The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when (...) infants are observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed. (shrink)

Parental mental disorders increase the risk for insecure attachment in children. However, the quality of caregiver–infant interaction plays a key role in the development of infant attachment. Dyadic interaction is frequently investigated via global scales which are too rough to uncover micro-temporal mechanisms. Prior research found that the latency to reparation of uncoordinated dyadic states is associated with infant behavioral and neuroendocrine regulation. We investigated the hypothesis that this interactive mechanism is critical in predicting secure vs. insecure attachment quality in (...) infancy. We also assessed the predictive quality of infant attachment regarding neuroendocrine reactivity later in childhood. A subsample of N = 58 dyads from a larger study were analyzed. At 3–8 months postpartum, maternal anxiety disorders were diagnosed via a structured clinical interview as well as dyadic interaction during the Face-to-Face-Still-Face was observed and coded on a micro-temporal scale. Infant attachment quality was assessed with the strange situation paradigm at 12–24 months of age. In an overlapping subsample of N = 39, we assessed child cortisol reactivity at 5 to 6 years of age. Generalized linear modeling revealed that longer latencies to interactive reparation during the reunion episode of the FFSF as well as maternal diagnosis at 3–8 months of age predict insecure attachment in children aged 12–24 months. Cox regressions demonstrated that dyads with infants who developed insecure attachment at 12–24 months of age were 48% less likely to achieve an interactive reparation at 3–8 months of age. Mixed models revealed that compared to securely attached children, children who had developed an insecure attachment at 12–24 months of age had an increased cortisol reactivity at 5 to 6 years of age during free play. The results confirm the hypothesis that the development of attachment is affected by experienced micro-temporal interactive patterns besides diagnostic categories. They also showed that infants of mothers with postpartum anxiety disorders have a more than fivefold increased risk of developing an insecure attachment than the infants of the control group. Moreover, results imply that these patterns may influence neurohormonal regulation even in preschool aged children. (shrink)

Publication date: 29 September 2016 Source: Author: Aida Cornelia Stoian This study highlights the results of an empirical research, whose purpose was to study the teachers` option of primary and preschool education to use learning situations for training pupils’ skills in relation to seniority in teaching and learning environment and to identify of the level of conceptual representation of the learning situations term in the opinion of teachers in primary and preschool education.We made a questionnaire in order to (...) identify the frequency teachers can organize learning situations and the teachers` conceptual representations of learning situation.The results have confirmed the conclusions to get teachers` adhesion to organize learning situations for pupils’ skills training, to develop teachers’ skills in harmonizing all the methods, means and teaching strategies with the objective and subjective factors determining the interaction between teachers and pupils. (shrink)

Unobservable properties that are specific to individuals, such as their proper names, can only be known by people who are familiar with those individuals. Do young children utilize this “familiarity principle” when learning language? Experiment 1 tested whether forty-eight 2- to 4-year-old children were able to determine the referent of a proper name such as “Jessie” based on the knowledge that the speaker was familiar with one individual but unfamiliar with the other. Even 2-year-olds successfully identified Jessie as the individual (...) with whom the speaker was familiar. Experiment 2 examined whether children appreciate this principle at a general level, as do adults, or whether this knowledge may be specific to certain word-learning situations. To test this, forty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children were given the converse of the task in Experiment 1—they were asked to determine the individual with whom the speaker was familiar based on the speaker’s knowledge of an individual’s proper name. Only 5-year-olds reliably succeeded at this task, suggesting that a general understanding of the familiarity principle is a relatively late developmental accomplishment. (shrink)

The article explores digital literacy practices in children’s everyday lives at Norwegian preschools and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic digital literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on 70 hours of video recordings documenting the activities in which 45 children, aged 5-6, and eight preschool teachers participated. Through the detailed analysis of two categorization activities – identifying geometrical shapes and identifying feelings/thoughts –the use of (...) digital tools in the social organization of the activities are examined. The article finds that children’s digital literacy activities encompass visual, verbal, audio and embodied competencies that are made relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in interaction between the children and between the adults and children in the form of norms and guidelines for what constitutes correct categorizations (geometrical shapes and green and red feelings) in the situated activities, and that are appropriated and actualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings also show how the categorization practices in preschools deal with symbols and labels in ways that create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing and acting upon the world. Digital media are embedded in routines, procedures and socialites that are part of these categorization practices; they are part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand and act in the world. Moreover, the different technologies created different conditions for the children’s participation. It was found that peer interaction was part of the digital literacy activities that involved such mobile technologies as smartphones and tablets, while when using non-mobile technologies, e.g. smartboards, the activities were structured more as ‘classic’ classroom activities, primarily guided by the teacher and the didactic material presented through the smartboard. (shrink)

