Concluding Remarks

How do you bring a rodeo to an end? It's my assignment today to get my arms around what we heard—and, yes, that's a pun on making love—and to help you get your arms around it, too, by doing what journalists do: connecting the dots, to try to make a coherent whole out of different presentations and perspectives on love and its obstacles. Part of what I heard, however, was how difficult it is to get your arms around even one person, a mother or child, a partner or mate, much less somebody Other in the world. Love is a subject that encompasses so many different worlds of knowledge, thought, and ideas. Every time I heard the word today it seemed a hyperlink to some experience, some memory, some feeling, something I knew or needed to know more about. If it was like that for you—and I expect that it was—then what we really should do is be quiet for a few minutes to allow you to concentrate, and then let you speak from your own hearts and your own experiences of love

Augustinian Interiority: The Teleological Deification of the Soul through Divine Grace

Augustinian interiority is a way of deifying ourselves in order to attain true happiness(i.e., teleology). Augustine approaches deification chiefly in terms of the ‘image of God’, from the perspectives of ontology and teleology. Ontologically, we are created inthe image of God and this image is indestructible as long as God sustains our life. Teleologically, the image has been deformed (and true happiness has become a remote reality for us) due to the Fall. Humanity therefore needs to be restored. How, then, can we renew the image? Augustine observes that the more we know and love God, the more we become like Him. How, then, can we get to know who/what God really is? This is what Augustinian interiority concerns: its intellectual dimension (i.e., knowing God) cannot be separated from its ethical dimension (i.e., loving God. The desire for true happiness, which is God, is universal among us. Since we cannot strive for what we do not know, we must know something about happiness before we pursue it, and the knowledge must be innate in our memory. In addition, learning/knowing a thing is refreshing our latent memory of that thing. Eventually, our endeavour to understand God is, in fact, an attempt to recall wholly what we have already known about Him. Why, then, do we remember so little about God – especially His immaterial nature? This is because we are preoccupied with material and worldly things. Thus, passing beyond the world of senses, we must make an effort to grasp the reality of the soul, which is, like God, incorporeal and rational: the soul is the best clue to knowledge of God. Then, we will be able to perceive correctly God’s immanence, omnipresence, and transcendence. Faith is crucial for making progress in our intellectual and ethical ascent to God. However, it is not enough just to believe revealed truths, but we must try to understand them by all means possible. In this way, we can cling to God with our mind and heart, be deified, and move closer to true happiness. Yet, we need to bear two things in mind. One is that without divine grace nothing is possible for us. The other is that, although we cannot know God completely in this life, we must hope for it and love to increase our theological knowledge

Proprioception of Thinking and Emotional Intelligence are Central to Doing Philosophy with Children

Philosophy with children often focuses on abstract reasoning skills, but as David Bohm points out the “entire process of mind” consists of our abstract thought as well as our “tacit, concrete process of thought.” Philosophy with children should address the “entire process of mind.” Our tacit, concrete process of thought refers to the process of thought that involves our actions such as the process of thought that goes into riding a bicycle. Bohm contends that we need to develop an awareness or proprioception of thinking as well. When Socrates enters into dialogue with his interlocutors, he shows the limitations of purely abstract thought by leading them to admit that they really “don’t know.” But, of course, they know. We know what bravery is or what love is, even though we can never “explain” these concepts in abstract terms. Life has taught us through experience what these concepts mean and we have developed an understanding of them. We can recognize when a person acts bravely. This is where I see the link between our tacit, concrete process of thought and emotional intelligence. We need emotional intelligence to learn how to be brave, to learn how to love, and be just in the way we act in the world. Knowing what justice is abstractly does not make us act justly. We have to develop awareness of our actions in order to develop the skills necessary to act the part. This is also where emotional intelligence comes in. In the bulletin of the play Romeo and Juliet, director Barry Edelstein wrote the following: “To perform Romeo and Juliet, actors need a series of skills… they must have the emotional and psychological awareness and openness of uncommon depth; they must listen with acuteness, they must possess an imagination of real suppleness and subtlety…” An abstract portrayal would not bring these characters to life. We can surely agree – abstractly – that racism is destructive, but still act racist, without being even slightly aware of it. My contention is that while our abstract sense of racism has evolved, our tacit, concrete knowledge has not, which explains that racism is for the most part still rampant, even though we know abstractly that it is wrong. So how do we educate and develop the awareness of the tacit, concrete knowledge that informs our actions, and develop the emotional intelligence to give a depth of understanding to what we know and believe abstractly

