 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
There was a time, not so long ago in human history, when practically no Westerners looked to the East for wisdom. But from our perspective today, this kind of philosophical seeking has been going on long enough to feel natural. When times get trying, you might turn to the Buddha, Lao Tzu, or even Confucius for wisdom as soon as you would to any other figure, no matter your culture of origin. And here in the 21st century, introductions to their thought lie closer than ever to hand: on The School of Life’s “Eastern philosophy” Youtube playlist, you’ll find primers on these influential sages and others besides, all playfully animated and narrated by Alain de Botton.There was a time, not so long ago in human history, when practically no Westerners looked to the East for wisdom. But from our perspective today, this kind of philosophical seeking has been going on long enough to feel natural. When times get trying, you might turn to the Buddha, Lao Tzu, or even Confucius for wisdom as soon as you would to any other figure, no matter your culture of origin. And here in the 21st century, introductions to their thought lie closer than ever to hand: on The School of Life’s “Eastern philosophy” Youtube playlist, you’ll find primers on these influential sages and others besides, all playfully animated and narrated by Alain de Botton.
In the UK, currently, there is much discussion around the appropriateness of the curriculum that we teach, so that all learners, whatever their background, ethnicity or prior experience of education, feel connected to what they are learning and how they are taught. In some debates this has been termed ‘decolonising the curriculum’.
This, relatively local debate, has coincided with webinars I have been running for teachers in the Caribbean around learning and teaching mathematics. These webinars have been based on resources I have written for primary age students in Jamaica and Belize. These two countries have recently introduced new curricula in mathematics, and whilst the term ‘decolonising’ is not used, both curriculum documents are clear, in terms of their aims, that one of the purposes of education is to preapre a path forwards to a successful independence whilst recognising the rich cultural heritage. Decolonisation by any other name.
What is the value of a graduate degree? That’s not an existential question like “what’s the value of learning?” though it could be. It’s a calculation: time plus tuition minus the chance of getting the right job after graduation. When the costs far outweigh the return, a new question might occur to graduates: Can I have my money back?
Toward the end of The Simpsons’ golden age, one episode sent the titular family off to Japan, not without resistance from its famously lazy patriarch. “Come on, Homer,” Marge insists, “Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon.” To which Homer naturally replies, “That’s not how I remember it!” This joke must have written itself, not as a high-middlebrow cultural reference (as, say, Frasier would later name-check Tampopo) but as a play on a universally understood byword for the nature of human memory. Even those of us who’ve never seen Rashomon, the period crime drama that made its director Akira Kurosawa a household name in the West, know what its title represents: the tendency of each human being to remember the same event in his own way.
2020 was “a year for the (record) books in publishing,” wrote Jim Milliot in Publisher’s Weekly this past January, a surge continuing into 2021. Yet some kinds of print books have so declined in sales there may be no reason to keep publishing them, or buying them, since their equivalents online are superior in almost every respect to any version on paper. As I finally conceded during a recent, aggressive spring cleaning, I personally have no reason to store heavy, bulky, dusty reference books, except in cases of extreme sentiment.
It might seem like good communication strategies are timeless, but in actual fact they are constantly evolving. In an increasingly globalized world, not to mention rapidly shifting virtual landscape, what qualified as effective five or ten years ago–even last year–may not longer be relevant. Here are ten of our tips for crafting good communication in 2021.
The concept of teaching creativity has been around for quite some time. Academics such as E. Paul Torrance, dedicated an entire lifetime to the advancement of creativity in education. Torrance faced much opposition in his day about the nature of creativity. Creativity was considered to be an immeasurable, natural ability. Torrance called for explicit teaching of creativity. He advocated that it was skill-specific, requiring intentional instruction. His life’s work ultimately led to the development of the Torrance tests and gifted programs throughout the world. In recent times, there has been a shift towards the increased acceptance of valuing creativity for all learners. A 2003 TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson discussing this subject reached over 5 million viewers. It discusses how our current school systems suppress creativity. He proposes that our current model leaves little room for divergent thinking.