The era of AI-based decision-making fast approaches, and anxiety is mounting about when, and why, we should keep “humans in the loop” (“HITL”). Thus far, commentary has focused primarily on two questions: whether, and when, keeping humans involved will improve the results of decision-making (making them safer or more accurate), and whether, and when, non-accuracy-related values—legitimacy, dignity, and so forth—are vindicated by the inclusion of humans in decision-making. Here, we take up a related but distinct question, which has eluded the (...) scholarship thus far: does it matter if humans appear to be in the loop of decision-making, independent from whether they actually are? In other words, what is stake in the disjunction between whether humans in fact have ultimate authority over decision-making versus whether humans merely seem, from the outside, to have such authority? Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, we build our formal model, enriching the HITL question to include not only whether humans are actually in the loop of decision-making, but also whether they appear to be so. Second, we describe situations in which the actuality and appearance of HITL align: those that seem to involve human judgment and actually do, and those that seem automated and actually are. Third, we explore instances of misalignment: situations in which systems that seem to involve human judgment actually do not, and situations in which systems that hold themselves out as automated actually rely on humans operating “behind the curtain.” Fourth, we examine the normative issues that result from HITL misalignment, arguing that it challenges individual decision-making about automated systems and complicates collective governance of automation. (shrink)

This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought. Prominent in Western political thought since the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal history holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a start and an end point, between (...) the savage state of nature and civilized modernity. Despite various critiques, the underlying teleological principle still prevails in much contemporary thinking and policy planning, including post-conflict peace-building and development theory and practice. Anathema to contemporary ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, universal history means that not everyone gets to write their own story, only a privileged few. For the rest, history and future are taken out of their hands, subsumed and assimilated into other people's narrative. (shrink)

In this paper, I will consider a unique case where changing one’s character is part of a process of moral betterment when facing oppression. By engaging with the Dutch-Jewish intellectual and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, I will highlight the situated dimension of moral betterment as a practice that is driven by the pressure of concurrent events. I will claim that moral betterment does not just come out of an internal will to change for the better. Instead, I will argue that (...) “bearing real suffering” (Hillesum 1996: 220) is what makes compassion a potential source of moral betterment. This is possible because in compassion, one experiences emotional friction between weakness and strength in facing the suffering caused by oppression. (shrink)

Position papers on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics are often framed as attempts to work out technical and regulatory strategies for attaining what is commonly called trustworthy AI. In such papers, the technical and regulatory strategies are frequently analyzed in detail, but the concept of trustworthy AI is not. As a result, it remains unclear. This paper lays out a variety of possible interpretations of the concept and concludes that none of them is appropriate. The central problem is that, by framing (...) the ethics of AI in terms of trustworthiness, we reinforce unjustified anthropocentric assumptions that stand in the way of clear analysis. Furthermore, even if we insist on a purely epistemic interpretation of the concept, according to which trustworthiness just means measurable reliability, it turns out that the analysis will, nevertheless, suffer from a subtle form of anthropocentrism. The paper goes on to develop the concept of strange error, which serves both to sharpen the initial diagnosis of the inadequacy of trustworthy AI and to articulate the novel epistemological situation created by the use of AI. The paper concludes with a discussion of how strange error puts pressure on standard practices of assessing moral culpability, particularly in the context of medicine. (shrink)

