Making educational places more inviting to learners is a key aspect of Invitational Theory This paper introduces a simple technique for sensitizing learners and instructors to how their environment affects their feelings and ability to learn It describes a learning exercise that may be used to assess, evaluate and transform places, to promote either calm reflection or creative energy as well as some experience based on three years of application in a college-level Geography course The approach, founded in the Samkhya-Yoga conception of the three modes of material nature, asks learners detect the roles of Soisa (peace, harmony, tranquility, awareness), Rajas (energy, action, creativity, destructiveness) and Tamas (inert, veiled, ignorance) working together in their habitat and to think about how this balance may be adjusted to positive effect Learners found the approach novel but many welcomed this new way of envisioning their world ********** Place is one of the five arms of Invitational Education; one of its "Powerful Ps" (Purkey and Novak, 1996) It is also a central concern for the ecology of education and critical to the creation of places conducive to thinking, study, and reflection (Biggs, 2003) For better or worse, educational environments, especially the microenvironments of the campus and classroom, 'make a difference in learners' lives" (Moos, 1979, p273) Hence, it is worthwhile having those same learners reflect upon how their habitat affects their feelings and about what they might do to change them for the benefit of themselves and others This paper offers a simple technique that might be used by learners and instructors for the evaluation of teaming spaces and, indeed, all places and situations Normally, the impacts of places upon our feelings and behavior are overlooked For example, many university instructors work away in their offices amidst heaps of paper, largely oblivious to the stress this clutter causes Then, one day, the mess is removed; magically, they feel more positive, more calm (Boniwell, 2006) Of course, similar processes work in the outside world The places that we inhabit "speak to us" and they affect the way we feel Sometimes, these messages are deliberate: retailers entice us to buy, banks to convince that they are trustworthy, overpriced hotels that they are 'high class' etc Sometimes the messages are not deliberate, like the litter and dilapidation that speak of neglect Our habitats are full of signs and signals, many of them transmitting subliminal messages Indeed, there is an industry, both within academia and without, devoted to the creation, manipulation and interpretation of these signals--semiotics, marketing, etc (eg Twitchell, 2004) Geography is a discipline deeply concerned with landscape and place, not least the sense of place, meaning its personality (Tuan, 2004) In the process, it has evolved a sub-discipline, Psychogeography, part of Cultural Geography, which explores the emotional impact of places (Coverley, 2006) This paper concerns an out-of-class experience; a Psychogeographic exercise that encourages learners to consider the ways that places affect their emotional state, to develop empathy for the places they inhabit and, because the exercise is created as team activity, to build up their emotional intelligence by considering the way these places affect the feelings of others This exercise, called "the Speaking Stones" is set in Oxford, England, and aims to alert learners to the ways that nonverbal signals affect their feelings and to engage them in constructive thoughts about remaking their world by creating places that promote either energy and action or peace and reflective contemplation Of course, the design of this exercise is affected by its context--not the "dreaming spires" of Oxford, but rather the legacies of Empire, the economy of the New Europe and the growth of the international market in Education …

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Srimad Bhagavad Gita

Coloring in the Emotional Language of Place

Sharing our considerable experience as teachers who have designed and conducted leadership development programmes, we discuss the challenges in the field of leadership development. We distinguish between leader development and leadership development; differentiate leadership theories from leadership development theories; discuss the goals of leadership development programmes and their implications for the design of such programmes – the knowing , being and doing gap and how the goal, cognitive understanding vs. deeper internalization vs. transformation would impact the design; the need to synthesize Western and Indian approaches to leadership development; and the importance of designing coherent leadership development programmes which combine multiple methods and approaches.

Dialogue on leadership development

In this paper we discuss methodology of yoga, together with significant aspects of integration of yoga and modern medicine. We suggest two way integration of experimentally oriented modern science and experientially modeled learning of yoga, that can bring us many answers for the challenges which burden modern individual. We emphasize importance of connecting the yoga knowledge and practice with the modern medical approaches to health, with the aim to improve the quality of life. Yoga is comprehensive, holistic science about human being, which at the same time deals with all aspects of philosophy, psychology and functionality of the conscious evolution. This corpus of knowledge given through the intensive, systemathic, introvert research of the functioning of human mind, is passed from Master to student for centuries.

/pdf/understanding-the-science-of-yoga-1zfob5ggpx.pdf

Understanding the Science of Yoga

Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language. Several important texts which are of interest to people all over the world today were written in Sanskrit. The Sanskrit grammar has a precise and complete specification given in the text As.t.ādhyāyı̄ by Pān. ini. This has led to the development of a number of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics tools for processing and analyzing Sanskrit texts. Unfortunately, there has been no effort to standardize and critically validate these tools. In this paper, we develop a Sanskrit benchmark called SandhiKosh to evaluate the completeness and accuracy of Sanskrit Sandhi tools. We present the results of this benchmark on three most prominent Sanskrit tools and demonstrate that these tools have substantial scope for improvement. This benchmark will be freely available to researchers worldwide and we hope it will help everyone working in this area evaluate and validate their tools.

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SandhiKosh: A Benchmark Corpus for Evaluating Sanskrit Sandhi Tools

“Yam hi na vyathayanthyethe purusham purusharshabha; Samadhukha sukham dheeram somruthathvaya kalpathe” [In Sanskrit] This analytic sloka from the Bhagavad-Gita (Chapter II, Verse 15) sums up the entire concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) It says: a person who is calm and remains unperturbed by either pain or pleasure is the one who attains immortality The theory of EI which has been popularized by Goleman can be traced down to David Wechsler, who, as early as in 1940 said that intelligence does not denote just the cognitive abilities of a person but the non-cognitive abilities as well This idea was again put forward by Howard Gardner in 1983 when he brought forth the multiple intelligence theory and said that intrapersonal and interpersonal skills are as important as the traditional concept of intelligence which focused on the cognitive skills alone In 1990, Mayer and Salovey introduced the concept of Emotional Intelligence as a distinct form of intelligence which can be measured and evaluated This paper analyses the possibility of developing the theory of EI into a more comprehensive one It compares and contrasts the theory of EI against the concept of emotions as discussed in the Bhagavad-Gita and explores the possibilities of finding specific methods through which a person’s emotional competencies can be enhanced by incorporating the ideals of Sri Krishna as discussed in the Bhagavad-Gita

Srimad Bhagavad Gita

Citations

Coloring in the Emotional Language of Place

Dialogue on leadership development

Understanding the Science of Yoga

SandhiKosh: A Benchmark Corpus for Evaluating Sanskrit Sandhi Tools

Emotional intelligence through the Bhagavad-Gita

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