Showing papers on "Wonder published in 2000"

I Read It, but I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers

Abstract: Fake Reading The Realities of Reading Purposes for Reading: Access Tools Conversations with Cantos: Tracking Confusion to Its Source Fix It! Connecting the New to the Known What Do You Wonder? Outlandish Responses: Taking Inferences Too Far "What's the Plan?" Appendixes Works Cited

Witnessing, wonder, and hope

Abstract: This article is based on a keynote address I gave in South Africa at the Eighth International Conference of The South African Association of Marital and Family Therapy. The phenomenon of witnessing is explored in a number of contexts, and a distinction is made between witnessing with and without awareness, and from an empowered or a disempowered position. I propose that the African philosophy of ubuntu--the emphasis of which is on the self in community, in contrast to the Western emphasis on the individual--may be a better fit for my view of hope, which, I propose, is not just a feeling but, rather, something people do.

Moral Language and Pedagogical Experience.

Abstract: As educators are challenged to develop a moral vocabulary of teaching, such a language needs to be sensitive to the way that pedagogical relations are lived and experienced. This exploration into the meanings of care offers a phenomenological puzzle. It concerns the relation between, on the one hand, commonly accepted and professionally received meanings of the ethical concept of care as we find it in the parental, philosophical, and curriculum literature and, on the other hand, the lived experience of caring. The language of care in the field of commerce and in the helping professions tends to pass over these subtle and deeply-felt sensibilities. It seems that for many parents and teachers caring commonly means worrying. Caring is experienced as worrying responsibility. But this worry ('sorgen' in German) is often neglected for happier or more acceptable understandings of care. This should make us wonder about what happens when language turns professional and theoretical, when it becomes charged with mea...

Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class

Abstract: appeared in 1991. I T IS A STRIKING fact of scholarly life that talking about oneself has become a virtue. The culture of confession, once limited to selfhelp manuals, therapy groups, and talk shows, has gradually penetrated the walls of the academy. For critics who are disenchanted with the spread of theory or who simply want to explore different kinds of scholarly writing, autobiography offers an appealing alternative. Getting personal can take a wide variety of forms, from a terse vignette prefacing a conventional piece of scholarly writing to a full-blown striptease by an academic superstar. Often, moreover, it is accompanied by an ethical imperative. I am doing this, the author implies, and you should do it too. What authorizes the discourse of personal criticism? Why is writing about oneself deemed important or interesting? Sometimes the answer is fame. In a culture of celebrity the private life of a prominent scholar appeals to our curiosity and becomes worthy of our attention. Alternatively, the therapeutic or the political value of autobiographical criticism comes to the fore. Writing about oneself is presented, with varying degrees of intellectual sophistication, as an act of catharsis or a means to self-knowledge. It is also clearly indebted to the "politics of recognition" informing new social movements grounded in group identities (Fraser). Feminists, in particular, have often been at the vanguard of personal criticism, arguing that traditional forms of academic language need to be replaced by a more personal voice. As someone who has never wanted to write about herself, I began to wonder about the reasons for my reticence. Of course, no trend is without its critics, and a number of writers, including some feminists, have expressed reservations about the value of self-disclosure as an intellectual or political strategy.' There is a sustained questioning of confession within poststructuralist theory, as well as a flourishing body of autobiographical writing informed by such theory. But neither defenders nor critics of autobiography have gone far in exploring the various social conditions that may affect the desire to speak or remain silent about the self. I want to pursue one aspect of this question by examining some of

Storytelling with Children

Abstract: Telling stories awakens wonder and creates special occasions with children, whether it is bedtime, around the fire or on rainy days. Encouraging you to spin golden tales, Nancy Mellon shows how you can become a confident storyteller and enrich your family with the power of story.

Ethical Imagining: Ecofeminist Possibilities and Environmental Learning

Abstract: In this essay I explore some of the ways in which nature is known through stories and imagination, with particular attention to the role of ecofeminist narrative for environmental learning and teaching. I wonder how we tell stories that acknowledge other beings as subjects of lives that we share, lives that intersect and are interdependent in profound ways? How do we ensure that these “other” voices are audible and that we co-author environmental stories to live, teach, and learn by? I take up feminist questions of responsibility and accountability for knowledge claims, in order to explore ethical and political issues of agency, vision, and narrative imagination. My contention is that the intertwining of ecofeminist narrative ethics with purposeful attention to developing human imaginative capacities has precious possibilities to offer environmental learning and teaching.