The present study investigated the respective roles of withdrawal, language, and context-inappropriate anger in the development of emotion knowledge among a subsample of 4 and 5 year-old preschoolers. Measures included parent-reported withdrawn behavior, externalizing behavior, and CI anger, as well as child assessments of receptive language and EK. Ultimately, findings demonstrated that receptive language mediated the relationship between withdrawn behavior and situational EK. However, CI anger significantly interacted with receptive language, and, when incorporated into a second-stage moderated mediation analysis, moderate (...) levels of CI anger rendered the indirect effect of withdrawn behavior on situational EK via receptive language insignificant. Cumulatively, these findings demonstrate a mechanism by which withdrawal may impact EK. They also indicate that such an effect may be attenuated in children with moderate levels of CI anger. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Over the past five centuries, those who translate the Greek New Testament for English readers have increasingly found it appropriate to do so without recourse to a human soul. This is not simply a case of linguistic slippage, but the consequence of sustained exploration of the social‐historical milieu within which the New Testament writers lived and wrote. This chapter explains three areas of inquiry. First, the significance of historical inquiry for situating the New Testament materials more securely within their first‐century (...) milieu as a prophylactic against colonizing New Testament perspectives, in this case, with foreign assumptions about theological anthropology. Second, the significance of sociocultural forms of inquiry, including medical anthropology and social psychology, for shaping our understanding of humanity in the New Testament world. Third, a rereading of New Testament texts that served previously as taken‐for‐granted illustrations of the New Testament's anthropological dualism. (shrink)

Our different senses put us in contact with the same world. In this paper, I use unusual objects and situations to bring out structural dissimilarities in the way our senses relate to the same world of material objects. In the first part, I briefly discuss the perceptual presence of spatial and material things. Using uncommon objects allows me to treat this issue without any need to invoke what it is like to have visual experiences. What comes to the fore in (...) these analyses, however, seems less obvious in experiences of the other senses. Therefore, in the second part, I propose a strategy, invoking unusual situations, to weed out the multisensory associations that enrich our normal relation to objects, in order to get a better grip on the perceptual correlate of the different senses. Although the actual correlates of the senses may not be material objects in each case, I explain why they are nonetheless occurrences in a spatial and material world. (shrink)

Baylis, Tomlinson, and Hoffmaster each raise a number of critiques in response to Bliton's manuscript. In response, we focus on three themes we believe run through each of their critiques. The first is the ambiguity between the role of ethics consultation within an institution and the role of the actual ethics consultant in a particular situation, as well as the resulting confusion when these roles are conflated. We explore this theme by revisiting the question of What's going on? in (...) clinical ethics consultations. Moving from those issues associated with the role of the ethics consultant to those associated with the role of inquiry within the practice of ethics consultation, we then take up the serious challenge that Bliton seems shackled by the assumptions and institutional dispositions embedded in the medical culture in which he is working. This reveals the second theme, namely that there is a risk of co-optation when acting in a role that derives its legitimacy from institutional sources. Finally, we focus on an even more problematic implication stemming from the first two, namely that the focus on institutional power as the crucial factor for determining ethical significance has the effect of distorting, and perhaps obscuring, other forms of relational, interpersonal, and moral meaning. (shrink)

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally “games are made”) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel (...) back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential “limit situations.” This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—“anthrobotic”—environments. (shrink)

