Group items tagged

The development of autonomy in children is a central concern of liberal philosophers of education. We endorse the liberal intuition that autonomy matters and that it is an appropriate aim of education. However, we divert from autonomy liberals, who defend

Both governments and zealous cyber-enthusiasts champion the internet's educational and political potential. The danger that results is a policy of techno-compulsion that undermines citizens' autonomy. There is a better way, says Dougald Hine.

"In assessing the various forms of welfare capitalism, normative political philosophy typically draws on two major philosophical traditions - republicanism and liberalism, invoking either equality and the public good or, alternatively, individual autonomy as normative criteria for evaluation. Drawing, instead, on Critical Theory as a tradition of social philosophy, I advance a proposal for assessment of the types of welfare capitalism conducted as 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Normative criteria thus emerge within a diachronic dimension of social transformation, which in turn grounds the comparison among synchronic types of capitalism. This ultimately enables a research agenda for the operationalisation of a normative analysis of capitalism within which social justice is gauged by the degree of voluntary employment flexibility - a key factor in the distribution of life-chances in the early twenty-first century."

Blogs have developed in two major ways: as a personal diary online and as a technologically enhanced multimedia diary that can be manipulated to suit the user's needs. This paper investigates one such blogging programme in India vis-à-vis its effect on au

Self-determination theory (SDT) assumes that inherent in human nature is the propensity to be curious about one's environment and interested in learning and developing one's knowledge. All too often, however, educators introduce external controls into lea

The research reported here demonstrates the need for greater subtlety in the practice of policy than appears to be evident in many parts of the globe. Based upon an ethnographic study of school reform, this paper heeds Appadurai's call for those researchi

This essay focuses on television censorship during the last military regime in Brazil (1964-1985) by examining the performance of television censors employed by the Public Entertainment Censor Department (Diviso de Censura e Diverses Pblicas, DCDP). It challenges common perceptions about small-screen censorship during this period, pointing to the need to analyse the boundaries and the spaces of autonomy in each television genre. It focuses on the multiple tensions and struggles between the written procedures and codes, the censors' subjective interpretation of television texts and the negotiation process of the broadcast contents between censors and television producers. The recent opening of the Censor Division Archives (DCDP) and the deluge of biographies, autobiographies and testimonials of key television figures during the authoritarian regime, have opened up new perspectives to examine Brazilian TV history and the place television censors had within it. Annotated and censored scripts of telenovelas and comedy series, correspondence exchanged between the executives of Globo Television Network, the hegemonic TV station in Brazil at the time, and the regime's authorities, printed press reports, as well as audiovisual content that is now available to researchers, constitute some of the sources analysed in this article.

The connections between the concepts of emergence and narrative are manifold, complex and significantly non-obvious, but in one context at least they come together explicitly: the term "emergent narrative" has an established currency in computer game studies as a potential (and desirable) effect of interactive media. Indeed for many it is the holy grail of contemporary computer game design, offering as it does the prospect of reconciliation between the conflicting values of narrative satisfaction and player autonomy. In the academic context of digital media studies, this same promise of synthesis has put emergent narrative in the front line of a long-running debate between ludologists and narratologists about the relative importance of game and narrative paradigms. My argument here suggests that emergent narrative is not the unifying concept it appears to be for computer game studies, though it does have interesting possibilities in that field; more fundamentally, though, I want to argue that this seemingly very specific concept helps to clarify the incommensurability of emergence and narrative and has implications for our larger understanding of the process of narrative sense making. The discussion begins with an introduction to emergence and some indication of its problematic relation to narrative. I then turn to emergent narrative itself, outlining the history of the concept and some difficulties of definition. I argue that these difficulties arise from confusions about the nature of simulation, and I make a case for understanding narrative and simulation as distinct and, in certain respects, antithetical modes of representation.

"This article analyses the discursive unities which make possible the current transformation of teacher training and our understanding of teaching as a profession, while focusing particularly on European educational policy and the situation in Slovakia. Using Foucault's archaeological method, we reconstruct the discursive link points between the circumscribed, and at first glance, different approaches to teacher training, where on the one hand, we have a humanistic and constructivist prism, and on the other, we find the pragmatic, economizing pressure of neoliberal educational policy. Discursive reconstruction, however, shows that these approaches are not contradictory, rather that a humanistic and constructivist discourse, by shaping a specific kind of subjectivity (the teachers), supports the neoliberal reform of teacher training and constitutes the reasoning upon which it is based. The analysis is conducted by drawing together various components: the logic of the higher education reforms, the changes to the epistemological basis of teacher training, the regulation of professional development through professional standards, the psychological content and general permeation of entrepreneurial culture into education right through to the performance culture of the 'portfolios', which are the typical attributes of neoliberal governmentality, and not only in teacher training."

The Lacandón rain forest of Chiapas, Mexico, has been progressively colonized by Maya peasant families since the middle of the twentieth century. Recently, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation-EZLN) uni