(PREPRINT) Transitions in Transitivity: The Complexity of Effort, Effortlessness, and Agency in Tibetan Great Perfection Contemplative Practices

This is a preprint article that has neither been reviewed nor copyedited yet. The revised and copyedited version will replace the preprint version if the article passes the peer review process. Otherwise, this article will be removed from the website. If you have comments on this paper, please contact the author at [email protected]. The Seminal Heart (snying thig) variant of the Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) tradition in Tibet is marked by a complex array of contemplative practices that have also changed considerably over its fourteen century history dating. back to the eighth century. A central organizing principle, and a hallmark of their innovative character, is the shifting roles of volitional effort and loci of agency at play in each contemplative practice’s procedures, as well as in the manifest appearances, sensations, and dynamics that constitute the unfolding processes and experiences therein. In addition, subtle and dramatic shifts in transitivity—the directional transfer of energy and locus of agency amongst various agents and patients—can occur throughout any given practice, so understanding these questions of effort and agency requires close attention to the contemplative lexicon of elements and the grammar of contemplation, including moments when there are scripted shifts from procedural techniques to the unfolding logic of experience. This article will focus on the most important formative period of the tradition—from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries—and offer speculative thoughts about how these contemplative issues were crucial factors in the tradition’s dynamic changes over time

English Mini-Workshops: Creating an English Teaching Offer for University Staff Members

Immer wieder wird betont, dass unsere Hochschulen in Deutschland internationaler werden (müssen). Wir finden spannende Partnerschaften innen- und außerhalb Europa, mit denen wir interessante Projekte durchführen können, und wir bieten immer mehr Studiengänge auf Englisch an, damit ausländische Studierende die Möglichkeit haben, ihr Studium bei uns in Deutschland zu machen. Doch dafür müssen wir an Hochschulen mit den „Konsequenten“ umgehen. Was ist, wenn ein Student oder eine Studentin eine Frage für das Prüfungsamt hat und das nicht auf Deutsch kann? Oder wenn eine Lehrperson ihre Vorlesung auf Englisch unterrichten muss, weil das ab sofort so vorgesehen ist, obwohl er oder sie bisher ausschließlich auf Deutsch unterrichtet hat? „Englisch kann ja jeder“ – nicht unbedingt. Wenn unsere Studierende „englischer“ werden, dann müssen wir das auch. Und das ist nicht selbstverständlich. Wir müssen die Plattform dafür bieten. Daniel Walker ist seit November 2020 als Englisch Referent für Mitarbeitende und Lehrende an der Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences tätig. Seine Aufgabe ist es, ein Englischangebot so zu konzipieren, dass dieses für jede Person nützlich und relevant ist – sei das eine Professorin oder ein Sekretär. In diesem Artikel schreibt Daniel über sein bisher beliebtes Angebot, das den Lehrpreis „Gute Sprachlehre an Hochschulen“ in der Kategorie „Förderung von Handlungsorientierung und Praxisbezug“ gewonnen hat: die Englisch-Mini-Workshops für Hochschulangehörige.It is repeated over and over again that German universities are becoming, or must become, more international. We are starting to find more and more exciting partnerships within and outside of Europe for carrying out interesting projects, and we are offering more and more degree programmes in English so that foreign students have the opportunity to study with us in Germany. But in order to do this, we have to deal with the "consequences". What if a student has a question for the examination office but can’t ask it in German? Or what if a teacher has to teach their lecture in English because this is now required, even though they have only ever taught in German? It is often assumed that everyone can speak English – but that is not necessarily the case. If our students become more "English", then so must we. And that's not a given. We have to provide the platform for it. Daniel Walker has been working as an English consultant for staff members and lecturers at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences since November 2020. His job is to design an English programme that it is useful and relevant for everyone – be it a professor or a secretary. In this article, Daniel writes about his most popular offer to date, which won the "Gute Sprachlehre an Hochschulen” teaching award in the category "Förderung von Handlungsorientierung und Praxisbezug": The English mini-workshops for university staff

Forgeries, Falsifications, Fictions, Fälschungen? : Some Early Modern European “Vedas”

This article examines—and rejects—the idea that, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans who sought to obtain copies of the Vedas were repeatedly duped by having other works (purporting to be Vedas) passed off on them. The focus is on a text entitled “The Essence of the Yajur Veda,” produced by a Pietist missionary, Christoph Theodosius Walther (1699–1741), and a Brahmin identified only as Krishna, published in a German missionary periodical in 1740. This text is examined in the context of a series of similar works produced by Indian intellectuals with, or at the behest of, European missionaries and colonial officials in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than seeing these works as fakes, it is argued here that they are better understood as the outcome of distinctive modes of composition, transmission, and translation of Indian religious literature emerging from the early modern encounter of Indian and European scholars