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel (...) back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in "With the Grain of the Universe" (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show (...) at least this much: "With the Grain of the Universe" transforms natural theology into "witness." In the end, my essay may demonstrate what many have feared, that Hauerwas is, in fact, a Christian apologist-though of a very ancient sort. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 15-37 [Access article in PDF] Kant's Strange LightRomanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius Orrin N. C. Wang We might say that in deconstruction history is always posed as a question, at once urgent, ubiquitous, and insoluble, whereas ideological demystification conceives of its relation to history as an answer, a solution, to its critical hermeneutic. Certainly, this critical truism has special force in Romantic studies, (...) a field very much shaped by the complex relation between deconstruction and ideological critique over the last twenty-five years. But it could just as well be said that the full implications of this relation are especially clarified by the field of Romantic studies, not least because its object of study replays the tensions between these two modes of inquiry. Studying Romanticism means knowing it as a historical period but also knowing it as a figure that stands for something else: an aesthetic practice, a form of consciousness, a political aspiration, an ideology, the possibility of historicity itself. That as a figure Romanticism can be either transhistorical or tied to its historical identity makes its situation all the more complicated and compelling. Romanticism especially dramatizes the interlocking relation between period identity and trope, and the investment of literary studies in that dynamic. Romanticism is the period metaphor that both stabilizes and disrupts the very concept of period metaphors.1 The deconstruction and demystification of Romanticism is very much about the deconstruction and demystification of history, its existence as either question or calculation, trope or immanent being.But even as Romanticism asserts its special relation to history it must also confront an opposite trajectory, how its meaning is best understood through a constellation of other, larger historical identities, such as the Enlightenment and modernity itself. At present the potential disciplinary reorganization of Romanticism into the long eighteenth century is the most vivid academic expression of the question, where does the historical specificity of Romanticism reside, within itself or something larger, or both?Sorting this issue out is certainly a historical proposition, but as Romanticism's special relation to history reminds us, it is also, in Paul de Man's sense, rhetorical. Which is to say, Romanticism's relation to history is, paradoxically, not special-or, more precisely, it is a trope for something pervasive among all the period fields of literary studies, insofar as they remain particular and distinct from one another. This includes those historical entities that might subsume or entangle with Romanticism itself, that would enact historicity by absorbing a field so intent on both the enabling and worrying of historical thought. Approached tropologically, the relation of Romanticism to these larger historical periods is not simply about events and formations that constitute [End Page 15] the boundaries of historical identities. It is also about best identifying and clarifying the workings of figure that create the intelligence of such periodicity.Such labor, what de Man designated innocently enough by the term "reading," calls for its own crossing of a particular set of boundaries. A philosophical text, generated by the entanglement between Romanticism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, might contain sections exemplary in their recording of the interstice between trope and historical periodization. Immanuel Kant's short meditation on genius in the third Critique is, like the rest of his book, about the limits and possibilities of the judging subject; his words on genius are also specifically about the artistically creative subject. In resolving the contradictions between aesthetic judgment and creation, Kant transforms the solar light of human genius into the historical genius of the Enlightenment, which is very much the linguistic genius of Romanticism. This all occurs in a register not of consciousness or of historical truth, but of something else before either's constative realization.Kant's text is especially telling in its reflexive expression of this situation, so much so that it helps illuminate the sharp distinction between deconstruction and ideological demystification. For if deconstruction always poses history as the pressure of an insoluble, omnipresent question, it does so through figure, before truth. In contrast, ideological demystification, with... (shrink)

It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we (...) need to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new. (shrink)

This study was designed to investigate the impact of self-relevance between preschool children and recipients on children’s sharing behavior in dictator games using a forced-choice resource distribution paradigm. Experiment 1: A total of 75 children aged 3-6 years were evaluated in a first-party situation in which they were distributed as recipients and dictators and shared resources with distracting recipients with different extents of self-relevance under three different payoff structures, including non-costly, costly and envy structures. Children could choose between (...) a sharing option and a non-sharing option. The results showed that, in a first-party situation, children aged 3-6 years old typically share more resources with highly self-relevant recipients (friends) than with moderately self-relevant recipients (acquaintances) and lowly self-relevant recipients (strangers) and that they share more resources with moderately self-relevant recipients (acquaintances) than lowly self-relevant recipients (strangers). Experiment 2: A total of 62 children aged 3-6 years old were evaluated in a third-party situation in which they were distributed not as recipients but only dictators, making decisions between the options of sharing more or sharing less with distracting recipients who had different extents of self-relevance under three different payoff structures, such as non-bias, high self-bias and low self-bias. The results showed that, in a third-party situation, children typically share in a similar manner to that of Experiment 1, meaning that children display selective generosity and that the self-relevance between the children and recipients played a key role. Across age groups, this study of preschool children (total N = 137) demonstrates a degree of effect of self-relevance on preschool children’s sharing in first-party and third-party situations, with highly self-relevant recipients receiving a more preferential share in the dictator game than those with low self-relevance, although this effect was stronger in the older preschool children. (shrink)

In this work we present some reflections about the interaction of preschool children (between 3 and 5 years old) with sound-producing objects. We implemented the phenomenological approach of Alfred Schutz, who under the influence of Edmund Husserl, elaborated his own notions concerning the Lebenswelt or life-world. We present some situations of interaction with musical instruments by children that have been documented in different research on musical education in early childhood, the same ones we use to exemplify possible analyses from (...) the perspective of the phenomenology of the social world. We conclude with some remarks that conceive of Schutz’s theory as a relevant perspective for the analysis of children’s experiences with sound-producing objects. (shrink)