A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime

Abstract: From the Publisher: The Internet is the most remarkable achievement of humankind since the pyramids. A millennium from now, historians will look back at it and marvel that a people equipped with such clumsy tools succeeded in creating such a leviathan. Yet even as the Net pervades our lives, we begin to take it for granted. Many have lost the capacity for wonder. Most of us have no idea where the Internet came from, how it works, or who created it and why. And even fewer have any idea what it means for society and the future. John Naughton has written a warm and passionate book whose heroes are the visionaries who laid the foundations of the postmodern world. A Brief History of the Future celebrates the engineers and scientists who implemented their dreams in hardware and software and explains the values and ideas that drove them. Although its subject seems technical, the book in fact is a highly personal account. John Naughton writes about the Net the way Nick Hornby writes about soccer -- as a part of life, and as a key influence on his own voyage from solitary child to established academic and writer. A Brief History of the Future is an intimate celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination, and above all of the power of ideas to transform the world.

The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina

Abstract: This essay examines the use of visual images during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the work of three important popularizers of science. J. G. Wood, Richard Proctor, and Agnes Clerke skillfully used illustrations and photographs to establish their credibility as trustworthy guides to scientific, moral, and religious truths. All three worked within the natural theology tradition, despite the powerful critique of William Paley's argument from design set forth in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Wood, Proctor, and Clerke recognized that in order to reach a popular audience with their message of divine wonder in nature, they would have to take advantage of the developing mass visual culture embodied in the new pictorial magazines, spectacles, and entertaining toys based on scientific gadgets emblematic of the reorganization of vision. But in drawing on different facets of the emerging visual culture and in looking to the images produced by the new visual technologies to find the hand of God in nature, these popularizers subtly transformed the natural theology tradition.

Recreating Brief Therapy : Preferences and Possibilities

Abstract: The result is personal consultation, with a focus on conversation and inquiries that gently guide the pursuit of desire. This approach embraces a diversity of longings, goals, and ways of being in the world. The key question, underlying both the authors' research and their consultative conversations, is 'How can we create a space for dialogue and wonder, where purpose, preferences, and possibilities can emerge?' This question leads to many others, which form the basis for the chapters of the book. Each inquiry is illustrated by case excerpts that show where this approach diverges from strategic and solution-focused questioning. The situations are difficult--crack addiction, marital separation, suicidal despair, etc.--and yet the consultant's stance of being 'curious with' the client leads to signs of hope and pathways toward a better future. In this pragmatic approach, previously unspoken desires take precedence over goals set by others, and what is preferred becomes possible.

Dialogues on function allocation

Abstract: Irish poet Seamus Heaney, reflecting on the co-existence of industry and agriculture, the acorn and the rusted bolt, the engine shunting and the trotting horse in Derry when he was growing up, asks: Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts? His dialogical sensibility to “both-and”, Derry as both industrial and agricultural, modern and traditional, left Heaney “suffering the limits of each claim” (Heaney, 1998, p. 295). This discomfort with limiting “either-or” claims on descriptions of a personal history reminds us of the dialogicality of people's meaning making (McCarthy & O'Connor, 1999). Given that dialogicality, is it any wonder that thoughts steal second thoughts?

Shakespeare's Hamlet and the controversies of self

Abstract: Introduction 1 2. Fear and Wonder 3. Something More than Fantasy 4. Fools of Nature 5. A Wave o' th' Sea 6. My Tables, My Tables 7. A King of Infinite Space 8. The Princes Hamlet Bibliography Index

