Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1926. / Vita. Published also as Teachers college, Columbia university, Contributions to education, no. 210. Bibliography: p. 179-181.

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Recent decades have witnessed the growing emergence of a conception of higher learning as entailing the interaction of individual tendencies with physical and social conditions. The present study explores the theoretical and practical implications of this conception across several key areas of the literature, including higher education reform, critical thinking, moral education, college writing, and college teaching. Generally speaking, educational interactionism is the attempt to explain intellectual and moral growth in terms of the ongoing and reciprocal interaction of human beings and their physical and social environments. It accordingly seeks to reconcile the historical antipathy between inner-directed theories (rationalism, idealism, romanticism) and outer-directed theories (empiricism, positivism, essentialism) of human agency, meaning, and growth. In terms of educational practice, educational interactionism seeks to resolve the persistent tension between attention to students' individual needs and interests and the transmission of a socially viable body of subject matter. It does so chiefly by asserting that neither has any meaning without the other. In projecting this interactive conception across what are for the most part discrete literatures, the present study seeks to illustrate how similar principles operate across these areas and to encourage dialogue between them. It should be viewed as a first step in a larger effort to integrate and clarify the general features of an interactive educational conception, eliminate many present inconsistencies, and outline its implications for educational policy and teaching practice.

Orientador: Pedro Angelo Pagni / Banca: Divino José da Silva / Banca: Marcus Vinicius da Cunha / Resumo: John Dewey buscou revolucionar a educação escolar por meio de uma reconstrução filosófica e cultural. Ele procurou resolver um problema secular da filosofia: dualidades estabelecidas tanto com o idealismo quanto com o empirismo. E articulou a filosofia da educação em outros termos lógicos, estéticos e morais, priorizando a relação entre filosofia e realidade social. A filosofia de Dewey está amparada no conceito de experiência. Experiência significa mudança, mas teremos uma mudança simplesmente mecânica ou física, avisa Dewey, se não atentarmos aos significados das nossas ações, que emergem do ambiente. Quando estabelecemos uma relação significativa com o ambiente, é sinal de que a experiência se tornou reflexiva. A educação escolar consiste em expandir, enriquecer, fazer crescer os significados da vida. O professor deve se ater ao desenvolvimento individual de cada aluno. Ao professor cabe analisar igualmente o ambiente e as suas direções. Isso implica não apenas a análise e escolha dos melhores métodos de ensino e aprendizagem, mas leva o professor a atentar à sua própria experiência. A sua influência nos hábitos dos alunos suscita problemas de ordem moral e intelectual, impondo o conhecimento moral como uma resposta à separação entre uma formação centrada na aquisição de conhecimentos empíricos e técnicos das ciências exatas, físicas e biológicas e uma formação humanista e racional das ciências humanas, mais voltada para o trabalho conceitual. O método individual deweyano que leva em conta a experiência do professor faz do ensino uma arte. Em face dessa perspectiva pragmatista, concluímos que é possível pensar atualmente a experiência reflexiva deweyana diante do empobrecimento da experiência, contrariando as críticas ao seu pensamento. No presente, é latente a preocupação com o empobrecimento da experiência que transcende... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: In our interpretative perspective, John Dewey worked in the field of Philosophy and Education, in the first half of the XX Century, with the term experience, to whom it was the continuity of the relation between an agent and his environment, which both would come out physiologically, emotionally, and intellectually modified. This is what we call unity of experience in Dewey thought. It is a respond to the diagnosis of the impoverishment of experience inside the critical tradition of John Dewey. He highlighted the importance of growing in the relation between giving meaning and communicated them to a community. The meaning of the term experience and the possibility to reflect and communicate our experiences, nowadays, has become a glowing problem to contemporary debate in philosophy and philosophy of education. Such problem mirrors the tension regarding the harms that the Modern project of knowledge imposed to actual life: the experience reduced itself to the empiric and the knowledge that mirrored the experience has reduced itself to the scientific knowledge and technologies. These characteristics represent the criticism from Critical Theory tradition of the Frankfurt School in what became so called impoverishment of experience. The existential emptiness is part of the scenario that Modernity helped to construct. The philosopher Max Horkheimer arose from such tradition of the diagnosis of the impoverishment of experience and imposed to the Deweyan Pragmatism one of the hardest criticism of the XX Century, by approaching positivism and pragmatism. Dewey, sad Horkheimer, contributed to the impoverishment of experience by reflecting in his philosophy a social dualism. We are looking forward to respond to Horkheimer criticism and to bring Dewey’s philosophy to help us to think our educational problems in the present. Nowadays, there are at least two researches that continue the Deweyan project... (Complete abstract, click electronic access below) / Mestre