Health behaviours of preschool children have a considerable impact on the shaping of habits later on in their lives. Parents’ and guardians’ role is to develop positive health patterns and represent exemplary models to be followed by children. The aim of the paper is to present the use of correspondence analysis for the assessment of the relationship between eating habits of parents and children, as well as for the determination of the most common situations in which preschool children (...) consume fast-food products and to find the relationship between the frequency of fast-food consumption and BMI values in preschool children. The tests were carried out with the use of an own survey carried out in kindergartens in Białystok among parents dropping off and picking up children. 149 correctly filled questionnaires were obtained. The statistical analysis employs the chi-squared test and correspondence analysis. Among the tested children, a statistically significant relationship between body weight and sex was obtained. In the group of children and parents consuming fast-foods, a statistically significant relationship between the frequency of children’s and parents’ consumption of the products in question was noticed. A statistically significant relationship between the age of introduction of fast-food products into the child’s diet and their BMI was found. A situation that was statistically significant as far as contribution to frequent consumption of fast-food products by children, i.e. at least once a week, were children and parents shopping together. The relationship between the frequency of fast-food consumption by parents and children was presented in the form of correspondence maps, as well as the relationship between the child’s BMI and the age when the first fast-food product is served, and the relationship between the child’s BMI and the frequency of their consumption of fast-foods. Unfortunately, despite the high awareness among parents of the harmful effects of fast-food products and the widespread health education programmes, a number of the children in kindergartens were overweight or even obese. For this reason, the quality of the educational programmes in kindergartens, as well as in various media outlets, needs to be improved, with emphasis put on their effectiveness, in order to minimise the problem of the occurrence of overweight and obesity in children. It is also important for parents rearing children to pay special attention not only to their children’s menus, but also to foods consumed in the presence of children. (shrink)

Based on work-family border theory and work-home resource theory, this paper examines the impact of border keeper’s support on work-family enrichment and whether or how work-family boundary flexibility mediates the relationship between border keeper’s support and work-family enrichment. A sample of 504 preschool teachers in Guangdong province, China completed questionnaires. The research results show a two-way process of work-family enrichment for preschool teachers in China. Organizational support was directly and significantly correlated with work-to-family enrichment, and family support was (...) significantly and directly correlated with family-to-work enrichment. Organizational support had no significant positive predictive effect on work boundary flexibility which has a significant positive predictive effect on WFE. Family support had a significant positive predictive effect on family boundary flexibility which had a significant positive predictive effect on the FWE. In addition, the study found that family boundary flexibility mediates the relationships between family support and FWE whereas work boundary flexibility did not mediate the relationships between organizational support and WFE. The above research results are partly consistent with the existing research, and partly inconsistent, which is related to the profound influence of traditional culture in Chinese society and the current situation of preschool teachers in China. Such findings have important implications for improving the work-family enrichment of preschool teachers. (shrink)

The COVID-19 epidemic in the early 2020s is making a big difference for educators around the world. For the past 2 years, the curriculum and working patterns have been overturned in response to this epidemic, which has brought unprecedented challenges and physical and mental stress to preschool teachers. This situation can have a drastic impact on the acquisition of job well-being for preschool teachers. During this special time, the leader’s management style will also influence the psychological feelings (...) of the organization’s staff. For example, empowering leadership is an important management function that empowers subordinates, emphasizes the meaning of work, promotes participation in decision-making, and expresses confidence. Therefore, in the current COVID-19 pandemic context, it is worthwhile to explore the topic of empowering leadership to ensure preschool teachers’ well-being, by balancing work demands and work resources in a way that facilitates a sense of organizational support and reduces job stress, while relatively fewer studies have been conducted on the relationship between preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this, this study proposed a research model from the theoretical perspective of the Job Demands-Resources Model to explore the influence of empowering leadership, sense of organizational support, and job stress on preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve the purpose of this study, a convenience sampling method was used to invite 500 preschool teachers in China to complete a questionnaire survey, and after removing invalid samples and data with incomplete answers, reliability and validity analyses and model fit tests were conducted, followed by a structural equation modeling method for path analysis. The results of the study showed that in the kindergarten work context, empowering leadership showed a significant negative effect on job stress, but a significant positive effect on job well-being and a significant positive effect on sense of organizational support. Sense of organizational support had a significant negative effect on job stress but a significant positive effect on preschool teachers’ job well-being. Preschool teachers’ job stress and job well-being showed a significant negative effect. The contribution of this study was to explore the relationship between understanding leadership empowerment and preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, which will facilitate educational organizational contexts to empower preschool teachers to work harder to reduce their job stress as well as enhance their sense of organizational support and promote the acquisition of job well-being. (shrink)

