Growing Environmental Activists: Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Children’s Fiction.

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism

Introducing music students to harmony – an alternative method

If teaching and learning harmony could rely less on prescriptive rules and more on the music that students themselves play, an alternative teaching method for harmony beginners may become possible. This approach yields a specific kind of knowledge, namely non-propositional knowledge or knowledge acquired by direct experience. After considering the function of thinking and doing in experiential learning, the article shows how the teaching of harmony in the twentieth century steadily moved away from the legacy of Rameau, the founder of harmony as a discipline in the eighteenth century. By using as point of departure melodic motifs in the piano music that students play, this article demonstrates the integration of horizontal and vertical musical features when introducing music students to the study of harmony. Furthermore, it shows how a linear approach could eventually lead through two-part counterpoint to the writing of four-part harmony, demonstrated at the end of the article. This proposed method provides a foundation for acquiring basic music-writing skills that are less concerned with music theory as a regulatory discipline and more with music as a creative art.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/redc202016-06-30hb201

On the Meaning of Screens: Towards a Phenomenological Account of Screenness.

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of screens. In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that phenomenology, much in a traditional methodological form, can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens. We ground our analysis in the ontology of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], claiming that screens will only show themselves as they are if taken as screens-in-the-world. Thus, the phenomenon of screen is not investigated in its empirical form or conceptually. It is rather taken as a grounding intentional orientation that conditions our engagement with certain surfaces as we comport ourselves towards them �as screens.� In doing this we claim to have opened up the phenomenon of screen in a new and meaningful way

Living on the threshold: The spatial experience of living alone with dementia

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the meaning of living alone for older people with dementia. Fourteen audio-taped open-ended interviews were conducted with eight such older women in Ontario, Canada. The data were analyzed using an adaptation of van Manen\u27s method. Heidegger\u27s philosophy informed interpretation of the findings through the theme living on the threshold. The study findings deepen understanding of \u27space\u27 and \u27place\u27 in the experience of living alone with dementia. Participants sought the middle-ground of dialectical tensions within the threshold space and shared insights about their spatial experience of: (a) being here, (b) being there, (c) being out, and (d) keeping out. These older women risked losing their threshold space when admitting to mistakes as their illness progressed. The authors conclude with examples of how this spatial interpretation may inform and improve communication with and care of older people in similar circumstances. © The Author(s), 2009