Katsushika Hokusai and a Poetics of Nostalgia

Abstract

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan.     

Using the Internet to Enhance Student Understanding of Science: The Knowledge Integration Environment

We have developed the Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) to promote lifelong learning. We believe that science courses can promote lifelong learning by offering students science models that apply to problems they encounter in their everyday lives and by engaging students in personally relevant science projects where they connect science models to typical science resources such as those found on the Internet. Our instructional framework, Scaffolded Knowledge Integration (SKI), guides the design of the Knowledge Integration Environment. In this paper we describe the Knowledge Integration Environment and report results of “design experiments” carried out to guide improvement of Knowledge Integration Environment instruction as well as to help us improve our understanding of lifelong learning.     

INSET: Five Types of Collaboration and Consultancy

‘We consider that every school should have an agreed procedure for ensuring that: (i) the needs for in‐service training and professional development of individual teachers of groups of teachers within the school and of the school as a whole are regularly reviewed; (ii) the priorities for in‐service training, and the most appropriate means of meeting the different needs identified, are assessed in consultation with the governors and the LEA in the context of declared curicular aims and objectives’     

Learning about the educational uses of the internet by producing an educational web site in an interdisciplinary and virtual team

ABSTRACT

In this paper we describe the use of an interactive software package designed to raise issues and questions about the role of information technology within the primary classroom and to highlight the partnership aspects inherent within a teacher tutor/mentor approach to the supervision of school placements. Data were collected from a variety of people concerned in the exercise: teacher tutors, university liaison tutors and student teachers. These data concerned not only the efficacy of the materials themselves, but also the effect or impact of the exercise upon the school placement experience. A number of issues emerged from our exploration into this exercise revealing attitudes towards information technology in education. These concerned ownership of learning and questions of expertise, access to partnership and co‐professionality, staff and student attitudes towards information technology and towards partnership and implications for the future. Our data suggest that learning becomes powerful when the learner takes ownership. Information technology can enable the shift towards creator and is a powerful means of achieving that.     

Faculty Organizational Commitment and Citizenship

Building on a theoretical framework that links characteristics of individuals and their work settings to organizational commitment (OC) and citizenship behavior, this study considers why faculty may be disengaging from institutional service. Analyses of survey data collected from a state system of higher education suggest that job characteristics, exchanges and social learning are associated with faculty members’ OC. For instance, opportunities for advancement and research support, as well as responsiveness of administrators to faculty, contributed to the likelihood that faculty would accept a position at their institution again if given the chance. Commitment, however, did not significantly affect time spent on institutional service. Two job characteristics—time spent on research and time spent on teaching—were negatively associated with this behavior.     

Just do it? impact of a science apprenticeship program on high school students' understandings of the nature of science and scientific inquiry

The purpose of this study was to explicate the impact of an 8‐week science apprenticeship program on a group of high‐ability secondary students' understandings of the nature of science and scientific inquiry. Ten volunteers (Grades 10–11) completed a modified version of the Views of Nature of Science, Form B both before and after their apprenticeship to assess their conceptions of key aspects of the nature of science and scientific inquiry. Semistructured exit interviews provided an opportunity for students to describe the nature of their apprenticeship experiences and elaborate on their written questionnaire responses. Semistructured exit interviews were also conducted with the scientists who served as mentors for each of the science apprentices. For the most part, students held conceptions about the nature of science and scientific inquiry that were inconsistent with those described in current reforms. Participating science mentors held strong convictions that their apprentices had learned much about the scientific enterprise in the course of doing the science in their apprenticeship. Although most students did appear to gain knowledge about the processes of scientific inquiry, their conceptions about key aspects of the nature of science remained virtually unchanged. Epistemic demand and reflection appeared to be crucial components in the single case where a participant experienced substantial gains in her understandings of the nature of science and inquiry. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 487–509, 2003     

Stimulus devaluation and extinction of chain schedule performance

Pigeons were trained on a two-component multiple schedule in which each separate component consisted of a three-link chain schedule. After initial baseline training, the stimuli correlated with the terminal links of each chain were presented in a successive discrimination, with one stimulus continuing to be associated with reinforcement while responses to the alternative stimulus were extinguished. Subjects were then returned to the original chain schedule, but with extinction in effect in both components of the multiple schedule. In two separate experiments, extinction of initial-link responding was not affected by which terminal link had been extinguished during the separate discrimination training, indicating that devaluation of the terminal link was not transmitted directly to the initial link of the chain. There was also no effect of the devaluation procedure during the first session of testing on responding in the middle link of the chain, but an effect did develop with continued extinction of the entire chain when the terminal components were presented during extinction. When the terminal components were omitted, however, the latter effect did not occur. Also, when the terminal link was omitted, extinction occurred more rapidly in the middle component than in the initial component, indicating a backward pattern of extinction.