Mobile agency and relational webs in women’s narratives of international study

Higher Education - Internationalisation and forced migration are rarely thought about as related phenomena in higher education (HE) literature. Internationalisation is associated with movement,...     

The role of predictability in preventing escape deficits following loss of control over food acquisition

The present experiment examined whether predictability of food acquisition would eliminate the impairment of subsequent escape performance that otherwise resulted from uncontrollability over food acquisition. In pretreatment, the yoked and the yoked-signal groups received response-independent food at the same times as the experimental group acquired it on an FR 5/20 lever-press schedule. However, a pellet presented for the yoked-signal group followed a 1.5-sqc tone, which served as a predictive signal of food. The naive control group received the same clumber of pellets in their home cages in this phase. Results of the escape latency in the subsequent FR 2 shuttling shock-escape test indicated that the predictability of outcome eliminated the escape deficits showed by the yoked-non signal group. This modulating effect of a predictive signal is hypothesized to be due to an overshadowing of uncontrollability by predictability.     

Teacher education and its reform in contemporary Japan

This article aims to describe the general framework of the teacher training system and its recent reform in Japan. As elsewhere, Japanese society is moving into an era of mass higher education provision. Since initial teacher training is provided by universities, the reform of teacher training is a part of the higher education restructuring that is also under way. At the same time, Japan is facing educational problems in compulsory education. The Educational Personnel Training Council of Japan is recommending reforms, which attempt to create a new type of teacher to cope with these educational problems. This opens the way for the Japanese state to develop more direct control over the curriculum and assessment of teaching staff in universities. The Ministry of Education is attempting to develop new control methods of 'Evaluative State' strategies. The reform of teacher education system exemplifies this shift.     

Loss of controllability in appetitive situations interferes with subsequent learning in aversive situations

In two experiments, we examined whether or not a loss of control over food availability would interfere with subsequent two-way shuttle-escape learning. Rats that had experienced loss of control over food delivery were impaired in their acquisition of a shuttle-escape response, relative to the response-contingent and the continuous-reinforcement control rats (in Experiments 1 and 2) and to the lack-of-control and home cage control rats (in Experiment 2). Rats that had received noncontingent food delivery without a prior history of control over food exhibited poorer performance than did the home cage control rats. Moreover, loss of control resulted in a larger interference effect than did lack of control, supporting the view that the learning of response-outcome noncontingency is the main determinant of the interference effect.     

In search of the public and the private: Philosophy of education in post-war Japan

The focus of this paper is on Japanese philosophy of education in the post-war period. We begin with a historical account, concentrating on developments in ideas and their interrelation with policy, and then go on to discuss aspects of the contemporary scene. Central to our concerns here are the ways in which there has been an impoverishment of the public and private realms, especially with the collusion of private and national interests under the sway of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies. We conclude our discussion by identifying some current trends in Japanese philosophy of education, highlighting ways in which new developments in the subject may lay the way for restoring and enhancing the relationship between the private and the public.     

CROSSING BORDERS WITHIN: STANLEY CAVELL AND THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION

The matter of crossing borders in the creation of democratic communities arises in ways that are pressing, both within the nation‐state and on a global scale. Tensions between tendencies toward nationalism and the cosmopolitan call for global understanding touch the heart of ideas of democracy as beginning at home—at political, psychological, and existential levels. Yet in both orientations there is a certain consolidation of what John Dewey called the “we.” In this essay Naoko Saito and Paul Standish address questions concerning the “I's” relation to the “we.” It is through an exploration of the apparently apolitical approach of Stanley Cavell, through what he calls the “politics of interpretation,” that Saito and Standish try to give substance to the critical destabilization of these terms and tensions that they believe to be necessary. Cavell's Wittgensteinian approach to skepticism and his account of the Emersonian sense of the tragic help to demonstrate the need to meet the political crisis of democracy with language of a more subtly critical kind. The antifoundationalism Cavell derives from these sources, with its concomitant notion of philosophy as translation, provides us with a language that answers to the problems of the “we.” This is, the authors conclude, a better formulation of, and a more hopeful response to, the challenge of crossing borders within. It touches despair but realizes within it the prophetic power of language. And it shows the political crisis in which democracy finds itself to be something that is not peculiar to our times but internal to the very nature of our (political) lives.     

Peers’ perceptions of Japanese returnees

Many studies have examined the reentry process of Japanese children raised abroad. Results suggest that “feeling different” is a key factor in describing their experiences. These studies, however, were based only on self-reports of returnees. The current study examined returnees’ peers’ perceptions and the factors that affected them. Results indicated that the returnees’ peers’ perceptions could be summarized by two factors: “advantage” and “difference/disadvantage.” Those who had studied abroad and who had known many returnees had a balanced perspective of the returnee experience. Women were more likely to perceive advantages while those who were older were more likely to perceive differences/disadvantages.