Embracing and Harnessing the Intimate Connection Between Emotion and Cognition to Help Students Learn

Traditionally, cognition and emotion were believed to be independent systems; however, research in the cognitive and neurobiological sciences has shown that the relationship between cognition and emotion is both interdependent and extensive. This intimate connection between emotion and cognition is leading to a number of insights that have the potential to inform and transform educational practices at all levels—from the classroom to the curriculum to educational policy. The question that has been on my mind (and on my heart) is, as a teacher, how can I both embrace and harness the power of emotion to help my students’ learning be more meaningful, useful, and intrinsically motivated? In this article, I would like to share with you some of the effective practices that I have implemented in my classroom and how I have worked to intentionally embed the emotional aspect of learning into the framework of the courses I teach.     

The Pedagogy of the Body: Affect and collective individuation in the classroom and on the dancefloor

Abstract

Much recent work in the study of popular culture has emphasized the extent to which it is not only a site of signifying practices, myths, meanings and identifications, but also an arena of intensities, of affective flows and corporeal state-changes. From this perspective, many areas of popular culture (from calisthenics to social dance to video gaming) can be seen as sites at which rich and complex—if sometimes dangerous—processes of embodied learning/teaching take place. By comparison, the world of formal education can seem hopelessly clumsy in its inattention to such issues. From a personal perspective, I can attest that nothing surprises my students more than when I try to get them to think about the ergonomics of studying, or advise them that getting some exercise and cutting down on sugar will probably improve their work as much as further studying will, or when I advise graduate students that their mood and physical state will make as much difference to the quality of their lectures as will their level of formal preparation; and yet experience has convinced me of the accuracy of these assertions. I would aver that I have learned more about successful lecturing—in particular about the improvisational skill of ‘reading’ a room, and adjusting an affective–informational flow accordingly—from DJing in dance clubs than from any formal training in pedagogy that I have received. What conclusions could be drawn from these observations, and how do they relate to existing strands of pedagogic theory? These are the questions which this article will ultimately seek to address.     

Environmental Education and Children's Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene

During the Anthropocene, the epoch characterized by humans’ destructive actions on earth, a few seminal questions may be raised: What have we done? How can we do better? This type of questioning is of course echoed in environmental education, related educational policy and research. There is, however, a difference between general and educational discourses: in the first instance, the collective ‘we’ refers to mainly adult human beings; in the second, to children. The distinction may seem trivial, but it is in fact quite important: If humans have destroyed the earth and caused children the loss of their futures, then adult humans and children humans cannot be positioned in the same place in terms of humanity and agency. What's more, adults cannot look to children and their agency for hope or for a future. Children's agency thus demands a reorientation and a certain re-theorization. This paper deliberates on the type of children's agency that is promoted by various environmental discourses—human, posthuman and other—and discusses what kind of agency children can possibly attain.     

Levinas,Ethics and the People: A reply to Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish

Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish have criticised my article ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ for misunderstanding and misrepresenting the phenomenological subtleties of Levinas's formulation of ethics. However, although their arguments are cogent and persuasive, I still cannot see how Levinas's ‘ethics of the Other’, regardless of its merits qua phenomenology or ethical philosophy, translates into the practical ethical and moral understanding that would transform people's everyday lives—which was the underlying theme of my original article. In this article, I shall develop this theme further with specific reference to the following difficulties, as I see them, relating to the practicality of Levinas's ethics: (1) it is unclear how ordinary people would gain an understanding of Levinas's ethical vision, or how, once gained, this understanding would change their behaviour; (2) the rejection of personal relations and attachments in favour of pre‐ontological abstractions and metaphorical images (as the ground for the possibility of ethical understanding) renders Levinas's ethical vision powerless to motivate individuals in their everyday lives; (3) conceived as a political project to transform society, Levinas's vision cannot be realised, not even in the commune; (4) the presumption that real human understanding can be gained through the study of Levinas, or any other philosopher, is a highly dubious one.     