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3-5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children’s and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children’s laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize (...) children’s everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children’s laughter in detail. It was found that children’s laughter tended to be directed to children and adults’ laughter tended to be directed to adults. 87% of children’s laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2,7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground. (shrink)

This research tested the hypothesis that prudence and altruism, in situations involving future desires, follow a similar developmental course between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Using a modified delay of gratification paradigm, 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on their ability to forgo a current opportunity to obtain some stickers in order to gratify their own future desires — or the current or future desires of a research assistant. Results showed that in choices involving current desires, altruistic behavior was (...) unrelated to age. However, prudence and altruism involving future situations were correlated with one another and with age. Children under 4 years of age demonstrated significantly less futureoriented prudence than the older children (F(1,49) = 15.75; p<.001) and significantly less altruism involving future situations (F(1,49) = 33.24; p<.001). The data for the 3-year-olds, but not for the older children, also showed agepartialled correlations between the two future-oriented choice situations. These results suggest that between 3 and 4 years, children acquire the ability to deal with future-oriented situations through the development of some common mechanism which affects both future-oriented prudence and altruism. (shrink)

The preschool education profession often faces many challenges and preschool teachers, as important members of the preschool education profession must respond to a variety of emergencies with young children, which also leads to high levels of job stress and can have a negative impact on their ongoing well-being. Past research has pointed out that a healthy lifestyle is one of the key factors in enhancing sustainable well-being in high-stress work situations and many studies have found that good (...) leisure activity engagement as a healthy lifestyle is associated with higher levels of well-being. However, the relationship between preschool teachers’ leisure engagement and sustainable well-being has been less explored. Therefore, this study proposed seven research hypotheses based on the engagement theory proposed by Fredricks et al. and developed a research model to explore the relationship between three types of leisure engagement, including behavioral, affective and cognitive, and preschool teachers’ job stress and sustainable well-being, using age as a control variable. This study used a cross-sectional web-based questionnaire with a convenience sample of 500 preschool teachers in China. The collected data were analyzed for reliability and validity, model fit testing and structural equation modeling for model validation after removing invalid data and incomplete responses. The results of the study showed that behavioral engagement was not related with either the job stress or sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; Emotional and cognitive engagement were negatively related to job stress but positively related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; and Job stress was negatively related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; Age is an effective control variable. From the above results, it is clear that not all three types of leisure engagement are effective in terms of reducing the work stress of preschool teachers. As well as being related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers emotional and cognitive engagement contributed more to sustainable well-being acquisition. (shrink)

This paper examines Plato’s Sophist with particular attention to the cast of characters and the most curious and complicated dramatic situation in which Plato places this dialogue: the dramatic proximity of surrounding dialogues and the impending trial, conviction, and death of Socrates. I use these considerations as a propaedeutic to the raising of questions about how these features of the dialogue might affect our interpretation of the actual positions espoused in the Sophist. One clear effect of these considerations will (...) be to destabilize the commonly held view that in this dialogue Plato is “replacing” Socrates and Socratic aporia and questioning with the more didactic, formalistic, and doctrinal conception of philosophy espoused by the Eleatic Stranger. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz identified two different approaches to the problem of intersubjectivity. The first is the transcendental, which maintains the primacy of subjectivity, and identifies the problem of the other as a transcendental problem. For example, in Husserl’s phenomenological idealism, all meaning is relative to a transcendental constituting subject. Hence the “problem of intersubjectivity” is to show how the other comes to be constituted, comes to be meant as a sense. The difficulty with such an approach is that if the other (...) is a meaning relative to and analogous to the constituting subject, the transcendence and irreducibility of the other to consciousness seem to be undermined. Transcendental idealism never reaches the “other” because the other is precisely what I do not constitute, but can only encounter. The recognition of the inadequacy of the transcendental approach leads to a second, namely, the other is encountered on the basis and background of the natural attitude and/or life-world. When the transcendental approach is abandoned, the “problem of the other” turns into a series of descriptions of either encounters or social situations. Ontology is replaced by critical theory of society. In either case, an ontology of intersubjectivity seems to be excluded. (shrink)