Beyond Recognition: Witnessing Ethics

Abstract: Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst interviewing survivors as part of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, remarks on a tension between historians and psychoanalysts involved in the project. He describes a lively debate that began after the group watched the taped testimony of a woman who was an eyewitness to the Auschwitz uprising in which prisoners set fire to the camp. The woman reported four chimneys going up in flames and exploding, but historians insisted that since there was only one chimney blown up, her testimony was incorrect and should be discredited in its entirety because she proved herself an unreliable witness. One historian suggested that her testimony should be discounted because she "ascribes importance to an attempt that, historically, made no difference" (Felman 1992, 61 ). The psychoanalysts responded that the woman was not testifying to the number of chimneys blown up but to something more "radical" and more "crucial," namely, the seemingly unimaginable occurrence of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz, that is to say, the historical truth of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz. Laub concludes that what the historians could not hear, listening for empirical facts, was the "very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination" (Felman 1992, 62). While the historians were listening to hear confirmation of what they already knew, the psychoanalysts where listening to hear something new, something beyond comprehension. While the historians were trying to recognize empirical facts in the survivors' testimonies, the psychoanalysts were trying to acknowledge that the import of these testimonies was unrecognizable. Although undeniably powerful in their impact, the empirical facts of the Holocaust are dead to that which cannot be reported by the eye-witness, the unseen in vision and the unspoken in speech, that which is beyond recognition in history, the process of witnessing itself. In this essay, I want to elaborate a notion of witnessing as an alternative to recognition as a basis for subjectivity. Witnessing is defined as the action of bearing witness or giving testimony, the fact of being present and observing something, from witness which is defined as to bear witness, to testify, to give evidence, to be a spectator or auditor of something, to be present as an observer, to see with one's own eyes (OED, 3904). It is important to note that witnessing has both the juridical connotations of seeing with one's own eyes and the religious connotations of testifying to that which cannot be seen, or bearing witness. It is this double meaning that makes witnessing such a powerful alternative to recognition in formulating identity and ethical relations. Contemporary theory is still dominated by conceptions of identity or subjectivity that inherit a Hegelian notion of recognition. In various ways, these theories describe how we recognize ourselves in our likeness as the same or in opposition to what is (or those who are) different from ourselves. Relations with others are described as struggles for recognition. But, if we start from the assumption that relations are essentially antagonistic struggles for recognition, then it is no wonder that contemporary theorists spend so much energy trying to imagine how these struggles can lead to compassionate personal relations, ethical social relations, or democratic political relations. From the presumption that human relations are essentially warlike, how can we imagine them as peaceful? In this essay, on the one hand, I challenge the Hegelian notion that subjectivity is the result of hostile conflict-Axel Honneth's struggle for recognition or Judith Butler's subordination that makes the subject's turn inward possible. On the other hand, I challenge notions of subjectivity based on a logic of exclusion-Butler's foreclosed object of desire or Julia Kristeva's abject. I am concerned with the question what of the subject position of the othered? …

Curiouser and Curiouser: The Virtue of Wonder:

Abstract: through virtues of thought. Through our actions and attitudes toward scholarly work and through the academic expectations we place upon our students, we represent and convey certain beliefs about t...

If Berne Met Winnicott: Transactional Analysis and Relational Analysis

Abstract: This essay addresses the nature and application of theory in psychotherapy, specifically challenging the overuse of Parent ego state functions and the oversimplification of D. W. Winnicott's work within contemporary transactional analysis models and techniques. In contrast to therapeutic models that emphasize empathy and attachment, the author emphasizes the importance of play, curiosity, wonder, and differentness within the therapeutic process.

Against Holocaust-Sublime Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory

Abstract: To the generation that directly suffered the Holocaust or witnessed it at one remove, ethical imperatives to remember Auschwitz must have seemed and seem clear and simple; but not today when the burden of memory increasingly falls upon a public whose members were born after the events they recall. No longer the sole purview of survivors, memory more and more depends upon the varied work of artists, scholars and community functionaries (painters, writers, architects, sculptors, actors, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, literary critics, art historians, politicians, clergy, educators, philanthropists, ideologues). In the following pages, I build on the work of recent critics to make a philosophical point about how one remembers: with what sympathies, suspicions, critical methods, narratives, images, tone, language and affect. I start with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim for whom the Holocaust undermined “philosophy” by provoking wonder and astonishment. Identified by Fackenheim with revelation, these constitute affective sources against which Reason has allegedly sought to protect itself. Arthur Cohen advanced the same argument when he wrote, “There is something in the nature of thought—its patient deliberateness and care for logical order—that is alien to the enormity of the death camps.” Like so much reflection upon the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s, these sentiments unwittingly teetered on the edge of art. In fact, the attention to wonder and enormity that Fackenheim and Cohen find

On the Familiarity of Strangers

Abstract: Inter-cultural communication is often considered complicated and a source for many problems in international business. Yet, looking at international project industry one can but wonder at how well projects are seen through, even though they involve the most difficult conditions, forcing people from the most differing cultures together. Instead interviews with managers from over 60 countries show issues such as trust and commitment play an important role in international business. Trust is here seen as the way the words and actions of other people and organizations are interpreted. To understand the complexities of intercultural communication, it is argued, it is necessary to look beyond the very physical act and look to its interpretation and the intentions ascribed to it.

