Euthanasia: Understanding Ethical Issues through Role-Play

Having transformed traditional ethics, people have empowered themselves and put ethics under their control. An individual\u27s value has become the center of all decision making. where has ethics gone? Why has ethics been fossilized? when an individual desperately needs a litmus test to check his stance, why cannot he re-visit ethics and apply its insights to solving his problems? I wish to believe that there might be a legacy of conventional ethics in the form of universal rules, regardless of time, culture, and context, to be passed on to the next generation. Has God given us life, death, and choice of life? Has God also given us the ability to understand another person\u27s pain? If so, we need to be conscientious about what is an appropriate way to resolve problems along with multi-disciplinary approaches in the postmodern world. How much has ethics tried to adapt current science/technology? Has ethics offered us any appropriate way of dealing with what\u27s right and/or wrong or with alternatives, whenever we are in the midst of complicated problems? when did we begin to omit ethics in our decision making process? Ethics seems not to be the sole value, but it has to compete with other contemporary values. The presently burning issue called euthanasia is everyone\u27s business, one we all have to face. I wonder if death is part of God\u27s purpose for lives or a divine appointment. The conundrum intertwined with euthanasia relates to how to reach a satisfactory end of life backed up by ethics. Critical and Creative Thinking could help us go through the crux of the issue and mold an individual\u27s ethical decision, while maintaining a balance with social justice. My goal in this synthesis paper is two fold: to provide a theoretical description of euthanasia and to prepare English teaching materials for Japanese college students on reading comprehension, by garnering the latest news/research from leading newspapers, periodicals, and the internet, and role play to help exchange views, to share empathy and I hope to create a climate of mutual trust among participants by the time role-play reaches its debriefing session

A modern synthesis of faith and reason

Today, modern man is uneasy. The current outcry for ethics in government and in social life reflects a need which has not been met. What distinguishes man as a rational and creative human being are his moral, abstract, artistic, creative, and spiritual ideas. In many instances, such ideas have been declared as meaningless by the \u27reasoning\u27 of the natural sciences; This thesis will develop a modern paradigm that will synthesize subjective values coming from the \u27faith\u27 side of rational beings with the objective values obtained from their objective (abstract reasoning) side of themselves; The paradigm will be illustrated by applying it to the Clark County\u27s Health District Hospice Program for terminal cancer patients and their survivors. A typical case will show the paradigm\u27s practicality for aiding persons to meaningfully participate in the solution and management of significant problems found in their every day lives

Inquiry-Based Learning: The vehicle for promoting Education for Sustainable Development in elementary schools

ABSTRACT Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has risen to prominence over the past decade and several studies have been conducted regarding its significance. UNESCO has repeatedly elevated children as crucial to achievement of the goals of the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) and research affirms that children are critical in galvanizing the changes necessary for achieving sustainable lifestyles. A plethora of research has been undertaken to analyze the integration of ESD into high school and post-secondary education, while other studies have featured the integration of ESD into specific disciplines. However, the literature does demonstrate there have been few studies that investigate the integration of ESD in elementary school classrooms Three research questions were used to navigate this research. These research questions include: (i) Does the Saskatchewan mandated curricula in English Language Arts, Mathematics, Social Studies and Science at grades 6, support Education for Sustainable Development through inquiry-based learning? (ii) If so, does this mandated curriculum support primary school teachers who are committed to ESD and who use inquiry approaches? (iii) What are the barriers/challenges faced by Saskatchewan teachers who are committed to implementing ESD through IBL. Findings from this research indicates that inquiry-based learning is a compatible teaching method for fostering ESD in the classroom. However, the study revealed that while some ESD concepts are embedded in the documents, the curricula lack adequate ESD visibility, which contributes to the challenges that teachers experience when integrating ESD in the classroom. Such deficiencies, along with other challenges uncovered by this research, impede the teachers’ willingness to integrate ESD in their classroom. These findings are critical for educational policy makers and curriculum developers as these suggest ways in which ESD through inquiry-based learning could be strengthened

In the Beginning was the Word: Concepts, Perception, and Human Being

In this thesis, I argue that humans are differentiated from other animals through a faculty of linguistically-structured perception through which we directly perceive things in virtue of their higher-order, conceptually-articulated properties. Yet I also argue that we retain a non-conceptual form of awareness that we share with non-human animals. Through an investigation of the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, I explore a phenomenology of expertise in order to defend a Dreyfusian view that argues that the experiential content of our practical dealings must undergo a translation if it is to become the content of conceptual capacities. However, although I agree with Dreyfus that our untranslated experience is of a kind that is shared with other animals, I also argue that he plays down the interdependence of conceptual and non-conceptual content in humans. I articulate this interdependence through a discussion of phronesis, 'practical wisdom,' as it is used in the debate, as well as by Heidegger. Drawing on McDowell's assertion that our conceptual capacities develop with our acquisition of a language and our initiation into a second-nature 'world,' I argue that our practical coping is better described not as non-conceptual but as post-conceptual; that is to say, human coping involves navigating our second-nature 'worlds' in the same, direct way that animals navigate their first nature environments. In the second part, I argue that this 'world' is ultimately linguistic in the sense that our conceptual experience is drawn from a grammatically-structured perception that Heidegger called vernehmen, 'apprehension,' which he identified with noesis. This structure creates the object-subject relationship through which we directly perceive entities as being objects. Through noesis, we experience concepts as things, and our capacity to cope post-conceptually with language and ideas powers the exponential creativity of human thought and action in our rich, second-nature ‘worlds.’ However, the cultural contingency of many concepts indicates a potential discordance between concepts and their experiential source. I conclude that while such discordances are not incommensurable, and that knowledge of reality is not inaccessible to us, we must be careful about the faith we put in language to describe it, for as soon as we conceptualise, we enter a sphere as much created as perceived

