scholarly journals Outdoors and Nature in Pedagogical Practices and in Cultural Historical Theory

Author(s):  
Liv Torunn Grindheim ◽  
Hanne Værum Sørensen ◽  
Angela Rekers

AbstractDespite the increasing awareness of the outdoors as a beneficial site for young children’s education, the status of outdoor activities varies in and within different cultures. Aiming to broaden and challenge presupposed understandings of education and care in the outdoors, we consider the empirical findings from all the chapters in this volume in order to identify a range of conditions for cultural formation in outdoor practices both within and between different cultures. Building on Mariane Hedegaard’s approach to cultural historical theory and Ødegaard and Krüger’s approach to cultural formation, our analysis is performed by identifying conflicts and alignments between the values and motive orientations of the individual and those interpreted from the contextual conditions and demands of institutions and society, particularly in relation to the perception of nature. In doing so, we depict how culture and nature are interrelated from a socio-cultural perspective, and argue that perceptions of nature shaped by institutions and society play a significant role creating conditions for cultural formation. The opportunity for play, learning and cultural formation in nature appears rich within all the represented cultural spaces described in this volume, although whether these opportunities are supported consistently within wider mainstream culture is regarded as an area of tension in some chapters. Based upon our analysis, we suggest that both pedagogical practices and cultural historical theory need to take the outdoors and nature into consideration when emphasising pedagogical practices for children’s play, learning and cultural formation.

2008 ◽  
pp. 110-134
Author(s):  
Pavlo Yuriyovych Pavlenko

The cornerstone of any religion is its anthropological concept, which seeks to determine the essential orientations of man, to outline the ideological framework of its existence, to represent the idea of ​​its essence, purpose in earthly life. The main task of the religious system is the act of involving and subordinating man to the spiritual divine realm as the realm of the transcendental existence of God. Belief in the real presence of the latter implies a new understanding of oneself, which ultimately leads the religious individual to the desire to be involved in this transcendental existence, to have intimate relations with him, to have a consciousness inherent in God. Note that in this context, all human being is interpreted as a certain arena for this realization. Therefore, the religious life of the individual acquires the status of religious activity.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Dr. Bilal Ahmad Khan

Islamic economics based on specific concept of universe and the creation of man is contradictory to the concept adopted and accepted by modern science. Islamic economics postulates although ability and expertise is required for progress and growth but distribution of resources completely dependent on it would be cruel, inhuman and bereft of kindness, and lead to oppression. Islamic economics does not favor making human ability and expertise the fulcrum of resource distribution. It should be kind, considerate and based on justice and fairness. This is because according to Islamic philosophy, ownership is considered to be a trust from Allah which has been bestowed on the rich so that they may utilize it correctly. In Islamic economics the role of the individual, has inclinations and his aims and objectives occupy a central position and are vitally important. He is definitely a rational being but his level of rationality is not confined to the calculations of cost and profit. An individual does not want merely to obtain monetary profit and physical pleasure and leisure but he also wants and aims for something beyond what the material world has to offer. The main aim of the study is to find out the relationship between Islam and economics. In Islamic economics the comprehensive moral training of the individual, his technical and educational ability, his aims and his priorities are of primary importance. According to Islamic economics the means of acquiring wealth has the same importance as wealth itself. Dishonesty, abuse of trust and earning of wealth through fraudulent ways and means may perhaps increase the status of an individual but the society suffers because of it on the whole. This leads to an unjust and oppressive economic system.