Memory, Religion, and Authoritarianism in Post (1994)-Genocide Rwanda

This article attempts to theorise governmental efforts of the Kagame regime to construct a common national identity that precariously hinges on the adoption of an official revisionist history. Guided by Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory, it may be argued the government’s official narrative of Rwanda’s idyllic history is a strategy for securing Rwanda’s future by linking it to an ancestral past. This narrative is largely supported by museums and the frozen memories of Tutsi returnees — to the exclusion of competing narratives — as materialised and publicly disseminated through traditional dances and tandemly pursued through private spaces through infiltration and closure of churches and mosques. However, per Rebekah Phillips DeZalia, a new version of history must successfully replace the former in the personal narratives of the people and not simply control public discourse through a top-down approach. Hence, the Kagame regime is also utilising a bottom-up strategy of infiltrating day-to-day, intimate spaces — one of which is religious spaces by both exploiting and curbing religious influence, appropriating religious language, and referencing the divine right of kings — all which are designed to sustain public confidence in the possibility of post-1994 genocide reconciliation and to realise Kagame’s vision of a unified and prosperous Rwanda. The regime’s strategy involves inverting the overall passage of personal memory to collective memory to history as well as repressing memory in official memorials by excluding narratives that contradict or do not legitimise the Kagame regime’s agenda. This tandem manipulation and suppression of memory is aided by the aggressive campaign of church and mosque infiltrations as well as closures, respectively, which may be functionally understood using Thomas Luckmann’s notions of invisible religion (Rwandan government) as competing with visible religions (Christianity and Islam). These government strategies are detrimental to the trauma-coping potential of visible religions and undermines reconciliation — highlighting the fragile architecture of Kagame’s authoritarian vision for peace

Teaching Intercultural Business English: Interkulturelles Wirtschaftsenglisch lehren

In unserer digitalisierten, vernetzten und mobilen Welt muss ein didaktisches Konzept zur Vermittlung von interkulturellem Wirtschaftsenglisch für die heutige Generation von Studierenden mit ihren diversen Hintergründen neu gedacht werden. Es gilt, soziales Lernen und Selbstmanagement mit zu integrieren. Gemäß der Aufgliederung von Macke/Hanke/Viehmann-Schweizer/Raether (Hrsg.) (32016: 88ff.) von Kompetenzen in einem handlungsorientierten Ansatz in Kompetenzfacetten – fachliches Wissen, Zuständigkeit, individuelle Wertvorstellung, gesellschaftliche Normen – auf verschiedenen Handlungsstufen – verstehen, anwenden, analysieren, bewerten, entscheiden, begründen – werden die verschiedenen Lernziele zugeordnet und didaktisch aufbereitet, um soziale und fremdsprachliche Kompetenzen als individuellen Lernprozess hin zu interpersoneller und interkultureller Bildung zu lehren. Eine eigens durchgeführte Befragung über mehrere Semester belegt, dass das Konzept den gewünschten Lernerfolg hervorbringt.In our world that is highly influenced by digitalisation, interconnectedness and mobility, didactic concepts on teaching intercultural business English to students with their diverse backgrounds have to be reconsidered and newly designed. Social learning and self-management have to be integrated. Hence, in the presented concept, the learning objectives are categorised according to the action-oriented systematization of Macke/Hanke/Viehmann-Schweizer/Raether (Hrsg.) (32016: 88ff.), in which competencies in are broken down into facets of competencies – knowledge, responsibility, value concept, norms – on various levels of complexity – understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, deciding, justifying. Didactic concepts are designed to match this categorisation of learning objectives in order to teach social and language competence as an individual learning process to also gain interpersonal and intercultural competence. The evaluation of the concept by the means of a multi-level survey has shown that the concept produces the requested success

The analysis of literary texts Teachers' beliefs in a field of tension in the didactics of literature

Die konstruktive Verbindung von Analyse und Interpretation literarischer Texte wird aus literaturdidaktischer Perspektive immer wieder gefordert, die unterrichtliche Praxis stellt sich jedoch nicht selten anders dar. Anhand von Interview-Daten aus dem Projekt „Literarisches Verstehen im Umgang mit Metaphorik: Rekonstruktion von lernerseitigen Verstehensprozessen und lehrerseitigen Modellierungen (LiMet)“ wird in dem Beitrag rekonstruiert, welche gegenstands-, fach- und lernendenbezogenen Überzeugungen entsprechende Praktiken rahmen. Da der Fokus des Projekts auf dem Umgang von Lernenden und Lehrenden mit Metaphorik lag, werden insbesondere die Zusammenhänge zwischen den lehrendenseitigen Modellierungen der Metapher und ihren Überzeugungen zur Analyse literarischer Texte aufgezeigt. Der Beitrag verfolgt zudem das Ziel, anhand dieses Projekts zu reflektieren, welche Ableitungen aus der Rekonstruktion von Überzeugungen möglich sind.The constructive connection of analysis and interpretation of literary texts is constantly demanded from the perspective of literature didactics, but teaching practice often presents itself differently. Based on interview data from the project “Literary Understanding and Metaphor (LiMet)”, the article reconstructs which teaching object-, subject- and learner-related beliefs frame these practices. Since the focus of the project was on how learners and teachers deal with metaphor, the connections between the teachers' modelling of metaphor and their beliefs about the analysis of literary texts will be particularly illustrated. The article also aims to reflect which derivations are possible from the reconstruction of beliefs

