Disentangling economic and political goals in the net neutrality debate

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Community and Communitarianism in Toni Morrison: Restoring the Self and Relating with the Other

Toni Morrison discusses the rebirth of the entire Black race through self-recovery. However, her novels are not limited to the identity of Black women and people but are linked to a wider community. Morrison might have tried to imagine a community in which Black identity can be socially constituted. In this paper, we discuss the concept of community by examining communitarianism, which is the basis of justice and human rights. Although community is an ambiguous notion in the context of communitarianism, communitarians criticize the abstract conceptualization of human rights by liberal individualists, but also see that human rights are universally applicable to a community as a shared conception of social good. Communitarianism emphasizes the role and importance of community in personal life, self-formation, and identity. Morrison highlights the importance of self-worth within the boundary of community, reclaiming the development of Black identity. In the Nancian sense, a community is not a work of art to be produced. It is communicated through sharing the finitude of others—that is, “relation” itself is the fundamental structure of existence. In this regard, considering Toni Morrison’s novels alongside communitarianism and Nancy’s analysis of community may enable us to obtain a sense of the complex aspects of self and community. For Morrison, community may be the need for harmony and combination, acknowledging the differences and diversity of each other, not the opposition between the self and the other, the center and periphery, men and women. This societal communitarianism is the theme covered in this paper, which deals with the problem of identity loss in Morrison’s representative novels Sula and Beloved and examines how Black individuals and community are formed. Therefore, this study aims to examine a more complex understanding of community, in which the self and relations with others can be formed, in the context of Toni Morrison’s works

Are Tandem Classrooms Effective in Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence?

The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of tandem classrooms in promoting intercultural communicative competence by comparing the competence of students before and after participation in tandem classes. This research is based on the descriptive statistics from a survey administered at a university in South Korea. The survey was conducted in 2016 during the second semester, and it used students who participated in tandem classrooms by employing a questionnaire to measure the effectiveness of the tandem classrooms in relation to intercultural communicative competence and the students’ perception of their own competence after completing the tandem classes. The result of the research shows that unlike the initial expectations, there is no meaningful sign that the surveyed students have developed intercultural communicative competence, which means that tandem classrooms did not actively help students improve this competence. In this study, an in-depth interview with students was also conducted in 2019 to find out why such a result occurred. Although tandem classrooms would be highly valuable as a language learning method, the approach may require redesigning and reimplementation in great detail to become a method for developing intercultural communicative competence. Therefore, this study highlights the underlying need for a revised curriculum for students attending tandem classrooms

Policy Making in Foreign Language Teaching towards Globalization: the Act on the Promotion of Education of Critical Foreign Languages in Korea

This study focuses on the implications of the enactment of the Act on the Promotion of Education of Critical Foreign Languages in Korea. This act is a legal institutionalization of the state’s responsibilities for and roles of teaching less commonly taught foreign languages. Foreign language education policy in the country has focused on English and a few major foreign languages. However, the Korean government came to realize the importance of teaching numerous languages that had been considered minor ones to cope with “glocalization”. With the enactment of this Act, the Korean government officially recognized the importance of education related to various foreign languages within its legal framework for public education. The objective of this study is to review the background and outline of the Act and examine the implementation of the projects associated with it. This paper also discusses the expected effectiveness of the Act for teaching diverse foreign languages and issues in the implementation process