Science on television : A representational site for mediating ideology

The emergence of a new science paradigm has been identified. It is characteristically described as structuring an organic, holistic and ecological framework for understanding the nature of reality. The modern scientific paradigm with its characteristic underlying inorganic, reductive, and mechanistic vision of reality, discursively dominates Western societies\u27 cultural sense-making with its attempts to unlock the \u27mysteries\u27 of nature. The radically different characteristics of the new paradigm science is linked to \u27rising culture\u27 articulated in the exploratory social change of alternative social movements. The holistic principles and ecological values found variously in the environment, feminist, and new age/holistic health, peace and indigenous people\u27s movements link to the new paradigm. Both factual and fictional television texts engaging discursively with science, present a representational site for different cultural expression of the preferred meanings of ideology of two radically different paradigmatic frameworks

The role of the researcher in qualitative psychology

Volume two of Qualitative Research Nexus focuses on the roles of qualitative researchers and their relationships within psychological studies. This book is a result of the presentations, discussions, and collaborations of participants at the second workshop "Qualitative Psychology" in October 2001 in Blaubeuren, Germany that was organized by the Center for Qualitative Psychology. The theme of the meeting was "the role of the researcher in qualitative psychology." Reading this volume of Qualitative Research Nexus can assist future researchers in considering the complexity of their roles as qualitative investigators. A model to describe different phases within the processes of research projects is used as an organizing framework for the articles in this book. This model was developed in the department of educational psychology of the University of Tübingen, Germany. It can provide a helpful overview for research processes. By indicating a sequence of central areas where research processes can be located we provide a non-linear guide to various tasks that are relevant in research projects. Being aware of these tasks can ease the design of scientists studies. Our model has been inspired by Maxwells description of tasks for designing qualitative studies (Maxwell, 1996). Having an overview of the range of activities involved in research also sheds light on which forms of research relationships might be relevant

Teaching as Analogous Personalization: A pragmatic inquiry into expert teachers' process for fostering synchrony in educational dialogs, in post-secondary writing

Descriptive understandings of what human learning is, and so normative expectations of what teachers can and should do as educational leaders, has shifted greatly in society over the past century. The learning metaphors have moved from mechanical transfer to organic transformation; the educational approaches have moved from behavioral response-training to social-emotional facilitating: encouraging students not merely to repeat experts but to think like members in those knowledge-based communities, not merely to mimic disciplines' methods but to participate personally in the ongoing discourse of those fields. In an immediate sense, this shift is progress. Yet, in a larger sense, it is merely cycling back to acknowledge an old and persistent thread of practical wisdom among educators: that people learn complexly as emotional-social-intellectual creatures, and so that a teacher's work is to entice interest and effort, to foster a sense of belonging and trust, and to persuade students toward personally connecting with and valuing those same integral parts of a subject-matter that the teacher has already beneficially personalized for themselves. This longstanding rhetorical and pragmatic view of a teacher's educational role is now being supported directly by empirical research that shows the sense-bound, neurologically integrated, socially attuned, identity-and-meaning motivated character of human feelings, thoughts, and dispositions. I introduce the term “analogous personalization” to capture this synthetic (experience-based, scientifically supported) understanding of teaching as complexly social-emotional, intellectual, persuasive work. I then focus on educational dialogs—specifically within post-secondary writing-based courses—as a means of exploring how expert teachers foster synchrony between their own and their students' personal connections to (i.e., emotional inclination toward, social affiliation with, intellectual/practical understanding of) subject-matter. First, this dissertation offers a synthetic overview of some emergent mind-brain-body findings, and points out the fundamental educational realities that those findings substantiate. On that foundation, it next overviews insights from the field of rhetoric-and-writing about how teachers can usefully conceptualize the learner-knowledge-environment relationship from a dialogic perspective, to achieve effective (intentional, situated, synchronous) educational exchanges. Building from those scientific and practical literatures, it offers a flexible research method for studying the pragmatic arc of an educational exchange (from teacher intention to student take-away): by using the teacher's own personal, practical, principled framework of educational ideals and approaches; comparing their stated intentions with students' stated learning experiences, and tracing the arc of that educational dialog through actual classroom recordings. Finally, it enlists this radically situated research method to analyze three expert university writing teachers' practices: their idiosyncratic understandings of a teacher's role (from their own perspective); their experience-based manner of forming learning-centered relationships with students (from my observing perspective); and their apparent, persuasive self-investment in the course's subject-matter and the students' learning (from students' perspectives). It concludes with observations about the role of a teacher's sincerity (both practiced and perceived) in developing professional expertise and achieving synchrony with students in educational exchanges

Border crossing on migrant workers' lifelong learning : a study of migrant workers' learning community

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