholarly learning as engagement with beauty. Three evocative images of aesthetic experience come to light in the essays by Custodero, Hansen, and Neumann. From the musical play of children conducting imaginary orchestras to the vocational aspirations of adults who gaze through telescopes or study paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, aesthetic experience spans a range of (...) activities and ages. No matter the setting or moment, aesthetic experience vitalizes our lives with meaning and joy. Why this is so and what difference this makes for education emerge as overarching concerns in this set of papers. Addressing these issues, the authors articulate a number of commonthemes and reach similar conclusions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience.I want to identify and analyze key ideas that run throughout these essays. Doing so deepens our appreciation of the authors' insights and underscores the importance of the project they undertake. I also want to examine three questions that the essays suggest but do not develop. Exploring these questions, I hope to further enrich our understanding of aesthetic experience and its place in education.First and foremost, aesthetic experience for all three authors integrates multiple ways of knowing and enables individuals to perceive connections that they might otherwise overlook. According to Custodero, aesthetic experience harmonizes imagination, physicality, and "thinking-in-action." [End Page 88] Thinking-in-action, Custodero says, while "critical and consequential," is nonverbal and nonjudgmental — unifying rather than analytic. Synthesizing bodily movement, imagination, and thought, aesthetic experience reveals "surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena." The theme of integration is echoed in Neumann's description of scholarly learning as aesthetic experience. Scholarly learning does not shun feeling or lived experience, Neumann writes. This way of knowing instead is "deeply emotional and personal." Insight fuses with emotion, enabling scholars to "feel the whole picture," as David the astronomer puts it in his interview with Neumann. For Hansen, aesthetic experience connotes heightened perception, a way of being that attends to nuances of gesture that would otherwise remain invisible. "The aesthetic highlights aspects of wonder and of beauty that emerge, spontaneously and unrehearsed," Hansen explains. A form of creativity, aesthetic perception combines with moral and intellectual understanding to fully embrace "the living dynamic gestalt" of teaching and learning.Aesthetic experience thus integrates mind, body, and emotion. Hansen links aesthetic experience to moral judgment as well. Integrating various ways of knowing, aesthetic experience enables individuals to perceive and understand relationships that pulse throughout the social and natural world. Such understanding is pleasurable, the authors agree.Aesthetic experience not only is integrative. It also is interactive. Custodero's musicians interact with instruments, musical scores, and other individuals. Neumann's scholars interact with ideas and scholarly materials. Hansen's preservice teachers interact with works of art, subject matter, students, and one another. Interacting with people and things, individuals become absorbed in what they are doing. "Being with" music is howCustodero puts it. Carmen, the professor of music in Neumann's essay, says that playing music well "is like a complete focus of oneness."Being absorbed in aesthetic interaction does not discount or dissolve the ability to make decisions or direct action. Aesthetic experience rather presumes and promotes "aesthetic agency," to borrow a phrase from Custodero. "To 'be in the moment,'" Custodero writes, "is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital." Hansen's description of aesthetic perception combines attentiveness and responsiveness in a "dynamic combination of patience, listening, and initiative." Neumann states that scholarly learning is an experience of "deep engrossment." Such engrossment does not extinguish the self, however. In the words of David the astronomer, feeling "the whole picture... is a combination of both what you see, sort of an instinctive or primal thing, and also your knowledge of what, you know, you put together." [End Page 89]The interactive nature of aesthetic experience thus signifies a kind of "agency-in-situ." Aesthetic experience is shaped or directed by the contribution and initiative of individuals. But individuals cannot act in advance of experience or know what to do, unless they are... (shrink)

This paper draws upon both Carl Jung’s theory of the psyche and nonviolence philosophy to re-examine curriculum dynamics in the context of teacher education. An integrative psychic life is enabled by the transcendent function of assimilating the unconscious to expand the horizon of consciousness while the integrative power of nonviolence heals the wounds of violence and promotes compassionate relationships. These theories follow different directions—the primary focus of Jung’s theory is the individual person and that of nonviolence theory is humane relationality—but (...) their underlying philosophical principles also intersect in ways that have important implications for today’s education. This paper focuses on three major intersections: the thread of interconnectedness is the undercurrent of an integrative psychic life and the underlying foundation for nonviolent relations; the shadow awareness within the individual psyche creates a social space for compassionate relationships with others; and complementary modes of psychic and nonviolent integration provide multiple pathways for teacher educators’ pedagogy and students’ self-education. After elaborating on these intersecting aspects and their curriculum implications, the final section discusses curriculum dynamics for subjective and social transformation through analysing the interactive relationships between and among teacher educators, students, texts, and contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 295-301 [Access article in PDF] Some Recent Controversies in the Study of Later Greek Rhetoric George A. Kennedy The Greeks of the Roman Empireproduced no equal to Cicero or Quintilian: among their extensive writings there is no profound philosophical examination of political rhetoric and no comprehensive account of rhetorical education based on a lifetime of teaching. But the numerous later Greek rhetorical treatises, (...) dry reading as they may seem, sometimes even poorly written, have considerable significance for the intellectual history of the early centuries of the Christian era. They are a major source for our understanding of education, its materials, goals, and values, as experienced by most important thinkers of the times, pagan and Christian; the training they describe directly influenced the form and style of composition of much of the writing that has survived; they are evidence for cultural change and for the perception of Greek language and literature of the classical period more than five hundred years later; and they provide linguists and philologists with useful concepts and terminology to describe the workings of texts, pagan and Christian, ancient and modern.From 1931, when Hugo Rabe published the last of his editions of later Greek rhetorical texts, to 1974, when Josef Martin published Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode(1974), making extensive use of later Greek rhetorical treatises, study of later Greek rhetoric was at a low point. There was of course continued interest in On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to Longinus and surely the finest Greek work on rhetoric of the imperial period. Other important exceptions include Guilelmo Ballaira's edition of Tiberius' handbook of Demosthenic figures and Dieter Hagedorn's monograph, Zur Ideenlehre des Hermogenes(1964). Since the 1970s, with the expansion of research opportunities and younger scholars' search for opportunities in original work, there has been a modest renaissance that has produced new insight and new controversy. In some ways we now know more about the authors and their works; in some ways we are now uncertain about what we thought we [End Page 295] knew. Here I shall comment on several major contributions to the field and various continuing controversies, limiting the discussion to rhetorical theory from the time of the Roman Empire (thus omitting Demetrius and Philodemus as well as the orators).First, however, readers unfamiliar with this subject may appreciate a brief historical background. The antecedents of the concept of Rhetores Graecican be found in composite manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries, which collect a number of works that the teachers and scribes of the times thought basic for their studies. 1 One of these manuscripts, now known as Parisinus 1741, was the basis for the first printing of Rhetores Graeci, the Aldine edition in two volumes (Venice 1508-9). The principal texts included are, in the following order: Aphthonius' Progymnasmata, the five rhetorical treatises attributed to Hermogenes, Aristotle's Rhetorica, the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, Aristotle's Poetica, Sopatros' Quaestiones de compendis declamationibus, the Ars rhetoricathen attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demetrius' De interpretatione, Alexander's De figuris sensus et dictionis, Menander Rhetor's works on epideictic, two treatises on style attributed to Aelius Aristeides, and Apsines' De arte rhetorica.During the next four hundred years several of these works were given better editions, and additional rhetorical treatises were discovered in other manuscripts. Thus when Christian Walz set out in 1832 to edit Rhetores Graeciin what became an authoritative nine-volume edition, he felt able to omit the three Aristotelian works and the work attributed to Dionysius and to add additional handbooks of progymnasmata (in vol. 1), a few short treatises on rhetoric there and in volumes 3 and 9, and a very large amount of Byzantine scholia and commentary on Hermogenes, constituting all of volumes 2 and 4 through 8.Although Parisinus 1741 has remained a major authority for the text of Aristotle's Rhetoric, by 1854 when Leonard Spengel began publication of his Rhetores Graeciin three volumes, several manuscripts offering better texts of other works had been... (shrink)