Author(s):  
Jon Stewart

This work represents a combination of different genres: cultural history, philosophical anthropology, and textbook. It follows a handful of different but interrelated themes through more than a dozen texts that were written over a period of several millennia. By means of an analysis of these texts, this work presents a theory about the development of Western Civilization from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The main line of argument traces the various self-conceptions of the different cultures as they developed historically. These self-conceptions reflect different views of what it is to be human. The thesis is that in these we can discern the gradual emergence of what we today call inwardness, subjectivity and individual freedom. As human civilization took its first tenuous steps, it had a very limited conception of the individual. Instead, the dominant principle was that of the wider group: the family, clan or people. Only in the course of history did the idea of what we know as individuality begin to emerge. It took millennia for this idea to be fully recognized and developed. The conception of human beings as having a sphere of inwardness and subjectivity subsequently had a sweeping impact on all aspects of culture, such as philosophy, religion, law, and art. Indeed, this conception largely constitutes what is today referred to as modernity. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that this modern conception of human subjectivity was not simply something given but rather the result of a long process of historical and cultural development.


Author(s):  
Alan Cooper

This chapter discusses three aspects of Jewish reception of the Ketuvim (Writings or Hagiographa): the status and authority of the Ketuvim in relation to the Torah (Pentateuch) and the Nevi’im (Prophets); the study and liturgical use of Ketuvim, focusing on the so-called Five Scrolls (hamesh megillot) and the Book of Psalms; and the character of traditional commentary on selected books, including recommendations for further reading. The Ketuvim were considered sacred and inspired, but at a lower level of inspiration than the Torah and the Prophets. They were regarded as diverting and edifying, but insufficiently authoritative to support the promulgation of law, which was the fundamental concern of rabbinic teaching and learning. On the whole, Jewish commentators seek to find consistency in the interpretation of the individual books, “taming” their originality in order to conform their meanings both to the rest of Scripture and to normative Jewish teachings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
M N Silva ◽  
M A Maas ◽  
D A Barreto ◽  
M V P Costa ◽  
D S Vargas ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The Regional Internship (RI) is an extension project provided by the Federal University of Santa Maria (Brazil) that gives the medicine students a real experience of how the Primary Health Care (PHC) works, offering them a chance to grow as professionals, gaining self-trust and autonomy while being supervised by the preceptors. The cities where the program operates are small and they suffer with lack of high-quality healthcare professionals, which makes this internship also important for these communities. Worldwide, mainly in developing countries, the deficiency of proper PHC is a problem that can be attenuated by this proposal of introducing updated doctors eager to improve their skills and benefit the society. Objective The aim of the present study is to report, through the interns' exposition, how the internship was capable of contributing for the life and formation of the medicine student. Results Based on an extension project that gives the students an opportunity of a more embracing experience with the community, it is possible to notice the importance of the extension on the curricular complementation. Moreover, with the interaction between students and community, the knowledge exchange and the experience with different cultures benefit and contribute to the medical formation of these students, as well as in the population health context. Conclusions This is a part of the portfolio delivered by an academic: 'At the end of the two months of Regional Internship I have the sensation of mission accomplished and satisfaction. The experience offered by this phase of the course is incomparable, I feel more secure, more autonomous, it's like the growth that was in a constant acceleration before now suffered an exponential improve.' Key messages The benefits of Regional Internship cannot be evaluated only by quantitative indicators, but also by the individual experiences lived by interns, preceptors and a general community. After the internship period, academics conclude that they feel more confident and encouraged to face the challenges of medical life.


Author(s):  
James Aaron Green

Abstract In Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Charles Lyell appraised the distinct contribution made by his protégé, Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species (1859)), to evolutionary theory: ‘Progression … is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [… Darwin’s theory accounts] equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrogressive movement towards a simple structure’. In Rhoda Broughton’s first novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), written contemporaneously with Lyell’s book, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham prompts precisely this sort of Darwinian ambivalence to progress; but whether British civilization ‘advance[s] or retreat[s]’, her narrator adds that this prophesized state ‘will not be in our days’ – its realization exceeds the single lifespan. This article argues that Not Wisely, but Too Well is attentive to the irreconcilability of Darwinism to the Victorian ‘idea of progress’: Broughton’s novel, distinctly from its peers, raises the retrogressive and nihilistic potentials of Darwin’s theory and purposes them to reflect on the status of the individual in mid-century Britain.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Thomas Crew