A global collage of impressions: Preschools abroad

“What do you think of European preschools?” “Do they have good schools in Yemen?” “What are Chinese child care centers like?” I am always taken aback when asked such questions. Of course, I'm always taken aback when someone asks what I think of kindergarten education in the United States; I never know how to answer that either. Does the question refer to kindergarten classes in the school near my home? Or kindergartens across the United States? Even if the inquirer expected an answer based on the schools which I visit regularly to supervise student teachers I would have to give a general statement, followed by some qualifying statements related to different teachers, different schools, and different school districts — all withinone county! The old adage that “All generalizations are dangerous, including this one” always comes to mind.     

Entry-Level Activities in System Consultation

System-level consultation or organizational development in schools is an area in great need of theoretical models and definitions. The three articles in this special issue provide a unique learning opportunity not only for consultation across borders but also for consultation within the same nation. In my commentary, I limit my remarks to a few general principles about school-based system-level consultation with particular attention to entry processes to consultation. Specifically, I attempt to answer the following questions: (a) Are the principles guiding system-level consultation different from those guiding case consultation? (b) Are there specific principles that guide consultation when working in another country? and (c) Can what we see in these articles to a large extent be described as entry processes to system consultation?     

Australia Revisited: 1973‐1988

Abstract

The author recounts the joys and foibles of 18 months spent as an Acting Director of the Learning Resources Centre in an Australian college of advanced education located in rural New South Wales. It is his contention that both the successes and failures of the project could have been maximized and minimized respectively had there been greater efforts made to bridge existent cultural gaps between the Australian and overseas participants. He further reflects upon some axioms learned in retrospect which might be helpful to others who would consider accepting future overseas assignments. Finally, he had waited with keen anticipation to return to the scene of his 18‐month experience which he describes as having been filled with joy, love, and despair. This reunion took place in July of this year. He is happy to report a total absence of despair, just joy and love.

It was a rainswept night in July 1973 and the passenger terminal adjoining Sydney Harbour was aflurry with activity. Eighteen months earlier, to the day, I had disembarked at the same terminal, filled with the excitement of what the future would bring — a future to be spent, in large part, some 300 miles distant from this thriving capital city of New South Wales. Now the time had arrived when I would once more board a ship and return to my homeland.

The emotions I felt when leaving on that dark rainy evening ranged from joy to love to despair. I was joyful in knowing that, as the ship slowly eased away from the quay, I could see no less than 100 friends who had come to bid me farewell, some from several hundred miles distant. I experienced the kind of love one has for a true richness of experience which one knows will never occur again, at least not in the same meaningful way. That love extended to all who were waving goodbye to me from the dockside, and to many hundreds more people from all walks of life who, while not able to join me in a last farewell celebration, had made the past 18 months for me the most memorable ever, but there was also an intense sense of despair—a feeling that I had not accomplished half of what I had envisaged back in February 1972 when I first stood on Australian soil.

Now, in August 1988, some 16 years after my departure, I was once more headed for that fabled ‘Land Down Under’ and before I did so I wanted to resurrect those cherished memories of 1972‐73. In so doing, I wanted to see if there might be lessons to be learned, ideas that would come to mind which — examined in retrospect — might prove both helpful and interesting to those vast legions of international educators who would follow where I had trodden, not necessarily in Australia but in any country other than that of their birth. That is the intention of this article.     

Rejoinder to Aaron Cooley's Review of Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy

Because of Professor Cooley's prosecutorial review, I want to make clear at the outset that my rejoinder is not a codefendant's answer to a plaintiff's replication. Instead, I first attempt to provide an “immanent” analysis of Cooley's indictment, in the sense of dealing with what dwells within his reasoning. A specific philosophical definition of “immanent” reads: taking place within the mind of the subject, but having no effect outside (this does not apply to me as an outsider). I intend to battle with Cooley up close—no “dancing”—my defense against his offense. In the second part, the focus will be on what I think is missing from Cooley's attempt to discredit McLaren and Farahmandpur's book. His decision or failure to deal with what Marx and the most effective Marxists have written, and how some of this provided analyses that could be and/or was acted upon, may be more serious than his beating up on the book's authors.     