Although education means evolving or transforming, every individual is the subject of education between the first breath and the last. The individual's relationship with the objects of existence, combined with his uniqueness, constitutes the subject of education on the time-space plane. The individual's relationship with himself and his environment can be associated with education. Since Sufi education adopts a disciplinary structure that aims to enable the individual to know himself first, the individual acquires knowledge from his Lord in his essence (...) and from the elements that teach him in his environment. Depending on the principle of obtaining knowledge from the closest, the individual obtains the educational activity starting from family members based on the principle of trust. Public institutions implementing curricula have also been other structures that nurture the individual. Due to the nature of education, different applications have emerged over time. As a matter of fact, the learner-teacher relationship has been an obstacle to spatial and temporal unity in the course of life, and as a result of this situation, the concept of distance education has emerged. While the letter tradition used in Sufi education, which is a method of distance education, has been practiced for centuries, the modern world met this concept as an educational method only in the 18th century through correspondence. The concept of distance education, which has taken on much newer forms with today's information technologies, will ultimately continue to support the human relationship with knowledge. In this study, it has been tried to understand the common points, characteristics and contributions to education of distance education, which is one of the educational practices in the historical process, and the letter tradition, which is a method of Sufi education.Individualization of education by taking into account the individual characteristics of each of the students, who constitute the focal point of education, is one of the indispensable elements of Sufi education. The murshid, who gets to know his disciple closely during the training process, sees his disciple's strengths and weaknesses, his character structure and his potential that he can maximize with training. The application of education on an individual basis offers an opportunity to maximize the gains in distance education as in Sufi education. The adoption of the principle of gradualism in educational programs and processes is another of the foundations on which Sufi education is based. According to this principle, education has a gradual structure, and this structure can be envisioned as multiple layers that constitute the basis of each other. In the journey of blending the education system and reaching the ideal form over the centuries, distance education systems have also been able to find a field of action in line with this principle. On the other hand, when we look at another characteristic of Sufi education, we encounter a structured and predetermined framework in education. The processes in education in which objectives, boundaries, expectations and achievements are structured and activities are expected to be carried out within a certain program are also predictable for distance education. It is seen that the teacher-student relationship in Sufi education is far from a formal structure and contains the warmth of the education that takes place in the family in the first years of education. Considering how important the first years of education are in terms of leaving a mark and permanence, it is quite remarkable that this principle comes to life in Sufi education platforms, which can also be considered as a prophetic method, by returning to this subjective structure in education.Today, it has become easier for individuals to structure themselves in the areas they need through distance education, and the educational processes that were carried out through correspondence in the past as a necessity for the health and survival of Sufi education have turned into a preference or alternative rather than an obligation. In this study, the aspects and common denominators of Sufi education, which is a Prophetic method, and the tradition of correspondence, which can contribute to distance education and set an example, have been evaluated together with the characteristics of Sufi education. In the study, firstly, the tradition of letter correspondence as a method of Sufi education is examined historically and educationally, and then distance education, which is seen as an outcome of the modern education system, is evaluated conceptually and historically. In the last part of the study, the common denominators of the letter tradition and distance education practice in Sufi education have been tried to be unearthed on the basis of Sufi education methods. (shrink)

Why focus on reading? Reading is one important human activity that is threatened by the knowledge economy in education. In this perspective, good reading tends to be fast reading. The objective for teachers is then to test pupils' reading skills according to how fast they read. In opposition to this, we think that good reading is a slow activity. A good text asks for a reading and a re-reading, again and again, because reading gives rise to thinking. Thus, you (...) can interpret our writing as a political act. We want to participate in education in a way that opposes the force of a knowledge economy. The aim of this article is to argue why prospective teachers have to train their capability [Ricoeur (2005. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) refers to four basic capabilities. He distinguishes between: the capability to speak, the capability to act, the capability to tell, and a fourth capability called imputation. Reading in this respect is subordinate to these basic capabilities] to read and, based on this, why we insist on this being a matter of necessity in order to develop reading as a reflexive activity, through what we have called ?slow reading? (this expression is meant to oppose the instrumentalization of reading toward a skill characterized as fast extractions of information, for instance, as measured in various tests). This represents one part of the argument that we are going to elaborate. The other part of the argument is related more specifically to the place of reading in the training of teachers, more precisely asking where this ?place? is. This has led us to ask the following question: Where are teachers' understandings challenged in teacher training? As our argument is laid out, we say that the place of reading is where teachers' understandings are challenged. This entails that this ?place,? this somewhere, is not a permanent ?dwelling?; it is rather something which has to be created (repeatedly) in a dynamic relationship between reader (teacher) and text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Setting the Stage for a Dialogue:Aesthetics in Drama and Theatre EducationAlistair Martin-Smith (bio)For us, education signifies an initiation into new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving. It signifies the nurture of a special kind of reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to learn.—Maxine Greene, Variations on a Blue Guitar1Examining the aesthetics of the complementary fields of educational drama and theatre is like looking through a (...) kaleidoscope. If you turn it one way, you see one colorful pattern; if you turn it the other way, you see yet another. The multiplicity of approaches to drama and theatre education, each with its own aesthetic pattern, often obscures the common ground they all share. As a result, in its unique emphasis on art, pedagogy, and society, each may have its own aesthetic pattern; yet only by looking closely at each distinct pattern can we understand more of the power of drama and theatre to develop human consciousness.In Western education, aesthetic learning seems incidental to the assessment of learning. How did this happen? For Descartes, whose Cartesian philosophy dissociated mind from body, aesthetic feelings are irrational, since they originate in the body's senses rather than in the mind. Theories of education focused on the primacy of cognition, denying feelings in the erroneous belief that learning is independent of its context. Conversely, aesthetic education is concerned with the quality of experience, how it is felt. Dewey believed that "learning by doing" was a "consummatory" experience for the learner; it was dramatic, dialogic, and felt. The confusion between subjective and objective aspects of the aesthetic experience makes aesthetic evaluation difficult, and this may be why cognitively dominated education has steered clear of aesthetics. Richard Courtney recognized that there is an important distinction to be made between aesthetic symbols and [End Page 3] artistic symbols: "Aesthetic symbols emphasize feeling; artistic symbols are context-dependent—they only have meaning in the context of art."2David Best argues that "the failure to recognise the distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic contributes largely to the trivialisation of the potential of the arts in education."3 He points out that "... it may often be necessary to take into account, at least implicitly, wider factors... in order to judge whether [an] appraisal was aesthetic or artistic."4 What are these wider factors, and how can audiences attend to them? As Christopher Havell reminds us,There is increasing pressure on drama teachers to use their teaching expertise purely for the development of social and life-skills training. This instrumental work may, at times, closely resemble the drama process, but the intentions will be confined to an experience that simulates or resembles those "real-life situations" that it is expected students will encounter. The aesthetic search for the "universal" at the centre of the particular will not be a relevant aim in any vocational training! One can only hope that the emerging interest in the aesthetic nature of drama and its place in a coherent arts education will encourage teachers and students to reflect on the final inadequacy of any instrumental view.5I believe that it is through the power of aesthetic education that audiences for drama and theatre will come to appreciate the artistic.In Caravaggio's painting David with the Head of Goliath (1606-10), the viewer is confronted with three time periods simultaneously. In his depiction of David, Caravaggio paints the shepherd-king of the Old Testament who prefigures Christ, but he is also modeled on Caravaggio's lover. David holds the severed head of Goliath down low in such a way as to engage the private viewer rather than to evoke the public spectacle.6 As I understood that the head of Goliath was actually a self-portrait of the painter not long before his death, I experienced a moment of instantaneity that shocked me into a new awareness of my own mortality, my relation to life and death. As it is Caravaggio's last journey, so is it our own. While Caravaggio's penultimate painting is recognized in terms of its artistic achievement, the moment of self-recognition on the part of the... (shrink)

