Group items tagged

We live in a world of increasingly complex and intractable problems. These are especially evident in the environmental and social domains. They range from climate change and destruction of ecosystems, to scarcity of water and other critical natural resources, and to the disproportionate effects these growing scarcities are having on the poor of the world

We have deep intractable social issues, such as youth unemployment around the world and the growing gap between rich and poor. All these ultimately are economic in the same sense that all social and environmental issues ultimately show up in our economic system. No one is very happy with the ability of their economies to establish pathways of sustainable progress

Without reflection, people tend to just assume their point of view is the right point of view and defend and argue from that point of view. Reflection is a key gateway that opens people to beginning to think together and move from just arguing for about who is right to collaboratively solving the problems we all face

being knowledgeable and being intelligent are not the same. Being knowledgeable generally refers to having access to information and facts as well as the ability to recall them. Intelligence usually refers to a person’s ability to reason, solve problems, think critically, comprehend subject matter, use language to communicate effectively, construct relationships, employ logic, and manipulate numbers (Gardner, 1999)

Experiencing diversity challenges expectations not only by increasing acceptance of different cultural, ethnic, and racial groups but also by enhancing students’ overall psychological functioning (Crisp & Turner, 2011). Pascarella (1996) reached a similar conclusion from the national study of student learning that found that diversity experiences in the first year of college had long-term positive effects on critical thinking throughout college, particularly for white students.

Learning how to express emotions within a social system is knowledge acquired through social interaction governed by the rules and customs of the culture. One culture may encourage open and intense expression of emotional feelings, whereas another may see that same behavior as inappropriate. The exception is primal emotions, such as fear when confronted by a predator. Emotional expression is a matter of how much or the degree to which one expresses an emotion. Plutchik’s (1980) eight basic emotions include continuums from minimal to extreme expression: Trust: acceptance to admiration Fear: timidity to terror Surprise: uncertainty to amazement Sadness: gloominess to grief Disgust: dislike to loathing Anger: annoyance to fury Anticipation: interest to vigilance Joy: serenity to ecstasy Combinations of these basic emotions create other forms of expressions. For example, the combination of the emotions joy and trust produce love, while the combination of the emotions anticipation and anger produce aggression (Plutchik, 1980).