This study attempts to investigate religion in the life of the young adult at University College Cork (UCC). It aims to ensure that pastoral ministry is based, not on guesses and assumptions, but on ascertained facts. The study is underpinned by historical, theological, psychological and sociological factors. It traces the provisions made for religion during each phase of its history as a nondenominational college. The contention is that religion arises from the nature of human beings in their capacity to relate to the mystery of God and the need to express this through organised religion in accordance with the culture. Expectations in relation to religion are informed by the psychological understanding that religious faith is not a constant through life. Young adult students are subject to the transitions which are typical of that stage of development. Account is taken of the effect on religion of the rapid changes in Irish society in the second half of the twentieth century. A multiple triangulation research design, consisting of a survey, depth interviews and participant observations, was used in the investigation. The survey was carried out by means of a postal questionnaire, administered to a systematic sample of students in the 18-23 year age group during the 1996/97 academic year. It examined student priorities, membership of religion, public worship, private prayer, charitable works, beliefs and moral values. The data were analysed using simple frequencies, descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, ANOVA and T-tests. Further insights were obtained by means of twenty depth interviews and by the observations of the researcher. These strands were interwoven in creating a canvas on religion in the life of the young adult at UCC. Interested parties are challenged to a new approach to religion as UCC makes its transition from a college to an institution of full university status.

This thesis, which moves through three stages, asks whether the compulsory provision of a daily act of collective worship can be justified in the schools of a liberal society. It begins with an analysis of the public debate which has surrounded its presence since legislation in 1944 formalised existing practice, and notes that its arguments are based on differing perceptions of the value of religious practice, the needs of the child, the relationship between religion and morality, and the nature of society. Because this public debate is often distanced from actual practice, research was undertaken in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales and is described in the central section of the study. The methods used to gather data are first discussed and are then followed by reports on the information acquired by means of a national questionnaire, as well as observation and interviews which were carried out with teachers and pupils in the south west of England and a city in the Midlands. The findings show that the legal requirements are met in the majority of primary schools, but that pupils' transfer to the secondary school frequently marks a point of transition from daily worship to a weekly assembly, except in the voluntary sector. Adult respondents discuss their attitudes to collective worship, the obstacles they encounter in meeting the legal requirements and the approaches adopted in their schools. The most important features of collective worship are perceived by teachers and pupils to be the contribution it makes to the development of a sense of community, the celebration of achievement and the ethos of the school. Conversations with pupils reveal the changes in belief which occur as they mature, and shed further light on provision in schools, reflecting young people's declining willingness to participate in religious worship. The evidence of the data reveals that opposition to collective worship is expressed by young people and their teachers in the language of individualism and choice. The philosophical analysis of the concluding section therefore examines the question of the justifiability of collective worship from a liberal perspective, giving particular attention to questions of autonomy, rights, indoctrination and the distinction between the public and private domains. Recognising, howevcr, that communitarianism provides a major challenge to liberalism, a study is also made of relevant arguments from this perspective before concluding that collective worship cannot be justified from either position. Nevertheless, schools claim that they intend to maintain the provision of assembly in a maimer which meets their needs, and the conclusion suggests that the way ahead may be to build on the current strengths of provision and to replace the traditional elements of participatory worship with a programme which develops a deeper emphasis on the spiritual and cultural dimensions of experience.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2006. / (UMI)AAI3224718. Adviser: Gary D. Fenstermacher. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2508.