The roles of small and great books, and passionate yet well-considered writings in the general education of a “college” or “university” trained teacher are questions which should be turned back upon the historian as teacher and writer. Where resides the historian's classroom? Who are the students and how do teachers come to be? What subject matter should be used to prod and provoke an often dormant humanity awake? Professor Marc Bloch's work, his passion for history's rôles and its voices (...) from the past speaking to the present, had a Renaissance in the cauldron of World War II. Bloch's commitment to teaching and writing history, teaching about the forceful, or surprising and shocking, “presences” of history's supposed past-tense experiences, remains seminal to the historian's craft. Bloch's own voice from the past was forged in an intensity of present-time experience. Reflection was searing experience. Memory was “now” and remembrance was an accident of preservation for futures then unknown. These futures need to know of the experiences of former, fragile, personal and generational memories if the very same futures were to be lived more surely and securely. Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, remains a vindication of the human-centred, purposive roles of history in a general education. Moreover, this general education can now be said to cover the broad sweep of “secondary schooling” experiences. This sweep of schooling and post-schooling experiences is beginning, however tentatively and problematically, to extend itself into worlds of work, the futures of work and the academic futures or courses of higher education: the arena of tertiary and university education. In a not dissimilar fashion but in an even more intense spirit, Bloch's work, L’étrange défaite, examines the explosion and implosion of France and, in effect, Western Europe in the years, months and days leading up to the German offensive in the West of 10 May 1940. Bloch recognized that education and the failures to harness intellect, true intellectual freedom and innovative teaching weighed heavily upon the disastrous course of events in 1940. Professor Bloch's texts can serve two complementary purposes. First, his works, Strange Defeat and The Historian's Craft remain as significant, contemporary records of personal thoughts, argumentative methodologies, and recollections of world-shattering events. They constitute, quite literally, an historian's craft in action. Second, Bloch's texts can serve an equally valuable role where the writer seeks to take his reader through and beyond the immediate historical question, methodology or series of unravelling events into an intellectual duel which stands upon the historian's engagement with worlds, past and present. Questions and actions, makings and doings matter in this world. Understanding is not only a prime responsibility of the historian; it is a duty which might well prove dangerous. Given the above observations, this essay will seek to emphasize that world history and the teaching of broad histories of humanity recognizes few, if any, borders which seek to block or hold at bay the presentation of the “passport” known as understanding. Teaching history is much more than teaching civics or recognizing civilizational variety and its barbarous opposites. Teaching history is an act, however imperfect, of recognizing ourselves in time. My brother “schoolmasters”—when it came to the point, you did, for the most part, put up a magnificent fight. It was your goodwill which managed to create in many a sleepy secondary school, in many universities—prisoners of the worse routines the only form of education of which, perhaps, we can feel genuinely proud. I only hope that a day will come, and come soon, a day of glory and of happiness for France, when, liberated from the enemy, and freer than ever in our intellectual life, we may meet again for the mutual discussion of ideas. And when that happens, do you not think that, having learned from an experience so dearly purchased, you will find much to alter in the things you were teaching only a few years back? Strange Defeat, 142).1 What was at stake was a geological upheaval of thought …2. (shrink)

Based on the presentation of a research framework (the shared work of teachers), this text uses an empirical approach to examine the hypothesis of a co-elaboration of the professional situation. To do so, the empirical investigation, based on the Goffman framework, analyzes the process of reconstructing a teaching session (reference situation) over the course of a pedagogical counselling session (support situation) characterized by interaction between a beginning teacher and a trainer. The invalidation of the hypothesis leads to a suggested (...) conceptualization of the professional situation combining definitional approaches (emphasizing the duality between its singularity and its genericity) and methodological approaches. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Harmony Between Rousseau’s Musical Theory and his PhilosophyJohn T. ScottRousseau is best known as the author of philosophic works, but he was a musician and musical theorist before he burst onto the European literary scene with his First Discourse. While he earned celebrity as an anti-philosophical philosopher, he continued to consider music as his primary vocation and avocation throughout his life. Rousseau testifies to the harmony between his (...) musical work and his philosophy in his Dialogues, where he explains that his musical writings and compositions are animated by the same feelings and ideas as all of his works—that they too are based on the principle of his “system” that “man is good although men are wicked.” 1 His mature musical theory not only incorporates his philosophy of human nature and development but also extends it through an examination of the role of the passions in human communication. Rousseau’s musical theory is an important, yet often overlooked, facet of his philosophy.The relationship between Rousseau’s musical theory and his philosophy as a whole has seldom been extensively analyzed. 2 His only widely known writing relating to music is the Essay on the Origin of Languages, but even that work has in general not received a full accounting because it has rarely been interpreted in light of his other musical writings. The Essay emerged out of both the Second Discourse and the contemporaneous musical polemics of the mid-1750s. The simultaneous elaboration of his “system” and his continued work on music was the context in which Rousseau’s mature musical theory developed. After an account of Rousseau’s pre-systematic musical writings and [End Page 287] a discussion of the development of his musical theory, I will turn to an examination of the Essay. Finally, I will conclude by discussing Rousseau’s novel aesthetic theory and its impact.Rousseau’s Presystematic Musical Writings“Jean-Jacques was born for music.” 3 Rousseau’s musical writings might be characterized as his attempt to account for his native love for music. In his Confessions he speaks of “the taste or rather passion for music” that he had almost from birth and says that it was while in Italy, after running away from Geneva at age sixteen, that his passion began to declare itself. 4 Rousseau increasingly indulged his love for music over the next several years, although six months in a choir school at about the age of seventeen was almost the only formal musical instruction he received. He acquired and painstakingly mastered Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony, and studied informally with a young organist with Italian training, recalling how he compared his friend’s “principles” to those of “my Rameau.” 5 At least in retrospect, then, Rousseau noted the contrast between French and Italian music that would later bring him into conflict with his youthful hero.Rousseau soon took up the profession of a music teacher and copyist, a trade to which he would return after abandoning philosophy. Copying music acquainted him with the difficulty of the ordinary visual system of notating music, and he therefore devised a numerical system. It was with his system of notation and a play, Narcisse, that Rousseau set out for Paris in 1741. He gained an audience for his “Plan Regarding New Signs for Music” (1742) at the Academy of Sciences, and while it was favorably received, the report of a select committee concluded that his system was not entirely new and was less practical in most respects than the ordinary system. 6 Rousseau was nonetheless convinced of his system’s utility and published it as the Dissertation on Modern Music (1743). This work contains a digression on musical expression where he explains that we are not “touched” by sounds themselves but by the harmonic relationships they have among them. He sends his reader to Rameau’s writings, where the source of musical expression is “sufficiently explained.” 7 In his mature musical writings Rousseau expounds a theory explicitly opposed to Rameau’s theory of musical expression.Several incidents in the next decade before the discovery of his “system” seem to have contributed to Rousseau’s subsequent break with Rameau. [End... (shrink)

This book explores the ethical dimensions surrounding the development of education for sustainable development within schools, and examines these issues through the lens of ethical literacy. The book argues that teaching children to engage with nature is crucial if they are to develop a true understanding of sustainability and climate issues, and claims that sustainability education is much more successful when pupils are treated as moral agents rather than being passive subjects of testing and assessment. The collection brings together a (...) range of fresh and creative perspectives on how issues around ethical literacies can be elaborated and expanded with regard to democratic sustainability education. The use of children's books in teaching about sustainability is carefully explored, as are the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of environmental education. Including an afterword by Arjen Wals, Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the field of sustainability education. (shrink)

This study examines how second-language English learners' grammar issues differ in rural and urban Pakistani schools. This study is quasi-experimental. The study uses a quantitative approach and SPSS-analyzed writing test samples. The key findings reveal that pupils struggle to understand complicated syntactic structures like qualifiers, adjectives, adverbs, and adjunct and complement categories, even though they understand subject-verb agreement. Lack of resources and poor language education exacerbate these issues in rural areas. Teachers emphasize the need for the government to improve (...) English grammar education and the necessity for custom learning aids to help rural students with their particular issues in grammar and syntax. Teachers also want enhanced professional development to master advanced grammar teaching methods. Students expressed mixed confidence in their grammatical skills since they were unsure how well they comprehended complex grammar principles. To assist students in comprehending and using grammar rules, the study recommends adding more interactive and relevant grammar assignments to courses and using the process-genre technique. The results also demonstrate the need for teachers to continue to study and have support networks to ensure good language sessions. Policy suggestions include equipping schools, especially rural ones, modifying the curriculum, and funding teacher training. This study enhances Pakistani second language learners' academic and employment prospects by identifying grammar issues and providing writing tips. Thus, it expands ESL instruction. (shrink)

Vocational Education and Training programs are fuelled by technical and practical educational modules. The teaching staff adopts both traditional and innovative pedagogical frameworks to increase the generalization and maintenance of practical skills. At the same time, VET teachers and trainers have a few occasions to promote and include disciplines and educational programs for enhancing students' soft skills, e.g., critical thinking skills and media literacy. Following the European VET framework and literature of the field, CT and ML represent a (...) social challenge that requires even more efforts by academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Thisstudy situates into this context with the aim of introducing a novel educational approach for supporting the teaching staff in the promotion of students' CT and ML. This educational approach has been realized by the team of researchers and trainers of the NERDVET project, an Erasmus+ KA3 project devoted to the promotion of new tools and policies for enhancing CT and ML in VET. To pursue this aim, the team has employed the self-nudging model which regards the individuals' set of cognitive and behavioral strategies that individuals can develop to target a specific objective. By framing pedagogical strategies into this perspective, the team realized an initial approach for educational activities and teaching strategies to promote students' CT and ML. (shrink)

