Influence of School Counsellor’s Demographic on the Provision of Guidance Services in Senior High Schools in Ghana

This study investigates how school counsellor’s demographics influence the provision of guidance services in senior high schools in Ghana. The study was underpinned by a positivist philosophical viewpoint where a quantitative approach and the descriptive survey was used to assess how school counsellor’s demographics influence their provision of guidance services. A self-developed questionnaire was used to collect data from respondents. A total of a hundred and thirty-six (136) respondents was selected on a purposive base. The study found out that there was a significant difference between the age, gender, experience and academic qualification of counsellors have an influence in the provision of guidance services in SHSs in Ghana. The study also revealed that orientation, information and counselling services were adequately performed in SHSs, but consultation and follow-up were the least provided services. The study recommended that the Ministry of Education should ensure that the employment criteria for school counsellors should be based mostly on academic qualification and experience. Finally, the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service should organise seminars for school counsellors frequently to have rudimentary knowledge and skills to help them in practice.

SELFIES, PERFORMATIVITY, AND INDIVIDUALISM

The paper analyses the influence of selfies on public performance. Contemporary media public is called by some theorists (Rojek, 2015) the “egocentric public”, primarily the users of social networks. Hedonism, consumption and egoism are only some of the characteristics of the modern society, which also points to the characteristics of visual culture. From a philosophical viewpoint as one of the phenomena of visual culture to which special attention is given starting with psychologists, art theorists and communication agents, and all the way to philosophers, the selfie supports the hypothesis that individualism is characteristic to contemporary culture.The paper examines the performance strength of the selfie (Senft, Baym, 2015) as well as the characteristics of the modern media public. The methods include the analytical and descriptive methods. The conclusion is that the selfie confirms that contemporary culture is dominated by individualism and that, from a pragmatic point of view, the contemporary media public belongs to the “culture of selfies“ in which the subject simultaneously becomes an object emphasizing narcissism and the illusionary focus on the other.

Subjects-in-Process/ on-Trial: The Construction of Teacher Subjects in an Early Field Experience Course

Increased standardization of teacher education programs urges a reconsideration of how pre-service teacher identities are constructed/being constructed and evaluated. The purpose of my study was to examine the writings of pre-service teachers enrolled in an early field experiences course in order to identify moments in which they interacted, negotiated, and subverted the teacher-making process, which they officially enter during the semester they take this course. I approach this question from a philosophical viewpoint, and I use the theories of French post-structuralist, Julia Kristeva. My analysis of pre-service teachers enrolled in an early field experience course illustrates how their language disrupts the standardized language and expectations of a teacher education program.

The location and composition of Group 3 of the periodic table

Group 3 as Sc–Y–La, rather than Sc–Y–Lu, dominates the literature. The history of this situation, including involvement by the IUPAC, is summarised. I step back from the minutiae of physical, chemical, and electronic properties and explore considerations of regularity and symmetry, natural kinds, and quantum mechanics, finding these to be inconclusive. Continuing the theme, a series of ten interlocking arguments, in the context of a chemistry-based periodic table, are presented in support of lanthanum in Group 3. In so doing, I seek to demonstrate a new way of thinking about this matter. The last of my ten arguments is recast as a twenty-word categorical philosophical (viewpoint-based) statement.

Decolonising cosmopolitanism: An anthropological reading of Immanuel Kant and Kwame Nkrumah on the world as one

This article offers an anthropological reading of the works of Immanuel Kant and Kwame Nkrumah. By doing so it seeks to expose the Eurocentric and racist ontology that lies behind dominant contemporary forms of cosmopolitanism. The article draws attention to the possibility of a more egalitarian vision of the “world as one” that can be derived from the perspective of an African philosophical viewpoint. Rather than regarding African social theory as a subordinate or subaltern mode of apprehending the world, it places African philosophy on a par with European traditions of philosophical thought. By focusing on some of the central tenets of cosmopolitanism, it argues that Nkrumah, by insisting on freedom and equality for all of humanity, had articulated a more genuinely cosmopolitan ontology than any that can be derived from the philosophy of Kant. The article argues that an engagement with critical anthropology enables us to imagine forms of decolonised cosmopolitanism which are genuinely both inclusive and egalitarian.

Institutions as a Philosophical Problem: A Critical Rationalist Perspective on Guala’s “Understanding Institutions” and His Critics

The symposium on Francesco Guala’s Understanding Institutions was thought provoking. Five critical papers took issue with Guala’s reconciliation of the game-theoretical view of institutions and the rule-governed view. We offer some critical commentary that adopts a different perspective. We agree that institutions are central to social life and, thus, also to the social sciences; they are also prior to and more fundamental than individuals. We add some historical points on the ways previous philosophers thought about institutions, and we come at this from a philosophical viewpoint that is not that of analytic philosophy but rather that of Popper’s critical rationalism. In that framework, we espouse an idea of the relation between philosophy and the philosophy of science that is different from that of Guala and his commentators, and we recommend a reformist philosophy of institutions that is neither radical nor traditionalist and that makes better sense of the institution of the scholarly symposium than do games or rules.