Mindfulness‐Based Design Practice (MBDP): A Novel Learning Framework in Support of Designers within Twenty‐First‐Century Higher Education

While the interconnected and technological nature of the twenty‐first century can bring about many positive global connections, the importance of prioritising the development of the ‘inner world’ of designers is receiving less attention; similarly, time for contemplation, reflection and stillness is becoming scarcer. This article discusses mindfulness training from the Buddhist perspective, and how it can act as a pathway to personal introspection and as a supportive method for mental illnesses. With a special focus on design education, it discusses a novel framework, Mindfulness‐Based Design Practice (MBDP), and how it can potentially offer opportunities for design students to foster positive mind qualities such as mindfulness, compassion, resilience, and recognising the true nature of phenomena for becoming more ethical designers. Therefore, this article looks to bridge the gap between the significant lack of contemplative mindfulness‐based methods within the higher design education sector and the increasing mental health crisis within that sector. Thus, the primary concern of the MBDP is to advance both the individual and the collective development of the contemporary designer’s mind. Referring to the mind of the designer as the ‘inner designer’, this article forms an unfolding dialogue of the novel framework MBDP in support of mindful learning within twenty‐first‐century design education.     

21世纪前美国成人移民扫盲教育发展概况简析

美国成人移民扫盲教育可以追溯至南北战争时期,直至现在,成人移民的扫盲教育尤其是英语教学仍是美国任重而道远的工作。从移民扫盲教育的对象、扫盲教育相关机构、扫盲目标等几个方面梳理成人移民教育的发展脉络,可以对美国的扫盲教育有一个比较清晰和全面的认识。     

美国生涯和技术教育新理念探析

2010 年,美国全国生涯与技术教育组织与21 世纪技能合作组织的战略性合作全面展开,将生涯与技术教育理念提升到一个新的高度.新理念将生涯与技术教育与21 世纪技能相结合并渗透进整个教育系统,让所有学生在掌握21世纪技能的基础上为升学和就业作双重准备.新理念表现出前瞻性与战略性相结合、系统性与整合性相结合、全面性与核心性相结合以及全纳性与个性化相结合的特点,其实施的可行性主要体现为理论基础符合国际职业教育发展趋势,并在实践上拥有强大的基层支持和范例证明.     

美国大学教师发展模式及其对我国的启示

美国高校教育信息化组织结合美国各高校现行优秀教师发展案例,提出了包含三个阶段的"大学教师发展五年计划",第一阶段为博士研究生提供大学教师资格证培训,第二阶段是新教师入职培训,第三阶段是教师督导和反向辅导.每个阶段有不同的大学教师发展项目,成功的大学教师发展项目具备十大因素,同时应该注意五大问题.美国高校教育信息化组织对...     

Playing with rules around routines: children making mealtimes meaningful and enjoyable

Children attending early childhood education and care centres spend a lot of time fitting in with institutional routines. This paper uses ethnographic methods and sociocultural activity theory to describe and analyse the processes whereby young children in an early childhood centre collectively created meaning and interest during potentially boring routine mealtimes. The research explores the relationship between rules and children's playful activity. Using their imaginations children negotiated and played with and within the rules around ‘eating‐together’ times. While physically constrained in chairs around tables children enjoyed the freedom of playing with word sounds and meanings. Children actively, collaboratively and at times subversively, created their peer community culture.     

‘Second death’, or revival of the ‘third world’ in the context of neo‐liberal globalization

Abstract

This paper tries to analyze the historical change in the Third World in its emergent stage, in the authoritarian stage and in the current democratic stage and, thereafter, find a way to revive the Bandung spirit in the current globalization context. I define the Bandung spirit as one of a ‘non‐aligned self‐helped “organization against” the dominant powerful countries’; that is, spirit of ‘anti‐predominance’. This spirit has emerged on the base of such domestic orientation and realities as economic self‐reliance, nationally integrated political regime, convergence of the state and civil society around anti‐colonialism. However, according to intensification of the Cold War confrontation on the international level and its centrifugal influence, the early Third World changed to a ‘new’ authoritarian Third World. The Third World in this stage could be characterized by an exclusive authoritarian political regime, dependent‐developmentalist economic orientation and coercively repressed and mobilized, in the top‐down way, civil society. This authoritarian Third World began to be confronted with a strong struggle from the bottom for democratization. In order for democratization of the Third World to become its true revival in the context of globalization, the following tasks should be considered. First, the democratic Third World should be a great driving force for the institutionalization of the transnational public regulatory mechanism. Second, the democratic Third World countries try to go over a kind of ‘transformed’ dependent development strategy. Third, democratization should go along with recovery of political inclusiveness and openness of the state to civil society’s demands. Thereafter, I tried to construct globalist re‐interpretation of the Bandung, by way of conceptualizing the current globalization as imperial globalization, unlike the imperialist globalization which the historical Bandung wanted to confront. I argue that the Bandung spirit of collective self‐help organizations against the newly emerging dominant order should be revived in this worse imperial globalization context. In addition, I argue that a nationalist resistance is also one component of the multiple resistances in the current imperial globalization.     

Made in China: the cultural logic of OEMs and the manufacture of low‐cost technology

Abstract

This paper investigates the conditions of the manufacture of low‐cost technology in China with the examples of ‘pirated’ VCD players, ‘no‐name’ DVD players, and Shenzhen’s development as a techno‐urban city. It emphasizes the significance of the cultural logic of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and argues that the various transformations and deflections that are derived from ubiquitous OEM experiences have gone beyond the original model of an authorized OEM, experiences that are to some extent embodied in the transgression of brand name and patent hegemonies, which are mainly controlled by high technology companies. OEMs have been associated with China’s current imperative and uninhibited development of low‐cost technology capitalism. ‘Made in China’ signifies the production of any product, legal or illegal, for transnational high technology giants or domestic technology manufacturers. Learning to ‘become an OEM’ in China has partly resulted in excessive technological mimesis that may be part of an unauthorized, underground economy that is based on low‐cost technology. Based on the Shenzhen experience, part of this study will show industrial production‐oriented OEM cultures in which illegal operations and counterfeit trade are incorporated, even in city projects that are shared by municipal governments and Chinese technological companies, and undergo spatial restructuring in the development of the economy, consumerism, and urbanism.     

Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss‐crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub‐processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a ‘cultural’ boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia’; a potential ‘East Asian identity’, emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable.     

The power of circulation: digital technologies and the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama

Focusing on the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, this paper explores the way in which the fan subculture, in connection with digital technologies, has carved out alternative practices in the circulation, production and consumption of Japanese TV drama. As ‘minority audiences’ who are not targeted as the objects of capitalist interests, online Chinese fans invent spaces for Chinese transnational networking with self‐help and sharing, as a way of resisting the aloofness from marketing strategies of Japanese TV distributors in Asia. This case study reveals that the online Chinese fan clubs, the websites for downloads, pirated VCD markets, digital file conversion, and private VCD burning – all of these have linked endless networks for the digitalized circulation and consumption of Japanese TV drama. The online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the politics of autonomy, network and low‐cost digital technology; they are attempting to break down time–space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy. Such fan practices shed light on the new trends of audio‐visual consumption via digitalization.