The current middle schools teach Oriental Ethics by utilizing moral education textbooks. Textbooks of moral education nurture moral ethics and etiquette needed for leading our lives and make us scrupulously reflect ethical issues and revise them involved in society and our lives thereby helping us to lead our lives in a desirable way and therefore contribute to the development of our society and this world. In case of presenting materials for textbook reading related to Western philosophy described in the textbooks (...) of moral education, they schematize them for students to easily understand and help them to explore them while in case of oriental ones, it is found to be quite insufficient and the reason is that only few of them who write textbooks are majored in oriental philosophy or oriental ethics. So it is quite appropriate that when writing and examining the content involved in oriental ethics, more than a certain proportion should be allocated to the people who are majored in oriental philosophy or oriental ethics. To revitalize oriental ethics education in middle schools, the content of the subject should be made easy and interesting to approach and to do this the utmost efforts of the writers are required. Furthermore, more good quality books other than the textbooks which are easy to read and help students to gain wisdom of lives are needed. If necessary, a system where the scholars can advise or provide related materials on the questions of the teachers or the students on line. Along with that, the teachers teaching oriental ethics should give them fun and inspiration, training their thoughts and moral judgment capacity To raise the level of the middle school students’ response regarding oriental ethics other than the classes of moral education, a variety of mind training programs which enliven the students’ self respect and understand other people and relieve their stress should be developed and the efforts to apply them should be accompanied. (shrink)

The purpose of the research is to clarify the current problems of education in terms of education management and to work out the ways of solving them within the framework of the humanistic paradigm, that is, “management for human education”, presenting these solutions as implementing the required model of teachers’ training. Methodology. The author implements the approaches of education anthropology, the basis for which was provided by monitoring in action, textual records and research letters, as well as general philosophical (...) methods. Scientific novelty of the research lies in the anthropological view of the education problems, including the sphere of management. The perspective of the modern situation under study, that is, the neoliberal and managerial context add to the degree of scientific novelty. Results. Different conceptions of education management are revealed and the corresponding management models are considered, the difference of which is explained by opposing the humanistic and managerial paradigms. In a number of problems of education management, beyond the usual ones that appear for the collectives of educational organizations, it became obvious that new problems have emerged due to introducing “new management”, which has a noticeable impact on the goals and values themselves, distorting “human education”. As a response required from management to the needs of education in line with the humanistic paradigm, a “synergetic model of management” and “democratic management of education” are proposed. Conclusions. On the basis of analyzing the problems and education management models required for education, the author draws conclusions for teachers’ training: highlights the ideas that make up its guidelines, and outlines possible approaches to the content and methods of teaching education managers and teachers in line with the model “Creative, autonomous, reflective teacher” corresponding to the humanistic paradigm. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

Monograph describing the theoretical basis and curriculum development of the hibernia experimental school, combining vocational education with general education and located in the ruhr region of Germany, Federal Republic - in light of rudolf steiner's integrated approach to education, traces its evolution from factory training unit to an integrated comprehensive school, reviews the structure of practical education, and applies pedagogics of steiner's "study of man" to the process of learning. Bibliography pp. 191 to 196 and diagrams.

Publication date: 29 September 2016 Source: Author: Aida Cornelia Stoian This study highlights the results of an empirical research, whose purpose was to study the teachers` option of primary and preschool education to use learning situations for training pupils’ skills in relation to seniority in teaching and learning environment and to identify of the level of conceptual representation of the learning situations term in the opinion of teachers in primary and preschool education.We made a questionnaire in order to (...) identify the frequency teachers can organize learning situations and the teachers` conceptual representations of learning situation.The results have confirmed the conclusions to get teachers` adhesion to organize learning situations for pupils’ skills training, to develop teachers’ skills in harmonizing all the methods, means and teaching strategies with the objective and subjective factors determining the interaction between teachers and pupils. (shrink)

In the United States, sex education is more than just an uncomfortable rite of passage, it's an amorphous curriculum that varies widely based on the politics, experience, resources, and biases of the people teaching it. Most often, it's a train wreck, overemphasizing or underemphasizing STIs, teen pregnancy, abstinence, and consent. In Touchy Subject, philosopher Lauren Bialystok and historian Lisa M. F. Andersen make the case for thoughtful sex education, explaining why it's worth fighting for and which kind most deserves our (...) fight, despite all the inconveniences and compromises along the way. They argue that democratic and humanistic aims can be used to provide the tools to reason about the content and form of sex education. In practice, this amounts to a curriculum that meets what are currently considered highly comprehensive standards, incorporates ethics and civics education, and substantially modifies some aspects of teacher training and school design; it also assigns different responsibilities to different actors inside and outside schools, and it responds to the salient features of young people's evolving worlds, including the inequities that put some students at much higher risk of sexual harm than others. Throughout their inquiry, the authors show the reader how sex education has progressed and how the very concept of "progress" remains contestable. (shrink)

Higher education in the 21st century faces the challenge of changing the way in which knowledge is conveyed and how teachers and students interact in the teaching-learning process. The current pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has hastened the need to face up to this challenge and has furthered the need to approach the issue from the perspective of digitalisation. To achieve this, it is necessary to design training programmes geared towards teaching staff and which address both the use of technology (...) and instructional design aimed at promoting the development of self-regulated learning and automatic feedback systems. In this study, work was carried out with 23 teachers in a training programme conducted through Moodle. The aims were: to test whether there were any significant differences between the behaviour patterns of new teachers compared to experienced teachers, to determine whether clusters of behaviour patterns corresponded to the type of teacher and to ascertain whether the level of teacher satisfaction with the training activity in digital teaching will depend on the type of teacher. A quantitative as well as a qualitative design was applied. Differences were found in the behaviour patterns in the training activities for the development of rubrics and use of learning analytics systems in virtual learning environments. It was also found that the type of teacher did not correspond exactly to the behaviour cluster in the learning platform. In addition, no significant differences were found in the level of satisfaction between the two kinds of teacher. The main contribution this study makes is to provide a detailed description of the training stage as well as the materials required for its repetition. Further analytical studies are required on teacher perception of training programmes in digital teaching in order to provide personalised training proposals that lead to an effective use of teaching in digital environments. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

In the main body of colleges and universities, the effect of college teaching psychology management is an important standard to test the quality of college teaching psychology management and its effects on the development of college teaching psychology management. However, the psychology management system used by traditional colleges and universities is challenging to meet the needs of the innovation of the new talent training model of higher vocational education. The construction of the new micro-level teaching organization inevitably requires the (...) psychology management practice, structure, process, and technology at the medium and macro-levels to adapt to it. However, there are many mismatches in Higher Vocational Colleges’ internal and external administrative systems in China, such as low administrative efficiency, generalization of administrative power, low degree of specialization in administrative psychology management, and unreasonable administrative and organizational structure. This paper innovates the psychology management of colleges and universities reforms in combination with the characteristics of the digital age. Based on the collaborative innovation theory of colleges and universities, this paper puts forward the collaborative psychology management innovation network model of colleges and universities. The model combines the psychology management theory with the practical research of collaborative innovation in colleges and universities, expands the application and research field of innovation network theory, constructs the evaluation index system of students’ satisfaction in teaching psychology management in colleges and universities, and discusses it through reading and consulting materials and communication with teachers and students. A questionnaire of college teaching psychology management based on student satisfaction is formed. The experiment shows that teaching satisfaction is improved by nearly 31% compared with before innovation and reform. It can initially get the effect of innovation and reform, meet students’ needs, and promote the improvement of teaching psychology management quality. (shrink)