Going ballistic: The dynamics of the imagination and the issue of intentionalism

Do we have control over the content of our imaginings? More precisely: do we have control over what our imaginings are about? Intentionalists say yes. Until recently, intentionalism could be taken as the received view. Recently, authors like Munro & Strohminger (2021) have developed some arguments against it. Here, I tentatively join their ranks and develop a new way to think about the way in which imaginings develop their contents that also goes against intentionalism. My proposal makes use of what we may call a ballistic framework for mental dynamics, which I sketch to some length. In this model, imaginings are articulated by ballistic events sensitive to constraints that modify the trajectories that imaginings trace in a special working space. This framework leaves room for alternatives to pre-assigned-content models, such as Kung’s (2016). In the ballistic-based models sketched here, and against intentionalism, imaginings can fail to be about what we intend them to be about. The framework also has applications beyond the intentionalism debate, some of which I will sketch

Metacognition and the puzzle of alethic memory

Alethism is the view that successful remembering only requires an accurate representation of a past event. It opposes the truth-and-authenticity view, according to which successful remembering requires both an accurate representation of a past event and an accurate representation of a past experience of that event. Alethism is able to handle problematic cases faced by the truth-and-authenticity view, but it faces an important challenge of its own: If successful remembering only requires accurately representing past events, then how is it possible that our memories are also experienced as originating in past experiences of those events? I call this the puzzle of alethic memory. I argue that alethism can be reconciled with the claim that memories are experienced as originating in past experiences of those events—what I call the experience of first-handedness—if we conceive of the phenomenology of remembering in metacognitive terms. According to the metacognitive approach that I favor, the phenomenology of remembering is partly explained by what memory represents and partly explained by the existence of a metacognitive feeling that accompanies memory representations. I argue that accounting for the feeling of first-handedness in terms of the metacognitive feeling that accompanies memory representations allows us to solve the puzzle of alethic memory

Learning to Engage With Wicked Problems

Complex, societal problems can be overwhelming. Maybe better avoid them. This contribution shows how a cloud-based learning technology—the Reflect! platform—can be used to practice a particular strategy for dealing with so-called wicked problems. By providing a learning experience that is close to collaborative problem-solving in real life, students can gain the self-confidence needed to engage constructively with wicked problems. The approach presented is an example of how philosophy can contribute to general education. After discussing the notion of wicked problems and what is required to cope with them, this article provides information that should be useful for readers who want to include a focus on wicked problems in their teaching: first, a discussion of how the work of learners can be assessed—with examples that demonstrate what is expected—and, second, the results of a survey-based assessment of the Reflect! learning experience from learners’ points of view

Katelhön, Peggy / Marečková, Pavla (Hrsg): Sprachmittlung und Mediation im Fremdsprachenunterricht an Schule und Universität. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2022.: Katelhön, Peggy / Marečková, Pavla (Hrsg) (2022): Sprachmittlung und Mediation im Fremdsprachenunterricht an Schule und Universität. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Rezension  Katelhön, Peggy / Marečková, Pavla (Hrsg) (2022): Sprachmittlung und Mediation im Fremdsprachenunterricht an Schule und Universität. Berlin: Frank & Timme,. The concept of mediation has undergone significant developments since the publication of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR 2001) and the Companion Volume (CV 2018). Even those who have worked with mediation for some time can find it an elusive concept to grasp. As practitioners who have been working with mediation since 2018, we recognize the importance of staying up-to-date on publications regarding developments in mediation. Therefore, we believe that this volume would be a valuable resource for both university and school teachers, providing a deeper understanding of the concept of mediation, as well as didactic and classroom-related questions. Comprising nine independent articles about mediation and foreign language teaching in schools and universities, this volume is comprehensive, providing different contexts for mediation and contributing to a clearer understanding of what mediation activities can and should look like. The authors provide definitions, explanations, examples, analyses, critiques, perspectives, and suggestions in the context of mediation. By reading this volume, teachers will gain an understanding of the conditions for successful mediation, and how effectively designed tasks can enable learners to use and improve their plurilinguistic and pluricultural skills, while engaging in real and meaningful activities. We would like to emphasize that our reviews are written from the perspective of practitioners who stand in front of university students in the foreign language classroom and use mediation tasks on a daily basis. Unless otherwise stated, we refer to the English edition of the Companion Volume 2018 and the German edition 2020