<p> Mountains are filled with both mystery and grandeur. They are places where the natural world can be experienced in its most raw form. Humans have been climbing mountains for centuries, yet it is still difficult to adequately explain what draws people to the mountains. There is danger in the mountains, but there can also be rewards in the form of physical health, mental well-being, and personal growth. My climbing experience has led me to believe that these benefits are felt most when climbers approach a mountain with a sense of reverence and respect, and that the colonizing mindset of conquering a mountain or completing a tick-list is detrimental to the climber, the people that the climber interacts with, and the natural environment of the mountain. This study examines the worldviews of mountain climbers and the aspects of mountaineering that seem to enhance these worldviews. The worldviews of the mountaineers are explored in regard to both the natural environment and human society. Focus is placed on the aspects of mountaineering that seem to encourage biocentric worldviews, with the hope of being able to apply these findings to future sustainability initiatives. This study finds that mountaineers have a generally negative view of societies which put too much emphasis on material wealth, social prestige, and power structures. These materialistic tendencies of society are in direct contrast with the world of mountains. The benefits of climbing mountains are extensive, with personal and spiritual benefits being even more essential to the experience than the physical benefits. Climbers do not climb mountains for these benefits though; they climb mountains to climb. The findings of this study are discussed in terms of the future of climbing, environmental and social sustainability initiatives, and genuine learning experiences. </p><p>

Relationships among education, oppression and class have been presented and explained in distinct and different ways by different social theories, namely, neo-classical and orthodox Marxist determinist, conflationist, and Marxian overdeterminist theories. Human practice, following these different social theories has had, and may continue to produce, different social structures, some of them disastrous, irrespective of whether the disasters are intended or not. Others carry in them seeds of freedom and justice. Determinist theories have contributed to disastrous human practice by being exclusionary in approach, picking either education or oppression as their entry points to which they assigned the privileged position of causality, independent of all other processes. The class process is one of those omitted processes because determinist theories had thought it would be wiped out following changes in education or oppression processes. Conflationist theory has formulated its logic differently, gliding education into oppression, presenting and explaining them to mean the class process. Result: changes have occurred in human practice which are nothing other than continual reformulations of the cultural process of education whose guiding threads are those determinist and conflationist theories. Politics, too, has been reformulated to mean competition for power--a process that tends toward oppression even if unintended. The class process itself has either been denied existence in contemporary society or inessentialized vis-a-vis education and oppression, leaving it untouched in the process of changes in education and oppression. This study rests on an alternative methodological standpoint with respect to how education, oppression and class are related, and how they might be removed. Using alternative Marxian theory, whose logic is overdetermination, I present and explain these three distinct and different processes and their relationships. The method of overdetermination understands the processes of education, oppression, and class to be mutually and contradictorily related. Its political implications, which this thesis tries to accentuate as having a promise in achieving freedom and justice, are that changes must simultaneously occur in education, oppression, and class processes. Following this viewpoint, overdetermination believes a different set of processes will constitute a free and just society. Those processes are politics, classlessness, and non-indoctrinational education.

The central premise of this enquiry is that the International Baccalaureate (IB) model of education fails to deliver the humanitarian values that its literature claims describe. Its curriculum lacks the moral authority of a coherent philosophical foundation, and this promotes 'emotivism,' which reinforces contradictory ‘neoliberal’ values. Accordingly, this undermines the basic aim of an IB education and leaves its teachers prone to the subjectivism of emotivist morality. The proposal is that a process of reflexive practice can create an Aristotelian alternative to emotivism that revitalises the IB’s values-based model. Furthermore, it will argue that technology can build this practice into a 'social ontology’ that challenges the ‘governmentality’ of contemporary international education. To test the premise, an isolated ‘classic’ type of international IB school is considered because it reveals how a teacher’s cultural displacement shows the ontological significance of difference. This is followed by an evaluation of the ontological impact of international education’s governmentality. Subsequently, Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue theory is combined with Michel Foucault's ‘care of the self,’ to build a framework for reflective teacher practice. Then, an argument is made to use technology to connect these individuals and form a reflexive social ontology. To conclude, the enquiry argues that technology represents an objective rationality that challenges emotivism by removing subjectivism from the moral issues of difference facing an IB teacher.