This blog was kindly contributed by Professor Randall Whittaker, Pro-Vice Chancellor Academic and Leeds Arts University. You can find Randall on Twitter @RandalWhittaker. On Wednesday 21 April HEPI hosted the third webinar in a series with Advance HE on ‘How do we ensure equality in higher education in a pandemic?’. You can watch the recording here. Over the years there have been numerous calls for action to abandon the divisive BAME term which have predictably not been heeded. I have previously argued that the homogenous term BAME is not only lazy but also problematic. Who exactly are you referring to when you use it? BAME has no nuance and the way it is being used impacts the lives of people of colour negatively; ‘BAME’ is being use to misrepresent the experience of Black and brown people and to mask inaction. The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report published at the end of March this year, recommends that the term should be disaggregated. Although I support this recommendation it is concerning that in other parts of the report the Commission use disaggregation to explain differential outcomes between Black communities:
What was it like to live in London during and after the Blitz? George Orwell’s notebooks from the time contain a “fascinating account of everyday life in London during the Second World War,” full of journalistic detail, the British Library writes. In Orwell’s estimation, the city was riven with class divides. “Despite his criticism of Stalinism, Orwell remained a convinced socialist all his life.” He believed the war could only be won if it turned into a revolution. “When you see how the wealthy are still behaving, in what is manifestly developing into a revolutionary war,” he wrote in a diary entry that would become the 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn, “you think of St. Petersburg in 1916.”
The people who are trying to make this world worse aren’t taking a day off. How can I?,” said Bob Marley after a 1976 assassination attempt at his home in Jamaica in which Marley, his wife Rita, manager Don Taylor, and employee Louis Griffiths were all shot and, incredibly, all survived. Which people, exactly, did he mean? Was it Edward Seaga’s Jamaican Labour Party, whose hired gunmen supposedly carried out the attack? Was it, as some even conspiratorially alleged, Michael Manley’s People’s National Party, attempting to turn Marley into a martyr??
Decolonisation is, to use the current phrase, about ‘doing the work’, and it’s difficult, uncomfortable work which for many of us will feel threatening, as it’s a de-centring of dominant cultural values, discourses and practices, a dismantling of a system created for the benefit of those ‘like us’ in which we have much invested, a destabilising of things we previously might have held to be inherently, self-evidently, unquestioningly, incontrovertibly universal norms. There is much talk of decolonising the curriculum, but the process really needs to begin not with things but people, so I’d like to focus in very practical terms on where we as Learning Developers can start to decolonise ourselves, and how we can enact this in our roles.
Summary: Whether you are a fan of War and Peace, or would rather immerse yourself in romantic fiction, researchers say the more you read, the better your verbal skills. The study reports those who read fiction for leisure score higher on language tests than those who read to simply access specific information.
After Charles Lindbergh “hopped” the Atlantic in 1927, his history-making solo flight set off a craze for all things “Lindy.” Of the countless songs, foods, products, and trends created or named in honor of the famous onetime U.S. Air Mail pilot, only one remains recognizable these more than 90 years later: the Lindy Hop. Developed on the streets and in the clubs of Harlem, the dance proved explosively popular, though it took Hollywood a few years to capitalize on it. In the late 1930s, the musical Hellzapoppin’ brought the Lindy Hop to Broadway, and in 1941, Universal Pictures turned that stage show into a major motion picture directed by H.C. Potter (now best known for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House).
|
There are Four Ps that I will use as an organizing principle for this talk about racial inequality in America: perennial, personal, political, and perplexing.
Who’s afraid of the call to decolonize higher education?
In 1979, just a couple of months into his stint with 20/20, ABC’s fledgling television news magazine, producer and documentarian Joseph Lovett was “beyond thrilled” to be assigned an interview with author James Baldwin, whose work he had discovered as a teen. Knowing that Baldwin liked to break out the bourbon in the afternoon, Lovett arranged for his crew to arrive early in the morning to set up lighting and have breakfast waiting before Baldwin awakened: He hadn’t had a drop to drink and he was brilliant, utterly brilliant. We couldn’t have been happier.
