Metal Craft Problems

Although goals change and reflect the issues of the time, two primary goals of education in a democracy have remained constant over time. The first goal is to educate for vocational competence and the second is to produce caring, intelligent, and wise citizens. Articulating the connection of design education concepts to the economy and social responsibility is beneficial in educating K–12 students. This article illustrates the ways in which design education fosters the skills needed in the global twenty-first century to help students make a better life for themselves and their community and improve the world. I articulate ways to incorporate design as an essential component into a comprehensive visual arts program.     

Reimagining policy: Power,problems, and public stories

The authors of various practitioner and scholarly documents suggest markedly contrasting understandings about the nature of “policy.” These divergent conceptions raise the question: What is at stake by understanding the nature of policy in one way as opposed to another? The purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to interrogate the nature of “policy” as it relates to music education and to question the values that do and might underlie and propagate through contrasting understandings of “policy.” Subsequently, I examine two aspects of policy, problem identification and meaning-making, that have gone largely unexplored in the arts education literature.

Using Foucault's writings, I argue that power-laden policy texts often have the greatest impact, not when they are mandated, but when they go misrecognized as common sense. I also advocate for the consistent use of the terms “policy texts” and “policy actions,” including as an alternative to the imbalanced designations of “soft policies” and “hard policies.” Drawing on Dewey arts educators might form “publics” around problems having consequences that they deem far-reaching, recurrent, and irreparable. Individual and collective political narratives, including what Ganz explains as “stories of self,” “stories of us,” and “stories of now,” can foster the meaningful connections necessary for forming “publics” who address pressing problems in arts education.     

The meaning of the present: hope and foreclosure in narrations about people with severe brain damage

In this article, I consider narratives told within a clinical setting. I argue that personnel in a day center for people with acquired brain damage are constantly involved in narrating about the disabled participants. The negotiation of who the participant is, and foremost will be, is in constant negotiation in regard to issues of hope. I further argue that hope is a meaning-making process and, as such, it has been defined as crucially connected to time. Hope has been said to enable a connection between the present and the future, because action taken in the present could bring about (positive) change in the future. However, I show that hope, in relation to narratives told about people with severe disabilities that are considered "incurable," must be understood within a realm of narrative foreclosure. Time seems to have lost the openness of its horizon for these people, and a narrative that tells of immediacy rather than chronology is created, resulting in hope being established within the present.     

Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Comparing Mental Illness Narratives of Haredi Male Patients and their Rabbis

By comparing versions of mental illness narratives – told by Haredi (Utraorthodox Jews) male patients of a mental health clinic in Israel and by their rabbis – this paper relates to two distinct, yet interrelated, theoretical questions: the place and agency of narrators, and the tension between experience and representation. A pair of narratives exemplifies a pattern in which the patients (Talmudic students) tell a narrative of a sudden breakdown related to a dramatic meeting with a non-human figure (often, a woman) or force. Their rabbis, by contrast, tell a narrative that emphasizes their students' mundane symptoms, ``abnormal' and ``immoral' behavior, and use a local adaptation of a Western psychological explanatory model. A dynamic of inclusion and exclusion emerges as students are seeking legitimization and avoidance of stigma, while their rabbis are silencing themes that challenge social and cultural orders. The different narratives are further interpreted in the context of the micropolitics of the interviews and of identity politics between the Haredim and secular Israelis. This social dynamics shows how differently placed social actors-narrators-interpreters construct differently contested and diverse cultural narratives of a seemingly shared reality.     

‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Anthropology After Globalisation

Laughing and humour are of great importance to most people in their everyday life and these phenomena have attracted attention from many social thinkers. It has been noted that laughter often is provoked by something that is considered to be absurd and paradoxical. This essay focuses specifically on the meaning of laughter among Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon. The paper discusses how absurdity is employed within narrative genres as a structuring principle within the specific ethos that is predominant among this people and how it serves to generate and manifest conviviality.     

Play and Intentionality Among Today's Preschoolers

A comparison is made of data on the level of development of play activity and its influence on the volitional behavior of today's preschoolers and the preschoolers of the 1940s–1950s. The results of the comparison point to a substantial decrease in the level of narrative role-playing among children today. The study reproduces the widely known experiment of Z.V. Manuilenko (1948). The comparison of data on preschoolers of the mid-twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first shows a significant decrease in the level of volitional behavior in both play and nonplay situations. The results suggest that primitive, underdeveloped play cannot define a zone of proximal development and fulfill the status of primary activity.     

Significant dreams: Repositioning the self narrative.

In this article the authors argue that the study of the ongoing significance of significant dreams necessarily goes beyond quantitative methods for analyzing dream content to a qualitative study of how the dream experience influences the dreamer's meaning-making processes. A set of concepts from narrative psychology is introduced as being potentially valuable in this regard. A case study is presented to illustrate how the significant dream may serve as a catalyst for repositioning the dreamer's self narrative relative to a cultural master narrative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching Evolution with Historical Narratives

This paper focuses on evolution as a unifying theme in biology education. Our aim is to argue that the different topics taught in secondary school biology classes should be enriched with and linked together by means of accounts of the history of life. We named this approach a “natural history perspective” on biology education. An essential aspect of the natural history perspective is the claim that evolutionary history forms the context for the development of an understanding of evolutionary processes. While there are some indications that a natural history perspective can function as a context for understanding micro-evolutionary processes, more research is called for.

The Study of Children’s Play within the Context of Cultural-Historical Psychology: Experience and Prospects

The paper reconstructs the history of the problem of mental development using material from children’s play. This study shows how researchers in the school of cultural-historical psychology identified the developmental function of play, established a qualitative leap in its development and attempted to re-create it, beginning with the works of L.S. Vygotsky, then of his followers (the activity-based approach in the interpretation of narrative role-playing: A.N. Leontiev, D.B. Elkonin, N.Ia. Mikhailenko, N.A. Korotkova, etc.), and, finally, of the researchers who studied a specific act of development in play (L.I. El’koninova, T.V. Bazhanova, K.O. Iur’eva). This research presents the view that the concept of the cultural form of play, containing a Challenge (defined by the boundaries of the possibilities of action and by risk) and the subsequent Response is the basis not only of narrative role-playing but also of games with rules, as well as computer games. The Challenge entails action that changes the action situation; it typifies all forms of play, which are supposed to tie together what is disjointed in a child’s daily life into a semantic knot.     

A structural and functional analysis of dream narratives.

This article demonstrates that elicited dream narratives use a differing narrative structural and functional framework, as proposed by Labov and Waletzky's (1967) narrative framework on elicited personal narratives. A quantitative structural and functional analysis of five male and female collected samples showed that dream narratives follow a homogenous structure of (1) Topic introduction, (2) Orientation, (3) Complication, (4) Evaluation, and (5) Coda, consequently reflecting the omission of Labov and Waletzky's (1967) proposed resolution unit, which confirms Labov's (1997) suggestion of the difficulty to distinguish between resolution and coda. Moreover, this article devotes attention to specific structural particularities, proposing that analepses and prolepses might indicate, firstly, the simultaneous processing of new spatial information and new protagonists, and secondly, reflecting indirectly the experience of dream bizarreness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)