: When we look at the research done on the history of education, it is possible to come across different ideas about personality-education relation, approaches and theories. Human feelings, thoughts, behaviours, material structure and personality characteristics that are evolving making it necessary to handle him in multi-dimensions. As a result of this situation both in Islamic geography and in the West, many thinkers elaborate the affecting factors on personality development and education, they evaluate the physcial environment and the conditions that (...) change depending on it as an active element influencing personality education. In this our study, we try to put out the ideas that point to the place of physcial environment in personality education of Muhammad Iqbal who has a distinct place in the tradition of Islamic thought with unique ideas about man. In this context, the starting points of our research will be determination the conceptual framework of the personality word and to recognize the physcial environment that Iqbal brings to the agenda in personality education and pointing to the move of the school and the teacher in the personality education process instead of Ikbal's views in connection with the physical environment and to determine the role give place by Iqbal in the physcial environment in terms of its impact on the development of human personality will be the starting points of our research. Summary: The education aims to develop the human being as a whole by the mental characteristics, emotions, personality and spiritual structure. Man is in a network of dialectical relationships with an environment that surrounds him from physical, social and cultural aspects constantly. Personality forms the center of human structure. Therefore throughout history, the way of thinkers, writers, systems and theorists who have developed ideas about education has intersected the concept of personality at some point in the efforts to understand people. The word "personality", which is a infinitive derived from the root of "şhs" which means "ascending, seeing, growing, growing" in Arabic, comes to mean "individuality". The concept of personality, "the structure of a person's whole attributes, attitudes, abilities, appearance and appearance of adaptation to the environment"; "Consistent patterns of behaviors stemming from the individual and intrapersonal processes", "a person's view of other people and their behavior as a whole" etc. differently defined. According to this, it’s possible to say that there is no common definition of the concept of personality, which is the subject of modern psychology and pedagogy. What is the element that has the primary influence in shaping and training the personality is discussed; in this sense, various factors such as "environment, inheritance and cultural values" are emphasized. The history of research on personality education in the West does not go very far. Whereas in the Islamic thought tradition, the examination of laws related to personality is much older and rooted than in the West, and the starting point of these examinations is accepted as the beginning of the analysis of the nafs. Eventually, the reality is that it is a being that can transform the material periphery of a person be accepted. Muhammad Iqbal, a Pakistani thinker, is one of the Islamic thinkers who stand out with their own ideas about personality development and education. Iqbal prefers "human" in education and deals with all these determinative elements in human education because human beings do not live in a space and in general have the characteristics of the material circumstance, culture, understanding and system in which the personality is developed and shaped. To make the people conscious, to prepare actions, to make them equipped; to make arrangements for its change, development and transformation is the common point of education philosophies and understandings in general terms. Accordingly, thinkers have historically dealt with humanity in their approach to education throughout history and moved from its reality. Muhammad Iqbal's view of humanity and imagination is nourished from this point. While putting forth his ideas about humanity, Iqbal has put concepts such as "personality, individuality, self, what is human being ie matter-spirit relation, person-society relation" and his understanding of education has built on this basis. According to Iqbal, education should give individual personality and should show ways of using mind and constructing personality. Iqbal sees personality as the center of the organization of human life and sees the most important goal of education as developing personality. Although individual basis takes, education should not isolate it from the concrete environment. Iqbal strongly opposes the educational attitude which removes the person from the concrete environment. Because human personality has a tendency to invade and dominate the environment. According to Iqbal, this direction must be used in person's personal education. "Concrete environmental knowledge" for personality development is an undeniable reality. The only way to obtain the knowledge of the concrete environment is through the struggle from confrontation to confront with his powers freely. According to İqbal, the most important thing that is indispensable for human beings is to be able to communicate with the concrete environment freely in this process. However, this freedom is not limitless freedom but also includes a certain discipline. It is a concrete environmental relationship that can pass on these principles for human should be seen as an area of activity that allows for a series of observations and experiments in order to build personality According to İqbal, the main thing for the human being is not to adapt to the environment but to dominate it. The constant change in the material world forces the person to rebuild and renew his personality continuously. The most important task to be undertaken human to research material world because nature is created in accordance with human nature. The mind, the senses, the imagination, the desires, the aesthetic values are the most important motivation sources of man in observing and realizing the material world. By observing nature, human beings embrace both the reality of their personality and the divine qualities of its founding elements. In addition, the mental and aesthetic values to be achieved through the discovery of the material circle should be seen as very valuable and important for personality education. The concrete environment, which renews itself again and again with each creation, inspires man to constantly renew himself and to have an active, dynamic personality. Discussing the effects of the school on the personality education perspective, Iqbal takes a stand against an independent, individualized school building. The most important characteristic of Iqbal's dream school is that it can be trained in material and spiritual education. Iqbal recommends implementation in schoools methods such as "project method, learning method by doing, active method" and liken the teacher a skillful gardener who raises children delicately as a delicate flower. According to him, the teacher is a soul architecture that guiding students, removing obstacles in front of their personality development, and not locking their freedoms. Through such teachers, dynamic individuals and perfect people who will discover the secrets of nature, obtain personality integrity and create a new world will surely exist at all times. (shrink)

It has been acknowledged that education includes ‘a love of what one teaches and a love of those whom one teaches’ (Hogan 2010: 81), but two traditions of writing in philosophy of education—concerning love for student and love for subject—have rarely been brought together. This paper considers the extent to which the ‘triangular’ relationship of teacher, student and subject matter runs the risk of the rivalry, jealousy and strife that are characteristic of ‘tragic’ love triangles, or entails undesirable consequences such (...) as transference from one intended object of love to another. It argues that this faultline in the literature of educational love corresponds to education's ‘divided heart’. The implication of this exploration of education's triangular relationship is that we cannot ignore the ‘dark of love’, nor can we address it simply by asserting that educational love must be of a more honourable sort than romantic love. These tensions can be reconciled through the loving recourse of ‘ceasing to strive’ and the possibility of sublimating the two originary loves into a higher ‘love of truth’. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to analyse the effect of gender and ethical training received on the sensitivity of university teachers towards the inclusion of ethics in graduate business studies. To this end, a study has been carried out that uses four ethical sensitivity indicators for teachers: their opinion about the need to include ethics in the world of business, their opinion about the need to include ethics in University education involving business studies, the current integration of (...) ethics by teachers in the subjects they teach, and whether they intend to increase the time set aside for ethics in those subjects in the future. Results suggest that the ethical training received by teachers has a significant influence on their sensitivity towards the inclusion of ethics in graduate studies and the introduction of ethical aspects in their classes. Conversely, the results do not enable us to draw the conclusion that gender is a significant variable in terms of sensitivity towards the inclusion of ethics in the university education of business students. This work is of special relevance because it adds to the extremely limited amount of literature available on variables that may explain the attitude of teachers towards the integration of ethics in higher education, by supporting the thesis defended by many authors of the positive effect of ethical training on an improvement in sensitivity and ethical judgement. (shrink)

Teacher perspectives on imagination and visualization in early childhood training perform an important part in molding the cognitive and emotional improvement of young learners. The study is based on instructors’ self-mentioned perspectives, which can be subjective and motivated through personal biases, experiences, and interpretations of imagination and visualization. In this study, the teacher's perspective on imagination and visualization in early childhood education was investigated. The study included 250 primary school teachers, demonstrating the quality of the findings and reflecting (...) their opinions. The study used SPSS version 28 software to analyse the teacher's opinion with the utilization of the chi-square test and confirmatory factor analysis test. The result of research indicates that elementary school pupils develop their imagination through fairy tales, character role plays, and language training that uses linguistic codes to transmit imagery. (shrink)

Se presentan los resultados obtenidos en la tesis de maestría Sistema de talleres de trabajo educativo para la capacitación del profesor guía de Medicina en Nuevitas con el objetivo de demostrar el impacto a partir de su implementación en la brigada estudiantil. Se exponen las definiciones elaboradas y las contextualizaciones. Se concluye que el sistema contribuyó al adecuado desempeño del profesor guía y al desarrollo del modo de actuación de los estudiantes. La rapidez y la calidad que implicó en la (...) praxis educativa constituyó el resultado más importante en el contexto de la carrera de Medicina en la Filial. Results achieved through the master's thesis "Educational work workshops system for the Medicine degree guiding teacher training" in Nuevitas are presented, aimed at demonstrating its impact starting from its implementation on a class. Elaborate definitions and contexts are exposed. The conclusionreached through it was that the system contributed to the adequate guiding teacher's performance and to the development of students' behavior. The speed and quality it involved in educational praxis constituted the most important result in the context of the Medicine degree in La Filial town. (shrink)

This article discusses the historical relationship between educational studies and British teacher education. Following a brief introduction it provides an overview of initial teacher training (ITT) developments since 1952, the launch date of the BJES, before tracing the rise of educational studies and its so-called 'foundation disciplines'. The fourth section discusses a range of criticisms levelled against the teaching of educational studies within ITT programmes. Examples of discontent voiced by student teachers, higher education personnel and the New Right are (...) considered in the light of changing attitudes and policies towards British ITT. It is argued that the attack upon the theoretical aspects of educational studies has been more sustained - and has had more impact - in England than in other parts of the UK. The article draws conclusions in respect of education as an academic subject, the current state of the foundation disciplines, the place of educational studies within teacher education programmes and comparative dimensions. (shrink)

