A Phenomenological Exploration of Bhutanese Counselors’ Experiences with Western Counseling

Bhutan has recently invited the profession of counseling to aid in responding to growing mental health problems, social and family issues, and school and career guidance needs. This study is a phenomenological investigation of the experiences of Bhutanese counselors with Western counseling in order to understand the cultural fit between Bhutan and Western counseling orientations. Eleven participants were interviewed and four themes identified: conceptualization of counseling, Bhutanese culture, Bhutanese counseling, and the relationship between Western counseling and Bhutan. Suggestions are made for a potential model of Bhutanese counseling, counselor training, ongoing Western contributions, and the further development of the counseling profession.     

Critical service-learning: promoting values orientation and enterprise skills in pre-service teacher programmes

Experiential learning pathways within education programmes such as Service-learning are a means to enrich the learning of pre-service teachers. As a pathway, Service-learning provides value-oriented learning focused on inclusion, diversity, and difference. This paper adopts critical social theory to examine how, along with these values, critical Service-learning promotes a deeper comprehension of values such as empathy, civic responsibility, social justice, and equity. Our paper also studies how, along with values, enterprise skills develop when pre-service teachers adopt a self-responsible, decision-making approach to implementing inclusion, social justice, and equity. Fifty-one data sets from interviews, questionnaires, and reflection logs with two groups of students over two semesters were examined to comprehend the unique experiences of students as they navigated through values and enterprise skills. The study concludes by reiterating the value of incorporating nontraditional ways of learning that align with the traditional pedagogical offerings for pre-service teachers.     

Improving academic outcomes in poor urban schools through nature-based learning

This paper presents results from the evaluation of the Nurture thru Nature (NtN) programme, a natural science and environmental education intervention designed to help elementary school children from disadvantaged backgrounds increase their knowledge of science and strengthen overall academic performance. Using an experimental design the pilot NtN programme in New Brunswick, NJ was assessed in one elementary school for a period of four years. The evaluation revealed that NtN students (n = 18) consistently outperformed a group of controls (n = 34) in mathematics and science with the differences in science reaching statistical significance. The paper discusses the active learning philosophy that motivates NtN teaching, the programme components that operationalise this philosophy, and a natural history paradigm from which this philosophy derives.     

Culture,communication, and the challenge of globalization

This essay deals with the problematics that globalization poses for critical communication scholarship. Globalization challenges our understanding of culture and identity in ways that both open up new directions for communication scholarship and invite a rethinking of current ones. First, we discuss how difference is unsettled and re/staged in the context of globalization. Second, we address how uneven patterns of global processes are enacted through cultural practices produced by the transnational flows of images and capital. This essay explores several areas of contemporary global growth with the overall objective of demonstrating the urgency of rethinking the study of culture in critical communication studies.

One of the most important implications of globalism is simply that there is no longer a space elsewhere. This means that instead of thinking in terms of displacements, a movement elsewhere, it is important for cultural studies to think in terms of dis-location, which is the transformation of place. –Ackbar Abbas (1997, p. 312), “Cultural Studies in Postculture.”

To think globality is to think of the politics of thinking globality. –Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (1999, p. 364), A critique of postcolonial reason.     

Techno‐pedagogy and the Conversational Learning Paradigm: Delivering the Curriculum at the Centre for Individual Language Learning

Techno‐pedagogy or the powerful combination of various technologies and pedagogy provides new opportunities to support a range of learning environments. This article describes how the Centre for Individual Language Learning (CILL) at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore applies techno‐pedagogy to a conversational self‐organised learning (S‐O‐L) environment. The concept of S‐O‐L is explained in terms of conversational constractivist learning events within a social context. We also review the pedagogy of S‐O‐L in terms of delivering task management components within a learning organisation. We then show how the CILL facility functions as a self‐organised conversational learning environment with its adapted working model of S‐O‐L pedagogy. We then discuss the three key technologies available in CILL and explain how the integration of these three technologies provides for a conversational scaffolding learning environment that helps deliver the CILL curriculum. This pedagogic process facilitates in learners the development of independent learning skills through both collaborative and individualized language learning encounters that enables them to take increased responsibility for self‐organising their own learning in both school and the community. The article concludes by discussing the benefits of techno‐pedagogic solutions and how these have shaped learning within a self‐organised conversational learning environment at CILL.