Change,Changing, and Being Changed: A Self-study of a teacher educator's becoming real in the throes of urban school reform

Set against an organized school reform backdrop, this inquiry features four challenges I faced as a result of working alongside teachers and principals whose urban schools were awarded major school research grants for a 5-year period. In addition to teasing out the origins of the dilemmas I encountered and showing how they impacted my teaching practice, I make two knowledge contributions through my public presentation of this self-study. First, I add a new set of partnered narratives—the stories of teacher educators/teacher educators' stories of self. Second, I extend my research niche to reveal the role I played as a living, breathing dimension of the educational conduit.

Rabbit: What is REAL? Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?     

Informing classroom practice: What we know about several task characteristics and their effects on learning

In this article, I discuss three task characteristics in terms of their possible implications for classroom learning—drawing heavily upon my own research. Of the three, only the spacing effect appears to have clear implications for improving classroom practice. By contrast, the other two—meaning-enhancing additions to what is to be learned and successive presentations of meaningfully related learning material—do not as yet have clear classroom implications.     

Problems and Alternatives

In one of his speeches, Professor Fang Lizhi, member of the Board of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the following. We should attach importance to the graduate students we have trained ourselves. Now that our degrees are equal to those in other countries, we of course should treat them equally without discrimination. Recently, the newspapers have given a scholar who got his doctorate in West Germany wide coverage. We have our own doctors, so why don't we publicize them? Since it will have a very bad influence on students, I hope this kind of publicity will be stopped immediately. I happened to be in Japan at the time. When some Japanese asked me why we made such a fanfare about one who had merely received a doctoral degree [we used more space in this newspaper to cover this doctor than Japan did to report the Japanese chemist's winning of the Nobel prize], I was rendered speechless. Foreign degrees are not acknowledged in Japan; even a degree from Cambridge or Harvard isn't very useful in helping you land a job. Rather, you have to get your degree in a Japanese university—Tokyo University or Kyoto University, for example. This is a question of national pride. However, things in China are the opposite. Foreign doctorates are more welcome. One of my graduate students is now studying in England. I planned to have him study there for two years and then have him return to get his degree in China. But I was thwarted in my plan; the department in charge held that the student would show himself to be a failure should he return without obtaining a degree. Under the circumstances, he has no choice but to stay there and get his degree. Foreign degrees bring high pay and enjoy good repute. When such an atmosphere prevails, how can we expect graduate students to have a correct and healthy view on this matter?     

Technology in Communications—McLuhan Reconsidered

‘When I started school—just a few years ago—neither my teachers nor I knew the term educational media. If we had, it would have meant to us textbooks, a blackboard and some squeaky chalk. Today it embraces the most exotic, complex and seemingly endless array of electronic miracles.     

My language autobiography: a critical view

In this article I critically examine both my spoken and written language acquisition. I present the advantages and disadvantages of being a Chinese/English bilingual. Through my own language acquisition experience, I suggest that language education in China may put emphasis on learners' subcultural diversities since China is a country with numerous sub‐dialects, and language education also needs to reconsider the balance between first and second languages.     

Unemployment: A Moral Issue

If any man would know the very cause

Which makes me to forget my speech in rhyme,

All the sweet songs I sang in other time,— I'll tell it in a sonnet's simple clause.

I hourly have beheld how good withdraws

To nothing, and how evil mounts the while; Until my heart is gnawed as with a file,

Nor ought of this world's worth is what it was.