In this study, Muarrij al-Sadusi (d. 204/820 or later) and his Kitāb al-amthāl which he wrote in the field of proverbs, are focused on. In this context, first of all, Muarrij’s life, scientific and literary personality are mentioned, his teachers and students are pointed out, and information about his works is given. Then, Kitāb al-amthāl was discussed; It was examined in terms of its content, classification and commentary method, and its contribution to the proverb literature. After spending part of (...) his life in the desert and learning Arabic from Bedouin Arabs, Muarrij came to Basra and educated himself by taking lessons from various teachers in fields such as hadith, lineage and history, especially linguistics. Also, in addition to Kitāb al-amthāl, he wrote works such as Kitābu Hazf min nesebi Quraysh, Kitāb al’-Anvâ’, Ansâbu Şaybân, Cemâhîru'l-kabâ'il, Garîbü'l-Qur'ân, Kitābu al-Maʿânî and Maʿânî al-Qurʾân also sheds light on his competence in many fields. Although Muarrij is a scholar who has written works in various fields, he has come to the fore mostly in linguistic sciences. In this context, qualities such as being the greatest of linguists, a scholar in Arabic, and the leader of grammarians have been attributed to him. It was also said that he was a star among Halil ibn Ahmed’s students who knew vocabulary and poetry well. Unfortunately, only two couplets of Muarrij, who is said to have been a poet and the author of many poems in addition to his knowledge of poetry, have survived to the present day. It has been stated that these two couplets are the best poems ever written on the subject on which they were written. Muarrij’s Kitāb al-amthāl is the second book written in the field of proverbs that has survived to the present day. In addition to proverbs, this book contains Arabic words, unfamiliar words, itbaʿ type words, poems, hadiths and a verse from the Quran. Although the author usually explained the unfamiliar words, he included in his work by bringing witnesses from the poem, he rarely mentioned the parable in which it was included. While it is seen that he used the hadiths and itbaʿs in his book as proverbs, he brought the verse of the Quran as a witness to the meaning of a word. The author mentioned many poems in his work, used poems as a source of istishhad for the explanation of unfamiliar words while explaining proverbs or to show that the proverbs he mentioned in his work were mentioned in poems. Apart from these, it is also seen that he included poems without any purpose and did not provide an explanation for them. For a long time, in the writing of proverbs books, the historical method, which corresponds to including events and stories related to the proverbs, or the lexical method, which envisages commenting on the strange words in the text, touching on the nuances between word groups, including grammatical analysis and making istishhad for them, have been followed. Kitāb al-amthāl, which was written by using the lexical method of these two methods, is accepted as the first work that has survived to the present day written with the lexical method in proverb literature. It can be said that Muarrij’s identity as a grammarian and lexicographer was effective in writing the work with this method. Due to these features, Kitāb al-amthāl is a book that has played a pioneering role in the formation of some understandings and traditions in proverb literature. As a matter of fact, it is the first book of proverbs in which a proverb was classified according to the time and geography in which it appeared, the hadiths that became proverbs were included for the first time, the tradition of accepting itbâʿs as proverbs was started. Kitāb al-amthāl is a work that is accepted in the proverb literature and continues the understandings it puts forward. This is demonstrated by the fact that scholars such as Abu Ubayd al-Qasım, Al-Mufaddal ibn Salama, Abu Bakr ibn Anbari, Abu Hilal al-Askari and Maidani, who wrote books on the subject, quoted and benefited from this book in their works. In addition, when the quotations and transfers made by the mentioned scholars from Kitāb al-amthāl are compared with the current version of the work, it is concluded that some of the transfers are not present in the work we have or are incomplete. This situation reveals that Kitāb al-amthāl was more voluminous and comprehensive and has not survived to the present day in its original form. (shrink)

Autobiography and Teacher Development in China investigates the roles of autobiography in teacher education, as several scholars in China recontextualize Western conceptions of teacher development, combining them with uniquely Chinese cultural conceptions to articulate a reconceptualization of teacher development that holds worldwide significance. Framed by the work of Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar, these theoretical and practical essays point to an internationally inflected reconceptualization of teachers' professional development, pre-service and in-service. This volume addresses multiple movements of teacher education (...) reform worldwide, focused on crafting a nationally distinctive course not only internationally, but also culturally, historically, and locally. (shrink)

Participation in further education is a central success factor for economic growth and societal as well as individual development. This is especially true today because in most industrialized countries, labor markets and work processes are changing rapidly. Data on further education, however, show that not everybody participates and that different social groups participate to different degrees. Activities in continuous vocational education and training are mainly differentiated as formal, non-formal and informal CVET, whereby further differences between offers of non-formal and (...) informal CVET are seldom elaborated. Furthermore, reasons for participation or non-participation are often neglected. In this study, we therefore analyze and compare predictors for participation in both forms of CVET, namely, non-formal and informal. To learn more about the reasons for participation, we focus on the individual perspective of employees and additionally integrate institutional characteristics. The results mainly show that non-formal CVET is still strongly influenced by institutional settings. In the case of informal CVET, on the other hand, the learning biography plays a central role. (shrink)

A formação política do professor: um olhar sobre a história Resumo: A presente pesquisa tem como finalidade possibilitar uma compreensão do desenvolvimento dos processos de formação política dos professores no âmago de um corpo social capitalista, objetivando fornecer as condições necessárias para repensar o contexto contemporâneo fundamentado na história. Partindo essencialmente da formação de professores, essa compreensão foi relacionada ao cenário político, econômico e social, uma vez que são as influências políticas reinantes no corpo social que sistematizam os processos formativos. (...) A partir disso foram elaboradas observações a respeito dos referenciais teóricos que trabalham a temática; o exame dos contrassensos da formação política no corpo social capitalista; o professor enquanto intelectual orgânico; função política e social do professor no contexto da educação brasileira, assim como o delineamento dessa educação no contexto neoliberal e sua privatização. Tratou-se de uma Pesquisa Bibliográfica, de natureza Qualitativa. Este estudo permitiu compreender que é há a necessidade de discorrer sobre a formação de professores, uma vez que compreendemos que o contexto histórico da formação política do professor já necessitaria ser uma fase conquistada no momento em que objetivamos alcançar uma formação pedagógica de suma importância para todos os sujeitos. Palavras-chave: Formação Docente; Formação Política; História; Educação. Teacher policy education: a look at history Abstract: The purpose of this research is to enable an understanding of the development of teachers' political formation processes in the core of a capitalist social body, aiming to provide the necessary conditions to rethink the contemporary context grounded in history. Starting essentially from teacher education, this understanding was related to the political, economic and social scenario, since it is the reigning political influences in the social body that systematize the formative processes. From this, observations were elaborated about the theoretical references that work the theme; the examination of the countermeasures of political formation in the capitalist social body; the teacher as an organic intellectual; political and social function of the teacher in the context of Brazilian education, as well as the delineation of this education in the neoliberal context and its privatization. It was a Bibliographic Research, of a Qualitative nature. This study allowed us to understand that there is a need to talk about teacher education, since we understand that the historical context of political teacher education would already need to be a stage achieved when we aim to achieve a pedagogical training of paramount importance for all the subjects. Key-words: Teacher Training; Political Formation; Story; Education. La formación política del profesor: una mirada a la historia Résumé: La presente investigación tiene como objetivo permitir una comprensión del desarrollo de los procesos de formación política de los docentes en el núcleo de un cuerpo social capitalista, con el objetivo de proporcionar las condiciones necesarias para repensar el contexto contemporáneo basado en la historia. Fundamentalmente basado en la formación del profesorado, esta comprensión estuvo relacionada con el escenario político, económico y social, ya que son las influencias políticas que prevalecen en el cuerpo social las que sistematizan los procesos de formación. En base a eso, se hicieron observaciones sobre los marcos teóricos que funcionan con el tema; el examen de las contradicciones de la formación política en el cuerpo social capitalista; el profesor como intelectual orgánico; función política y social del docente en el contexto de la educación brasileña, así como el diseño de esa educación en el contexto neoliberal y su privatización. Fue una Investigación Bibliográfica, de carácter Cualitativo. Este estudio permitió comprender que existe la necesidad de hablar de formación docente, pues entendemos que el contexto histórico de la formación política docente ya tendría que ser una etapa alcanzada en la que pretendemos lograr una formación pedagógica de suma importancia para todos los actores. asignaturas. Palabras clave: Formación Docente; Formación Política; Historia; Educación. Data de registro: 03/04/2020 Data de aceite: 20/10/2021. (shrink)