Reflections on the Philosophy of Chemistry and a Rallying Call for Our Discipline

Abstract: Biology in the popular mind remains tied to the doctrines of the struggle forsurvival and the survival of the fittest. Physics is linked to the heat deathof the universe – the inexorable march towards greater disorder,increasing entropy. Our field, on the other hand, focuses on orderedstructures, molecules and crystals, and their aggregates, and what holdsthem together. The philosophy of chemistry is centered on affinity,cohesion, the architecture of the very small, attraction, harmony, and, ifyou permit, beauty. Our discipline is the voice of the twenty-first century,a message, a clarion call of life, of hope. This paper addresses failures ofreductionist and deterministic claims in the face of the cussedness ofchemical facts. It will examine uncertainty principles, Edmund Whitaker'spostulates of impotence, Gerald Holton's themata, Isaiah Berlin's warning –and the wisdom of the Chinese. We can teach the world the need for humilityin the face of the wonder and mystery of our world.

Navigating Through Geometry in Grades 3-5

Abstract: The "big ideas" of geometry - shape, location, transformations and spatial visualisation - are the focus of this book. Sequential activities will enrich the curriculum and help students develop a strong sense of geometric concepts and relationships, leading them to experience the joy and wonder of geometry and other mathematics. The supplemental CD-ROM features interactive electronic activities, master copies of activity pages for students and additional readings for teachers.

Coming to terms with grief and loss. Can skills for dealing with bereavement be learned

Abstract: PREVIEW“No matter what specialty you choose, in reality you lose every patient you ever have.” This sober perspective, uttered by a long-time physician to his neophyte medical students, captures an existential fact about life and human frailty that most of us prefer to deny: Ultimately medical skill is limited, every relationship is finite, and each of us will die. So why, we might reasonably wonder, are physicians taught so little about how to comfort the brokenhearted? Drs Zerbe and Steinberg provide ideas for becoming aware of and dealing openly with these difficult feelings and situations.

Rewriting the Christian Apocalypse as a Science-Fictional Event

Abstract: The anonymous author of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, Plato, Lucian of Samosata, Jonathan Swift, and many others, have at one time or another been proclaimed as progenitors of science fiction: no-one in print, as far as I know, perhaps out of misplaced reverence, has suggested St John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation.1 Yet he is one of the most widely quoted and influential of all writers on the future: the symbolic creator of a prophetic tradition that has influenced much more secular approaches to speculation about the future, and his Book survives to this day as an influential and powerful way of imagining the future. Utopian thinkers and activists have drawn on the apocalyptic theme of the millennium for their visions of the perfect world; the dramatic tales of cosmic struggle to be found in the Book of Revelation are comparable in the sweep and the ‘sense of wonder’ that they evoke to the most extravagent space operas of the science-fictional tradition. In this paper, I shall look at some of the interactions between what we might see as rival eschatologies: the vision of the end of all things presented in Jewish and Christian revelation (the Greek word for which gives us ‘apocalypse’) and the view of the end of all things presented by science fiction.

Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science

Abstract: Nature has secrets, and it is the desire to uncover them that motivates the scientific quest. But what makes these "secrets" secret? Is it that they are beyond human ken? that they concern divine matters? And if they are accessible to human seeking, why do they seem so carefully hidden? Such questions are at the heart of Peter Pesic's enlightening effort to uncover the meaning of modern science.Pesic portrays the struggle between the scientist and nature as the ultimate game of hide-and-seek, in which a childlike wonder propels the exploration of mysteries. Witness the young Albert Einstein, fascinated by a compass and the sense it gave him of "something deeply hidden behind things." In musical terms, the book is a triple fugue, interweaving three themes: the epic struggle between the scientist and nature; the distilling effects of the struggle on the scientist; and the emergence from this struggle of symbolic mathematics, the purified language necessary to decode nature's secrets.Pesic's quest for the roots of science begins with three key Renaissance figures: William Gilbert, a physician who began the scientific study of magnetism; FranA ois ViAte, a French codebreaker who played a crucial role in the foundation of symbolic mathematics; and Francis Bacon, a visionary who anticipated the shape of modern science. Pesic then describes the encounters of three modern masters--Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein--with the depths of nature. Throughout, Pesic reads scientific works as works of literature, attending to nuance and tone as much as to surface meaning. He seeks the living center of human concern as it emerges in the ongoing search for nature's secrets.

Fire and Water: A Journey into the Heart of a Story

Abstract: The creative tension between these stories has fuelled feminist studies of folktales for the last decades of the twentieth century. They seem diametrically opposed, victim and victor; but it is not so simple given the deliberately enigmatic quality of wonder tales. The mysterious nature of this genre endures, even after long years of attention by a host of writers offering their own particular interpretations. Feminist scholars in particular have criticized the overabundance of passive victims and sought out more active and resourceful women. Each new study and every recreated story opens up new patterns, perspectives, and constant variations on themes. Jane Yolen's stories, for example, always make me look again at my own favored traditional tales. Even with all of this attention, no single outlook or approach offers a final answer to the mystery of this genre, because the wonde rtale at its best is multifaceted in depth and meaning, always open to new breath and breadth.

