I don’t recall how I happened upon this page and its list of pedagogies. Probably I was nosing around for something or the other. Anyway, the page’s home is The Math and Science Partnership Network. (I had thought they were married.) It provides one of my favorite pasttimes: galumphing around someone’s internal search engine.
Monthly Archives: October 2005
I CAN’T HELP YOU
By law I cannot practice psychotherapy. So, I co-counsel, mentor, facilitate, ‘therapize’. This sends me into the vast, errr, not-really-therapy
Of course it’s human nature to want to help! I think all these outlayers should have a yearly parade and party. It’s okay, of course, for informal claims to be made. The meta-claim is: “life is therapeutic”.
Filed under folk psychology
RESPONSIVE ATTITUDES
Another goldmine hiding out on the web. This time oriented around phenomenological-constructive psychology and coming out of The Virtual Faculty in New Zealand. The VF has a modest facade behind which lies enormous resources; for example: The Vysgotsky Project.
I haven’t read all the papers, (not hardly!) but could point to a thinker worth curling up with. John Shotter.
If the unceasing flow of speech entwined activity is sustained between us spontaneously, i.e., in an unforced, unplanned, and unintended fashion, what must be the nature of our everyday activities such that we can not only sustain this flow routinely in our actions, but we also, unreflectively, repair or restore it should a significant hiatus occur within it (Buttney, 1993; Shotter, 1984)? To do this, we must both be able to ‘follow’ others in our talk entwined activities, while at the same time, we must speak and act in ways that they also can ‘follow’. To follow another’s utterance entwined activities, we must actively adopt an expectant attitude toward them. Besides noting their content, their reference to the current context, we must also note their point, the changes in that context toward which they ‘gesture’ in the future. As Bakhtin (1986) puts it: “…when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding, from the very beginning – sometimes literally from the speaker’s first word” (p.68).
Inside dialogical realities: FROM AN ABSTRACT-SYSTEMATIC TO A PARTICIPATORY-WHOLISTIC UNERSTANDING OF COMMUNICATION. (from above link
Lots of important reasoning/feeling meta-psychology under his name at this site. Another grabber: VICO, WITTGENSTEIN, AND BAKHTIN: PRACTICAL TRUST’ IN DIALOGICAL COMMUNITIES.
…tip of the berg.
SHAMELESSLY DUMB
The essential humorous take on the evolution non-controversy has quickly passed into legendary status on the internet. Of course I’m speaking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its infinite creative unraveling as both parody and pastadigm. The Verganza site is worthy of any and all attention the reader with a sense of humor can deploy. Dig the emails and their growing revelations about the true magnitude of the noodlie mythologem.
…back in the unreal worldly…Sohel’s blog is silly but I discovered Benson College writing professor Leonard Rosen’s essay on it. Insipid is never good, but sometimes it can fuel entertaining “super insipidry”.
Here’s Rosen’s thoughtful (?) banal riff on the reconciliation of science and ID.
Excerpt:
Biologists and intelligent designers may point to the same tiger, but because one asks how and the other why, they talk past each other. It’s a nondebate. And that’s what we can teach. Throughout history, into our own day, how and why — both, neither alone — have defined the human project. Nations that would be guided by one question, not both, usually make a mess of things. How has given us Einstein and Euclid; why, Virginia Woolf, Homer, Moses, and Mother Teresa. Have we not learned, even yet, to untangle these questions? They should be, and have ever been, debated endlessly, but never with much success in the same breath. We need both but must pursue each alone. At the end of life, no one wants another description of the tiger’s symmetry. We want what William Blake did: to know that those stripes, and our lives, are not accidents of matter colliding in the void. Until scientists, the masters of how, can give us that, we will ask why. There is no debate over intelligent design, only different ways of knowing and the mystery of tigers burning bright.
Filed under science
DESIGNER SMACK DOWN
I’ve been tracking the instigation of the Intelligent Design crowd in their play for attention in Dover v. Kitzmiller. The battle for the hearts and minds of impressionable high school science students seems to me to be no more than this given how etched the so-called “Wedge Strategy” is at the leading edge of the long-standing historical movement to replace science with a nonsensical magical pseudoscience. It does a disservice to religion to suggest scientific explanation should be replaced by mythic explanation.
But even if this category error leaps out of the fray, it is notable that the ID brethren nowadays believe scientific methodology might be usurped simply because school boards can vote on what constitutes scientific method, and, do so through appealing to academic freedom, or, ‘studying all the sides’. Silly…
(The controversy is a red herring. The matter is settled both as a matter of the status of biological knowledge, and, the ill status of the already ruined explanatory program and ‘metaphysics’ of Intelligent Design.)
What is interesting lies in the other direction, away from science.