Referring mainly to theories of transformation engineering, this article focuses on an experimental vocational training system bringing together special education teachers in initial training, under apprenticeship contracts and in employment. It uses the issue of the construction of emerging professionalism to analyze the formation of legal skills among educators. This contribution offers a broader vision of the conditions that make this learning possible, pointing to their effects on the feeling of personal effectiveness. The analysis of the traces (...) collected makes it possible to highlight the role of the relational circles around the learner in a professional situation. These results are discussed in the light of work on legal socialization and aim to identify the skills forming a "legal professionalism" specific to the educator, and for which training modalities are suggested. (shrink)

This paper, co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor part of an educational psychology seminar, describes a participatory curriculum design approach for preservice teacher education that focuses on the use of the principles of second-order cybernetics to teach about teaching and learning. Using elements of an Open Source Educational Processes framework, our Spring ESEPSY2309 section created project-based collective hive minds of preservice teachers, relying on a cybernetic approach at the crossroads of Gregory Bateson and Gordon Pask's theories. The classroom (...) community used four innovative tool-mediated pillars to guide collaborative activity: 1) Live-chatting using the Reddit social media platform, 2) observation of the lives, strategies, and practices used by teachers and students in their own social networks through Soundcloud podcasting to expand their own perceptions of pedagogies and best practices that they could employ in their careers, 3) open-ended paper writing, exploring sources beyond the object language provided by the textbook through extensive dyadic conversations with the instructor, and 4) training in the use of the Alice 3 game creation tool for block programming enabling the accumulation of competence in designing classroom systems that may treat students these undergraduates would soon teach as active historical agents in learning environments, combining skills from varied subjects into transdisciplinary educational experiences. We showcase outcomes of our class projects using a narrative inquiry to describe podcast episodes, a topic network analysis to illustrate the expansive nature of Open Source writing activity, and a visual depiction of our class Alice 3 games. (shrink)

We argue that pedagogic authority relies on love, which is misunderstood if seen as a matter of actions and subjects. Love is based not on finite subjects and objects existing in Euclidean space and linear time, but, rather, on the non-finite ontology, space and time of relations. Loving authority is a matter of calling and vocation, arising from the spontaneous and simultaneous call-and-response of a lively relation. We make this argument through a reading of Buber’s I–You relation and Murdoch’ s (...) account of the responsiveness of ascetic discipline. In presenting this analysis, we draw upon a case study from a research project on Australian teachers and students. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Grand Manner Aesthetics in LandscapeFrom Canvas to CelluloidEmily E. Auger (bio)Popular films about the environment and related human and material resource issues, particularly colonialism, tend to enhance the appeal of their subject matter by aesthetically transforming it according to audience preferences and tastes. Such mediating strategies are perhaps too familiar to contemporary artists of all types who would prefer to work beyond the limits of what their readers or (...) viewers are prepared to tolerate as entertainment, but the particular emphases and accommodations made by film artists to convey messages about the environment are little changed from those strategies used by painters over the past three centuries to a similar end. The methods by which environmental issues are aestheticized in late-twentieth-century film is directly and historically related to those established for grand manner painters by Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) and taught at the French academy from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. That these fundamentals were part of the training of artists who would be willing and able to enhance the glory of Louis XIV's absolutist monarchy seems not to have undermined the popular enthusiasm their association with the "classical" past generated outside of France. Thus, the grand manner ideal was repeated, elaborated, and adapted by subsequent British and American artists, teachers, and aestheticians, both amateur and professional, including Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), president of the British academy; theoretician Edmund Burke (1729-97); and such American painters as Benjamin West (1738-1820), Thomas Cole (1801-48), Frederic Church (1826-1900), and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).Examples of filmic adaptations of grand manner aesthetics considered here include English director John Boorman's The Emerald Forest (1985) and Anglo-French director Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), both British productions; Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) and John McTiernan's [End Page 96] Medicine Man (1992), both American productions with American directors; and Australian director Bruce Beresford's Black Robe (1991), a Canadian/Australian production based on Irish-born, Canadian novelist Brian Moore's best-selling novel of the same title (1985). While it might be argued that these films merely show the adaptation of academy-based grand manner ideals and principles to new imperialist interests, this article demonstrates how they educate and draw public sympathy to global environmental concerns, albeit with reference to a recognizably Western aesthetic tradition. Thus, the interest of this study to educators and students of the visual arts is twofold: first, it demonstrates the continued adaptation and application of aesthetic principles originally developed in the seventeenth century to a technology-based medium; and second, it shows how those aesthetic principles are currently applied in film to direct and modulate public opinion on matters well beyond the domain of pure or theoretical aesthetics.The grand manner aesthetic, first defined with reference to seventeenth-century painting and still apparent in twentieth-century film, is largely attributable to Poussin since he was an artist who wrote—and wrote well—about his understanding of artistic quality and priorities. He was deeply committed to classicism; he thought the elements of a painting should be idealized rather than realistic and particularized, that those elements should be clearly delineated in a linear manner, that exotic subjects and excessive color should be avoided as both appeal too much to the senses and not enough to the mind, and that figures should always predominate over landscape. Poussin's ideals became the model for students training at the French Academy, an institution officially formed in 1648 under the direct control of the government. Aspiring academicians were exhorted to produce images that were usually composites of the better, and sometimes imagined, aspects of the appearance, character, and deeds of the fictional and historical people, events, and locations that were their subjects. They were never allowed to forgot the hierarchy of value that placed genre painting forever below history painting, yet it cannot have escaped their notice that a certain number of well-executed examples of the lowly still life, domestic interior, and picturesque landscape on the exhibition walls made the "grandness" of more ambitious works more apparent by contrast.The French Academy soon became the envy of foreign upper-level bureaucrats cognizant... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

Everyday teaching involves emotional and relational irrationalities, and these aspects of pedagogical sensitivity and sense are critical for beginning teachers as they develop their practice. The complex elements of what it means to teach are often impossible to grasp from an instrumental approach to teacher education, which emphasizes subject matter knowledge and practical behavioral know-how. Increased educational standardisation and a new teacher training paradigm in Sweden have resulted in positioning future teachers as responsible only for communicating official school (...) knowledge and assessing their learning process. This narrowed understanding of teachers’ practice requires another perspective of teaching to be articulated. This article explores the internships of beginning teachers from a phenomenological perspective, drawing on storytelling in teacher education as a way to reveal student teachers’ lived experiences. These beginning teachers are learning professional ways of being, which reveal the complexities of teaching, and their accounts have the potential to counter the dominance of neoliberalism in education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is a reflective piece on the thought processes individuals and teams have when engaging in decoloniality work in Teacher Training/Education. We argue that until the self is decolonized, the process of decolonialization becomes rhetoric. We also question how much we can decolonize whilst working in the academy whose very culture, symbols and practices are borne out of colonialism and the period of enlightenment; whose very raison d’être is to elevate some knowledge over others and to claim cultural (...) and academic superiority. The current political landscape in England approaches anti-racism as a political ideology that must be avoided in schools and education and this ideological battlefield is evident in teacher education. We aim to recognize the tensions and resistance to decolonialize, which demonstrates the messy and contingent process of moving between shifting positions and subjectivities. It confronts the challenge of the teacher–practitioner who must balance their own moral and philosophical grounding whilst attending the political imperatives of the work. This can take the form of according with the policies and procedures of the institutions in which they are situated which can often be balkanizing and debilitating. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine student perceptions of teaching behavior. Additionally the aim was to examine if teacher characteristics (educational level, gender, and teaching experience) could explain differences in student perceptions of their teachers. Teaching behavior was studied from the research on teaching and teacher effectiveness perspective. Secondary students (N = 7,114), taught by 410 teachers in Spain, participated in the study. Survey data were analyzed using non-parametric tests, Kruskal-Wallis, U Mann-Whitney with Bonferroni correction, and (...) the analysis of effect sizes. Furthermore, a regression model was applied. Results showed that teaching behavior was perceived as sufficient to good, depending on the teaching behavior domain. Results indicated interesting differences between lower secondary education, upper secondary education and vocational education and training teachers. The effect size values (rU statistic) ranged between 0.43 and 0.63, highlighting the significant effect of teachers’ teaching experience on the six teaching skills domains: learning climate, efficient classroom management, clarity of instruction, activating teaching, differentiation, and teaching learning strategies. Those teachers with less teaching experience were the ones who showed higher scores. Findings from the regression model showed that educational level had a significant predictive effect on the six teaching skills domains, mainly for male teachers. However, in several domains female teachers were perceived by students to outperform their male counterparts. (shrink)