Wonder Woman : the life and times of the Amazon Princess : the complete story

Abstract: She is STRONG. She is INVINCIBLE. She is WONDER WOMAN--the most popular super heroine of all time. Les Daniels honors her superhuman strength, her peace-seeking mission, and her fabulous outfits throughout the years. The unconventional Dr. William Moulton Marston originally created her as "psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should rule the world." And Wonder Woman--known to her friends as Diana--has triumphed for sixty years, whether battling evil fascists or ensnaring villains with her magic lasso. Filled with a fascinating array of archival comic book art, photographs, and paraphernalia, and designed by Chip Kidd, "Wonder Woman" follows on the heels of the successful "Batman" and "Superman" histories to complete this popular super hero series. Not only a sure hit with collectors and fans, this celebration of Wonder Woman's independent spirit will also appeal to the larger girl-power audience of today. Colorful, complete, and captivating, "Wonder Woman: The Complete History" is a true tribute to this splendid super hero.

Written in Stone: Slavery and Authority in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Abstract: A religious hubbub, such as the world has seldom seen, was excited during the reign of Frederic II, by the imagined virulence of a book entitled "The Three Impostors." it was attributed to Pierre des Vignes, chancellor of the king, who was accused by the Pope of having treated the religions of Moses, Jesus, and Mohamet as political fables. The work in question, however, which was squabbled about, abused, defended, and familiarly quoted by all parties, is well proven never to have existed. (Poe, "Pinakidia" 15) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, begins with a crash between two vessels, the small and drunkenly captained Ariel and the large whaling ship, the Penguin. To read these ship names allegorically is to recognize that Poe's adventure novel begins with a collision between a literary figure and a bird that "embodies" the novel's obsession with blackness and whiteness. It is this crash between a vessel of culture and a vessel of nature, a crash in which culture is shipwrecked, that sets the novel in motion. Pym is full, not only of encounters between the natural and cultural world s, but of descriptions in which it is hard to differentiate between the two. The significance of the naming of the Penguin is underscored when actual penguins make an important appearance further on in the novel. The strangely attentive description of the natural nesting habits of the eponymous penguins and of albatrosses in the South Seas is later offered in such intricate detail (152-53) as to attract considerable critical attention (Pollin, I: 291-98; Irwin, "Quincuncial" 175-87). Pym proposes to tell us "something of their mode of building and living," and describes the way these two species "assemble," "for some days appear to be deliberating," and "trace out with mathematical accuracy" the boundaries of their rookery or "colony." The penguins and albatrosses, along with other birds, "enjoy all the privileges of citizenship," provided, of course, that they stay within their designated living spaces. The natural world is offered in the terminology of culture. And just in case we've missed it, Pym ends his description by praising the "spirit of reflection evinced by these feathered beings," and suggests that "nothing surely can be better calculated to elicit reflection in every well regulated human intellect" (153). What looks cultural is actually natural or, somehow, obscures the difference. Indeed, one of the questions this color-coded episode provokes is whether divisions between different "species" of humans are natural or cultural. Pym was composed at a time when arrangements between the races were being challenged, when people were considering the extent to which these arrangements were manufactured by culture and the extent to which they were natural, a designation that for many had religious implications. It is no wonder that critics have suggested that the scene offers Poe's commentary on the plantation arrangement (Worley 234). And yet, more than any other major writer of the period, Poe has been treated as somehow outside of political concerns. He is often seen as aloof, eccentric, an aesthete obsessed with language, the darling child of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. And those critics who have been interested in Poe's views on the slavery issue that raged in his day have traditionally been satisfied to end their inquiries at the apparently indisputable position that Poe was proslavery. In The Power of Blackness, Harry Levin summarizes his generation's critical verdict that Poe's "letters and articles reveal him as an unyielding upholder of slavery, and ... no great admirer of the Negro" (120). Poe's recent biographer Kenneth Silverman concludes that "Poe opposed abolition and identified with slaveholding interests.... Although in no way consumed with racial hatred, he considered blacks less than human" (207). In reading Pym as "a thinly disguised allegory of Poe's manifesto `Keep the South White,'" John Carlos Rowe considers himself to be in the tradition of the earlier readings of Harold Beaver and Sidney Kaplan. …