GVERZO DI M0NTECANTI—13th Cent. Translation by D. G. ROSSETTI

     

日本高中教师“转勤”制度的利弊分析

日本能在强手如林的国际大舞台取得世界第二大经济强国的地位。可以说很大程度上受益于其完善的教育制度．笔者于2006年至2008年在日本的高中任教过程中,对于教师的转勤制度印象深刻。本文以高中为例分析日本教师转勤制度的利弊．希望为我国的教育改革提供一些启示。     

Looking Inward: The impact of race,ethnicity, gender,and social class background on teaching sociocultural theory in education

In this paper I examine how and to what extent various elements of my biography—race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class background, and prior personal and professional experiences—influenced my relationships with students in a graduate course examining the impact of race, gender, and social class on education. My lived experiences as an immigrant woman of color in United States society and my prior professional experiences as an urban teacher are shown to have strengthened my expertise and confidence in teaching this course. Nevertheless, experience confirmed my initial concerns that my race, gender, and social class background negatively influenced some students' perceptions of my teaching competence and position of authority in the classroom. The paper concludes with recommendations for teacher education, including encouraging teachers to continuously engage the question of how their biographies shape their pedagogies and relationships with students, an important undertaking as our schooling populations become more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. I also recommend that universities continue to recruit faculty who are not only from racial minority backgrounds but also from varied ethnic and social class backgrounds.     

Enquiry-based learning workshop for deep learning in Middle Eastern classrooms – an action research approach

The senior year design students and I were dismayed when my linear teaching and their habitual rote learning failed in a Middle Eastern University. The gulf between the curricular objectives and our teaching-learning methods intrigued me. I turned this into an action research project that sought to answer the questions, ‘What paradigm shift might we need to migrate from traditional rote learning to deep learning? What attitudinal change and philosophical beliefs would that call for in an instructor?’ The search for a solution metamorphosed me from a disengaged instructor into an empathizing reflecting practitioner. It led my students to active engagement in an enquiry-based learning workshop, which significantly improved their performance. This paper celebrates the journey of our collective deep learning. It explicates how I built my personal theory of teaching praxis through critical consciousness and meta reflection. This knowledge-creation process is empowering and may draw many teacher researchers towards meta-reflexive engagement with the social systems around. These change drivers can initiate institutional overhaul to effect systemic reforms.     

浅谈探索中前进的翻译理论

翻译是语言学习的最高境界,对于翻译的研究和争论也从未停止过.它到底是艺术还是自然科学呢?语言学对翻译的影响又是怎样的呢?如何看待我国的翻译体系和外国的翻译体系之间的关系呢?笔者认为翻译既可以是艺术也可以是自然科学.它应该是一门正在探索中的科学.要想翻译到位,语言学的知识必不可少.最后,对待西方翻译理论的问题,我们应该取其精华,去其糟粕,建立我国现代的翻译理论.     

Moral development: a reply to Richmond and Cummings

My paper on moral development has been criticized on three main counts: firstly, that I have confused romantic and progressive ideology; secondly, that I have failed to appreciate the teleological character of (cognitive) developmental theory; thirdly, that I have failed to show that normativity of developmental theory goes, as it were, ‘all the way down’. In this reply, I maintain that the first two charges are based on distortion and misrepresentation of my argument, and—in relation to the third charge—that my critics have simply failed to offer any discernible counter‐argument to my case that it is misguided to seek empirical theoretical grounding for developmental theories of the kind in question.     

Something 'Paralogical' Under the Sun: Lyotard's Postmodern Condition and science education

Sometimes I dream that I am an astronaut. I land my spaceship on a distant planet. When I tell me children on that planet that on earth school is compulsory and that we have homework every evening, they split their sides laughing. And so I decide to stay with them for a long, long time… Well anyway… until the summer holidays. (Cited in Lyotard, 1995, p. xix)
Each state of the mind is irreducible. The mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it. From all this, it would be possible to deduce that there is no science in Tlon, let alone rational thought. The paradox, however, is that sciences exist, in countless number… The metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to some one of them. Even the phrase 'all the aspects' can be rejected, since it presupposes the impossible inclusion of the present moment, and of past moments. (Borges, 1962, p. 10)