Vocational Education and Training policies are paying increasing attention towards the need to develop quality career guidance processes. Career guidance plays an essential role in this challenge by enabling people to develop the career management skills that allow them to become aware of their full potential and to construct life projects that facilitate the emotional management of uncertainty and complexity, participating as responsible agents in their environment. After conducting a literature review on each of these key elements, we set (...) out to identify best practices in VET as “building blocks” for the construction of an integrated career guidance plan in VET. This study adopts an approach based on qualitative methodology, specifically a documentary type of research has been carried out. The documents analysed correspond to 88 best practices identified in Andalusia. The analysis strategy used was a content analysis. For this purpose, a system of categories has been designed, from a deductive perspective, which has contributed to a systematic analysis of them. One of the first conclusions of the study is the uneven development o best practices in the different VET professional pathways. The practices carried out in the centres begin to incorporate different elements and thus facilitate the creation of a suitable context for the development of comprehensive career guidance plans in VET. The article closes by offering implications for the development of guidance in the education system and discusses lines of future research. (shrink)

The research question addressed in this paper is: How do the activities of writing mediate knowledge of writing, disciplinary knowledge, and professional knowledge as intertwined sites of learning? To conceptualise the role that writing can take in these complex processes, we apply an analytical framework comprising two core concepts; mediation and learning trajectories. We draw on an empirical study from the context of initial teacher education in Norway. From our analysis, we identify three qualities of writing as important. First, the (...) writing process should in- clude responding to and sharing drafts. Other important qualities include high teacher expectations and continuous reflection. From the perspective adopted here, learning is understood to be distributed and situated. In particular, in situated cultural contexts, collaborative writing can become a significant mediational tool for learning. Initial teacher education seeks to prepare the student teacher for a highly complex professional competency, developing both professionally and in individual subjects. To do so, students must transform social structures and the tools embedded in practices into psychological tools. We contend that writing is one significant tool in moving through complex trajectories of learning towards becoming professional teachers. (shrink)

Educational psychology focuses on the laws of change in the knowledge, skills, and individual psychology of the educatees in the process of education and teaching. Writing teaching is a key and difficult point in literature teaching. Nowadays, it is common for students to be afraid and tired of writing in school literature education. In view of these problems, the present work optimizes the teaching mode of writing from the perspective of reconstructing the writing subject. Through literature research and interdisciplinary analysis, (...) a questionnaire is designed to analyze the literary situation and the reconstruction of writing subjects in literary education. The questionnaire is aimed at three aspects, namely the hidden educational effect of teachers’ personality charm, the influencing factors of students’ psychology and students’ learning effect, and the influencing factors of psychology of the communication between teachers and students and teachers’ teaching effect. Then, the changes of students’ performance in literary class in these three aspects before and after using the teaching strategy of writing subject reconstruction are analyzed. Finally, the changes of students’ grades in the literary course are investigated. In this experiment, a total of 400 questionnaires were distributed, and a total of 389 questionnaires were collected. The survey results show that the number of students who feel the classroom atmosphere is active increases by 10%, the number of students who listen carefully and take notes increases by 7%, and 45% of students have improved their grades. Besides, after the implementation of the teaching strategy, most students change their attitude to the literature course, become more active, and significantly improve their motivation for learning. This study has a certain reference value for the analysis of literary situations and the reconstruction of writing subjects in literary education from the perspective of educational psychology. (shrink)

This text sets out to give a reinterpretation of Schon's work. It breaks new ground by looking systematically at the entirety of his writings, by identifying critical difficulties with Schon's work, and by subjecting his work to reinterpretation.

The purposes of higher education in general and of university education in particular have long been subject to controversy. Whereas for some, the main role of universities is to provide professional and vocational education and training and their benefits are to be measured in terms of social or economic utility, their value for others is to be seen more in terms of the liberal development and promotion of certain intrinsically worthwhile qualities of mind and intellect. In this context, indeed, (...) much recent literature on university education has been concerned to reaffirm what are usually taken to have been the liberal purposes of bygone university education over the more instrumental or vocational agendas of much contemporary university and higher education. While recognising, along with other treatments of this issue, that it is to some extent implicated in a false dichotomy between the liberal and the vocational, this paper seeks a clearer rationale for the liberal dimensions and aspirations of university education. (shrink)

Introduction: education, philosophy and politics -- Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy -- Nietzsche, nihilism and the critique of modernity: post-Nietzschean philosophy of education -- Heidegger, education and modernity -- Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity -- Neoliberal governmentality: Foucault on the birth of biopolitics -- Lyotard, nihilism and education -- Gilles Deleuze's 'societies of control': from disciplinary pedagogy to perpetual training -- Geophilosophy, education and the pedagogy of the concept - (...) Humanism, Derrida and the new humanities -- Politics and deconstruction: Derrida, neoliberalism and democracy -- Neopragmatism, ethnocentrism and the politics of the ethnos: Rorty's 'postmodernist bourgeois liberalism' -- Achieving America: postmodernism and Rorty's critique of the cultural left -- Deranging the investigations: Cavell on the philosophy of the child -- White philosophy in/of America. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Marja Heimonen, “Justifying the Right to Music Education”Hermann J. KaiserFirst of all I would like to thank Marja Heimonen for her paper on a central problem not only for music education as practice but also for the theory of music education. She gives a very clear and convincing answer to a permanently irritating question: How do we justify music education within an ensemble of competing subjects (...) struggling to get a place within the school curriculum. And she does it in a rather uncommon way, that is, by means of legal philosophy. I think her arguments provoke several questions worthy of serious discussion. Some of these questions I shall try to indicate.The first question relates to the right to (music) education. Referring to the Nordic countries she states, "Their legal systems are based on enacted acts and statutes not only protecting the citizens against criminal acts but also securing their rights to receive a certain amount and standard of services the state is obliged to provide" and she continues: "Education is one of the basic rights in Nordic societies." I am interested very much in the wording by which these constitutions declare the right to education respectively to music education. The German constitution, for example, says only, but very bluntly that the entire schooling system stands under control of the state. That means, in connection with compulsory schooling, education at school means no right but a compulsion. (I shall come back to this point later.)The second question relates to the issue of internal versus external goods or instrumental versus self-justifying aims. In her attempt to justify music education Heimonen makes a distinction between internal and external goods, instrumental and self-justifying aims. I wonder if this distinction—though it is very common in theories of action and of value—really refers to different facts; perhaps [End Page 213] it is only a difference in perspectives. I will transform this problem into a question thus: Are aims and values emphasizing a person's well-being really not instrumental with regard to this person? The well-being aims look to me to be necessarily connected to self-justifying aims. Aims, values, activities, facts, situations, and so on, generating well-being, are always instrumental with regard to a person's well-being. What else should they be?On the other hand, are so-called external goods and instrumental aims not self-justifying aims as well, again from the point of view of the person concerned? Are not aims which favor the training of a future professional (so called instrumental aims) self-justifying with regard to this person since they contribute very much to his or her well-being? Thus music educators should not hesitate to demonstrate the real individual, social, economical, and so on, benefit of music education to the society concerned very energetically.The third question arises around the implicit theories of the teacher, the school, and the function of music education as set forth by Heimonen in her paper. Heimonen compares the structure of the (music) teacher's situation with that of a judge. She says:The judge has to operate between the tensions of different interests in the framework of the law consisting of written regulations and the tradition of previous cases that have been solved.... The judge works within a "legal puzzle" just as the music teacher operates in a "musical puzzle": both of them have to think holistically as they try to achieve the best possible solutions in a particular situation, and both of them have to act innovatively and creatively in their practice.Here the question arises as to whether the "musical puzzle" is really the corresponding moment to the "legal puzzle" or whether it is the "music-pedagogical puzzle." I think it is the latter. But the teacher does not have—like the judge "his" legal system—a framework of written regulations and he never is in the situation just to apply rules on different cases. That is to say, one cannot reduce educational activities to making decisions on the basis of right or wrong, good or bad. But even if one would acknowledge an identical structure of the... (shrink)

Teachers perform the duty of imparting knowledge and educating people, and undertake the important task of cultivating socialism builders and successors and the mission to improve the quality of the nation a whole. Therefore, teachers should set an example in abiding by teachers’ professional ethics, intensifying construction of teachers’ morality, and improving level of education. This article proposes the constructive thought in teachers’ morality construction in vocational education, that is, to try to improve the (...) overall quality of a teacher in vocational education. Improvement of moral trait is the foundation, improvement of cultural awareness the key, improvement of innovative quality the core, and improvement of health and psychological quality is the basis. (shrink)