Universities’ measures to recruit more students from “disadvantaged” backgrounds have resulted in almost half of students flagged as not coming from working class families.
Social mobility charity The Sutton Trust has produced a report warning that these positive discrimination measures have not succeeded in their goal of targeting less well-off students.
The report says Russell Group institutions may be handing out lower A-level offers to the wrong students, as one of the main measures of deprivation used is “conceptually flawed”.
Via UK Data Service
Cornell University librarian demands LIBRARIES be held accountable for their ‘fraught history of being complicit in racism’ - Cornell University Librarian Reanna Esmail says libraries are often ‘complicit in racism’
- Esmail, who works at the Ivy League college’s Olin Library, spoke at a virtual event on confronting anti-Asian racism
- The librarian also highlighted the Dewey Decimal System, which is used to classify books by giving a different numbered section to different subjects
- English, French and Greek languages have multiple Dewey sections apiece – but East and Southeast Asia languages are given just one
“Man,” a fellow working the checkout counter at Los Angeles’ Amoeba Music once said to me, “you sure do like Japanese jazz.” His tone was one of faint disbelief, but then, this particular record-shopping trip happened well over a decade ago. Since then the global listenership of Japanese jazz has increased enormously, thanks to the expansion of audiovisual streaming platforms and the enterprising collectors and curators who’ve used them to share the glory of the most American of all art forms as mastered and re-interpreted by dedicated musicians in the Land of the Rising Sun.
When Dawoun Jyung, a sixth-grade math teacher at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in New York City, heard about the Atlanta spa shootings that took the lives of eight people—including six women of Asian descent—she felt a mix of “fear and devastation, lament and disbelief,” she recalls. At the same time, the violence wasn’t entirely unexpected—the recent surge in xenophobia and brutality against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and against Asian American women in particular, builds off a long history of such racism in America. And so, Jyung says, “this is not new pain. This has precedent.”
Experience Venice in this boat tour through 17 miles (27 km) of canals. “You will see the full Grand Canal going in both directions, navigate through the small canals and under bridges and see sites that you cannot see by walking.” It’s quiet, meditative, a mental escape from the tedium of quarantine life.
An online design museum made by and for designers? The concept seems obvious, but has taken decades in internet years for the reality to fully emerge in the Letterform Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look simple, but no one should be fooled into thinking it’s easy. “After years of development and months of feedback,” write the creators of the Letterform Archive online design museum, “we’re opening up the Online Archive to everyone. This project is a labor of love from everyone on our staff, and many generous volunteers, and we hope it provides a source of beautiful distraction and inspiration to all who love letters.”
For women street photographers living and working today, the project offers what founder Gulnara Samoilova says she needed and couldn’t find: “I soon began to realize that with this platform, I could create everything I had always wanted to receive as a photographer: the kinds of support and opportunities that would have helped me grow during those formative and pivotal points on my journey.” The project is international in scope, bringing together the work of 100 women from 31 countries, “a tiny sampling of what’s out there.”
The subject of decolonising the curriculum is once again back in the headlines, following recent comments by the Universities Minister. Advocates of decolonising the curriculum have objected strongly, arguing that Ministers are seeking to dictate the content of courses. This is wide of the mark. On the one hand, decolonising the curriculum activists claim merely to be inviting a conversation about diversifying the reading lists and material on university courses. On the other hand, activists are working with often compliant university leadership teams to force through radical changes to UK higher education. Since these changes are both illiberal and authoritarian, the Government’s announcements should be seen for what they are: a defence of key academic values, including the primacy of evidence-led research, judgmental rationalism and academic freedom.
After months of chasing these birds around Lough Ennell, Co. Westmeath [a lake in Ireland], James Crombie and I captured a unique display, writes Colin Hogg on YouTube. He’s referring to the video above, which–for one ever-brief moment–captures a murmuration of starlings forming the shape of a giant bird. It’s a pretty meta concept.
|
