Environmental Learning in Mangunan Experimental Primary School in Responding to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Indonesia

This article is a result of qualitative research. The investigation was conducted in the Experimental Elementary School of Mangunan, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, before and during the covid-19 pandemic by literature study, observation, and interview methods. The research focuses on exploring Y. B. Mangunwijaya's educational perspective concerning John Dewey's thought on environmental learning. Furthermore, observations and interviews focused on tracing how the environmental learning process was carried out before and during the pandemic. Three main findings could be identified. First, the School conducted environment learning before the covid-19 pandemic twice a week. During the pandemic, environmental learning activities were carried out in each student's home. Second, ecological learning becomes a project that brings together faith communication, language, natural sciences, social sciences, and mathematics. Third, learning becomes an effective means of intensive communication between teachers, students, and parents during the covid-19 pandemic. This research provides alternative ideas and its implementation of learning with an ecological vision in Indonesian society during the pandemic.

Distance Education and Parental Role, in Italy. Evidence-Based Reflections from an International Survey, after the First Lockdown

This paper presents the analysis of the data from the International Covid-19 Impact on Parental Engagement Study (ICIPES) 2020, an international survey investigating the ways in which parents and caregivers were able to build capacity to engage with children’s learning during the period of social distancing arising from the global Covid-19 pandemic. The survey was coordinated by the University of Bath and involved 23 partner countries, among which the “IUL- Italian University Line” representing Italy. The domains investigated were parental engagement; school support for parents and children; home-schooling and family life balance, and confidence in the use of technology. The pandemic has shown several obstacles that families had to face daily in their attempt to educate their children, especially in a period where no previous models could be taken as a reference point. Therefore, it represents a unique historical opportunity for researchers and policymakers to understand all the lessons learnt from this global emergency and work closely with families, to support them inengaging with children’s learning. The Authors of this contributions, as well as the other partners worldwide, believe that school-family relations are far from being collaborative and supportive, especially in certain age levels, and that much needs to be done to co-design learning opportunities bearing in mind a more ecological vision, with formal, informal and non-formal learning occasions be intertwined and interconnected. In sight of the abovementioned framework, the analysis shown in this paper focuses on the Italian data set.

Dark Ecology in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera

This article examines the notions of dark ecology, the Capitalocene, and hyperobjects to delve into a re-reading of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera that interrogates how those literary works provide valuable ecological awareness for the present era. Additionally, the article explores how Gabo’s works present a global ecological vision that enables the reader to observe a destroyed imaginary world where humanity dies after an ecocatastrophe produced by excessive human interference in the natural world. The novels analyzed are not narratives of an idealized primordial past or a catharsis that immerses us in the natural world to clean our minds from guilty environmental reality; instead, the narratives portray tenets of dark ecology, which attempt to provide a vivid portrayal of an environmental dilemma. The novels can be read through the lens of dark ecology as evidencing closeness to the earth; in them the omnipresent theme of solitude enables the reader to be in tune with nature more than as a mere presentation of an idealized interconnection with the environment. Before delving into the analysis of the novels, the essay provides a review of recent criticism and a brief examination of new developments in ecocritical theory.

Aesthetics Naturalised: Schlick on the Evolution of Beauty and Art

In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. Having countered these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature.

Towards the social doctrine of the Orthodox Church: The document ‘For the Life of the World’ of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (2020)

Amongst the recent documents released by the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the one titled ‘For the Life of the World’, published before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, touches upon an important section of the life of the Orthodox Church, namely, the social one. As a result of the fact that, so far, there is no official document of the aforementioned Church dedicated to this aspect, whilst the Reformed Churches and the Catholic one have already issued similar documents, I consider the existence of such an article, with all its minuses, important. Moreover, it can constitute a bridge and an invitation to dialogue with other Christian traditions or backgrounds. Being aware of this fact, I have decided to analyse this document in this article to emphasise its influence and its elements of novelty and to speak about both its utility and its weaknesses. As a result of the fact that the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has had an important contribution to its drafting, I will also try to present this aspect and to show how the ecological vision that he has, amongst other aspects, influenced its content.Contribution: Considering the importance of the recent document ‘For the Life of the World of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople’, I will try to analyse it and to present its social relevance and meaning.

Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy

Charles Chesnutt's fiction describes the forests of North Carolina not as the unspoiled wildernesses of the popular imagination but instead as an integral part of the extractive economy of the South. In the postbellum decades, many northerners visited the state's forests for health tourism even as the turpentine and lumber industries were decimating the local pine. By drawing on his readers’ familiarity with turpentine, a pine product that was both a household staple and a global commodity, Chesnutt shows his readers how the pine woods were anything but bucolic. Chesnutt's ecological vision disrupts the centrality of cotton in the environmental imaginary of the plantation and postplantation South. By linking the rise of conservation efforts to the logic of preserving white health, Chesnutt reveals that both deforestation and conservation were driven by the operations of white supremacy.

Ecological Perspectives in Linus T. Asong’s No Way to Die

Given the environmental crisis plaguing the world, this paper investigates the manner in which Linus Asong represents man’s link with nature in the novel No Way to Die. It attempts to provide an answer to the following question: how does Linus Asong portray the contact between man and nature? The work is based on the premise that the Cameroonian author depicts the relationship between human beings and other elements of the ecosystem with perspectives for improvement for the benefit of both man and nature. Second Wave Ecocriticism, as outlined by Lawrence Buell, is used to bring out novelist’s ecological vision which posits that human beings need to improve their relationship with, or treatment of, other elements of nature so that the rapidly degrading ecosystem is saved. Keywords: Environment, Fiction, Ecocriticism, Degradation, Protection, Vision