In this essay I consider the theme of individuation or self-becoming in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1888) and Hesse’s Demian (1917) and Steppenwolf (1927). Although this task appears inter-disciplinary, Nietzsche’s autobiography can be considered a Bildungsroman in which ‘Nietzsche’ plays the protagonist. After showing the correspondences between Nietzsche’s and Hesse’s diagnoses of contemporary Europe, which can be summed up with the notion of ‘decadence’ or nihilism, I suggest that they both point towards the process of self-becoming as the ultimate remedy for both the individual and society. Self-becoming is a painful yet necessary process that holds the repeated destruction of the individual’s identity as the precondition for attaining the status of human being. It is a process implied by Nietzsche’s ‘formula for human greatness’: amor fati. Resistance to individuation leads to a state of ‘miserable ease’, embodied by what Hesse calls the ‘bourgeois’ and what Nietzsche terms the ‘last men’.


2003 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Offer

Herbert Spencer remains an important and intriguing figure in thinking about political, social and moral matters. At present his writings in relation to idealist thought, social policy, sociology and ethics are undergoing reassessment. This article is concerned with some recent interpretations of Spencer on individuals in social life. It looks in some detail at Spencer's work on psychology and sociology as well as on ethics, seeking to establish how Spencer understood people as social individuals. In particular the neglect of Spencer's denial of freedom of the will is identified as a problem in some recent interpretations. One of his contemporary critics, J.E. Cairnes, charged that Spencer's own theory of social evolution left even Spencer himself the status of only a ‘conscious automaton’. This article, drawing on a range of past and present interpretative discussions of Spencer, seeks to show that Spencerian individuals are psychically and socially so constituted as to be only indirectly responsive to moral suasion, even to that of his own Principles of Ethics as he himself acknowledged. Whilst overtly reconstructionist projects to develop a liberal utilitarianism out of Spencer to enliven political and philosophical debate for today are worthwhile – dead theorists have uses – care needs to be taken that the original context and its concerns with the processes associated with innovation (and decay) in social life are not thereby eclipsed, the more so since in some important respects they have recently received little systematic attention even though the issues have contemporary relevance in sociology.


Author(s):  
Thomas Teo

Critical psychology comprises a broad range of international approaches centered around theories and practices of critique, power, resistance, and alternatives of practice. Although critical psychology had an axial age in and around the 1970s, many sources can be found decades and even centuries earlier. Critical psychology is not only about the critique of psychology, which is a broader historical and theoretical field, but about doing justice in and through theory, justice with and to groups of people, and justice to the reality of society, history, and culture as they powerfully constitute subjectivity, as well as the discipline and profession of psychology. Doing justice in and through psychological theory has a strong basis in Western critical approaches, representing a privileged position of reflection in Euro-American research institutions. Critical psychologists argue that traditional psychology is missing its subject matter and hence is not doing justice in methodology, and its practices of control and adjustment are not doing justice to the emancipatory possibilities of human agency or human science. Critical psychologists who are attempting to do justice with and to human beings are not neglecting the onto-epistemic-ethical domain, but are instead focusing on people, often marginalized or oppressed groups. Critical psychologists who want to do justice in history, culture, and society have argued that traditional psychological practice means adaption and adjustment. This means that not only subjectivity, but also the discipline and profession of psychology need to be connected with contexts. Psychologists have attempted to conceptualize the relationship between society and the individual, as well as the ability of humans not only to adapt to an environment but to change their living conditions and transform the status quo. This conceptualization also means providing concrete analyses of how current society, based in neoliberal capitalism, not only impacts individuals but also the discipline of psychology. Despite the complexities of critical psychology around the world, critical psychologists emphasize the importance of reflexivity and praxis when it comes to changing the conditions of social reality that create mental life. Given that subjectivity cannot be limited to intra-psychological processes, critical psychologists attend to relational and structural societal realities, requiring inter- and transdisciplinarity in the discipline and profession.


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