Deductive Mathematics: an Introduction to Proof and Discovery for Mathematics Education

Mathematics has two fundamental aspects: (1) discovery/logical deduction and (2) description/ computation. Discovery/deductive mathematics asks the questions: 1. What is true about this thing being studied? 2. How do we know it is true? On the other hand, descriptive/computational mathematics asks questions of the type: 3. What is the particular number, function, and so on, that satisfies ... ? 4. How can we find the number, function, and so on? In descriptive/computational mathematics, some pictorial, physical, or business situation is described mathematically, and then computational techniques are applied to the mathematical description, in order to find values of interest. The foregoing is frequently called “problem solving”. Examples of the third question such as “How many feet of fence will be needed by a farmer to enclose ...” are familiar. The fourth type of question is answered by techniques such as solving equations, multiplying whole numbers, finding antiderivatives, substituting in formulas, and so on. The first two questions, however, are unfamiliar to most. The teaching of computational techniques continues to be the overwhelming focus of mathematics education. For most people, the techniques, and their application to real world or business problems, are mathematics. Mathematics is understood only in its descriptive role in providing a language for scientific, technical, and business areas. Mathematics, however, is really a deductive science. Mathematical knowledge comes from people looking at examples, and getting an idea of what may be true in general. Their idea is put down formally as a statement—a conjecture. The statement is then shown to be a logical consequence of what we already know. The way this is done is by logical deduction. The mathematician Jean Dieudonne has called logical deduction “the one and only true powerhouse of mathematical thinking”. Finding proofs for conjectures is also called “problem solving”. The “Problems” sections of several mathematics journals for students and teachers involve primarily problems of this type. The deductive and descriptive aspects of mathematics are complementary—not antagonistic—they motivate and enrich each other. The relation between the two aspects has been a source of wonder to thoughtful people

Law Learning in Action: An Action Learning Project to Evaluate Processes and Outcomes of using Law E-learning Objects in Social Work Education

This document reports on a research project funded by the Social Care Institute for Excellence to evaluate the processes and outcomes (for social work students and educators) of using a suite of e-learning objects within law teaching on social work degree programmes. The e-learning objects in question were published by SCIE in 2007, and those involved in their development were keen to explore how they were being used, and what their impact might be. The research, which started in 2008 and reached completion in 2010, has tracked a group of educators in 6 universities as they have engaged in a process of collaborative capacity building, through participation in a learning set designed to support their own engagement with e-learning and to develop skills in evaluating their outcomes for students. A full list of the SCIE law e-learning objects and their associated learning outcomes is given at Appendix 1

Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications. 2nd Northumbria Witness Seminar Conference, 24-25 Oct 2007 Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

These proceedings capture the content of the second Witness Seminar hosted by Northumbria University’s School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences. It followed the success of the first witness seminar in terms of its format and style but differed in that it focused on one topic - managing email and other electronic communications technologies from a records perspective. As before the witnesses were invited to share their views and opinions on a specific aspect taking as their starting point a pertinent published article(s). Three seminars explored the business, people and technology perspectives of email and e-communications, asking the following questions: What are the records management implications and challenges of doing business electronically? Are people the problem and the solution? Is technology the problem or panacea? The final seminar, 'Futurewatch', focused on moving forward, exploring new ways of working, potential new technologies and what records professionals and others need to keep on their radar screens

New futures health trainers: an impact assessment

Although the health of the UK population has improved significantly over the last century, inequalities in health still exist, with some of Britain’s biggest killers being ‘preventable’ illnesses. The 2004 white paper ‘Choosing Health: Making Healthy Choices Easier’ aimed to introduce initiatives to reduce inequalities in health. One such initiative was ‘Health Trainers’ – a new role staffed by individuals drawn from and based in deprived areas. This role aimed to offer people in deprived communities practical advice about health improvement, and to facilitate access to health services This report aims to examine the impact of introducing the ‘New Futures Health Trainer’ role into criminal justice settings in terms of: a) Training for the Health Trainer Tutors/the development of the Health Trainer training course b) The impact of the training on the New Futures Health Trainers c) The organisational consequences of the role d) The impact of New Futures Health Trainers on clinical outcomes for prisoners/offenders on probation, and e) A brief examination of the relationship between ‘early adopter’ sites for Health Trainers in the community, and the prison/probation equivalen

Information Outlook, May 2001

Volume 5, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2001/1004/thumbnail.jp