Researching two different work settings, police work and hospice care, the authors experienced a strange sense of discomfort in their bodies during their fieldwork when investigating professional training and work situations, especially in encounters with citizens and patients. In some of those situations, the authors withdrew physically or mentally from the situation without wanting to do so, feeling emotionally affected by the uncertainty of the situations, not fully grasping the meaning of what was going on. In a (...) class='Hi'>strange way they felt awkwardly detached from their research activities and their bodily involvement in their fieldwork. In this article, the authors seek to explore the meaning of awkwardness embedded in some kinds of ethical dilemma. Through a phenomenological analysis based on the concept of intentionality of the body and a model of inner dilemmas, they reach a renewed understanding on the phenomenon of awkwardness as a natural way for researchers to respond to challenging fieldwork situations. Finally, they propose and unfold mutual interviewing and cooperative analysis as methods of investigating researcher's subjectivity in facing such situations. (shrink)

L’observation de la littérature théologique de notre époque permet de constater une floraison assez dense de titres sur saint Thomas. La chose est d’autant plus étonnante qu’aux lendemains immédiats de Vatican II, Karl Rahner s’inquiétait de « l’étrange silence » des théologiens au sujet du Maître d’Aquin. Comme il se doit dans un article de bilan, J.-P. Torrell commence par dresser un tableau des éditions, biographies et traductions dont S. Thomas a bénéficié depuis 1974, année de célébration du septième centenaire (...) de sa mort. Après quoi, dans une seconde partie, il donne les « Orientations » dans lesquelles s’engagent aujourd’hui les études thomistes, insistant davantage sur la production théologique plutôt que sur la production philosophique, étant donné l’abondance et la complexité de cette dernière, tenant compte pour cela des productions américaines et allemandes autant que des productions francophones.A look at present day theological literature shows a fairly dense flowering of works on Saint Thomas. This is all the more astonishing as, just after Vatican II, Karl Rahner was uneasy about “the strange silence” of theologians concerning Master Aquinas. As expected in an overview, J.-P. Torrell begins by giving a list of publications, biographies, and translations on St. Thomas since 1974, the year of the celebration of the seventh centenary of his death. In the second part, he presents the “Orientations” of Thomistic studies today, insisting more on the theological production rather than the philosophical. Given the abundance and complexity of the latter, he takes into account American and German works, as well as French. (shrink)

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates (...) of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore how children learn to form new relationships with nature. It draws on a longitudinal case study of children participating in a stewardship project involving the conservation of salamanders during the school day in Stockholm, Sweden. The qualitative method includes two waves of data collection: when a group of 10-year-old children participated in the project (2015) and two years after they participated (2017). We conducted 49 interviews with children as well as using participant (...) observations and questionnaires. We found indications that children developed sympathy for salamanders and increased concern and care for nature, and that such relationships persisted two years after participation. Our rich qualitative data suggest that whole situations of sufficient unpredictability triggering free exploration of the area, direct sensory contact and significant experiences of interacting with a species were important for children’s development of affective relationships with the salamander species and with nature in an open-ended sense. Saving the lives of trapped animals enabled direct sensory interaction, feedback, increased understanding, and development of new skills for dynamically exploring further ways of saving species in an interactive process experienced as deeply meaningful, enjoyable and connecting. The behavioural setting instilled a sense of pride and commitment, and the high degree of responsibility given to the children while exploring the habitat during authentic situations enriched children’s enjoyment. The study has implications for the design of education programmes that aim to connect children with nature and for a child-sensitive urban policy that supports authentic nature situations in close spatial proximity to preschools and schools. (shrink)

This article—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix ‘neuro-’ is ubiquitous today and therefore concepts like ‘neuropedagogy’ or ‘neurodidactics’ seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of the article the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; (...) a brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be made in order to demonstrate how the results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty in integrating neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of ‘native concepts’. In contrast to them, educational theory has much more difficulty with such integration, as will be shown in the third part of the essay. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to dominate education rather easily and without great resistance, especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning—mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere ‘relationship problem’. On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education might be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself, with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention. (shrink)

In an article recently published in this journal, I raised a puzzle about the control of genetic information, suggesting a situation in which it might turn out that we have a duty to remain in ignorance about at least some aspects of our own genome. In this article, I propose a way that would make sense of how the puzzle arises, and offer a way to resolve it and similar puzzles in future: in essence, we would consider genetic information (...) to be something the distribution of which may be more or less just. We would not know in advance what a just distribution would be, though, and in some cases there might still be a justice-based reason to deny a person genetic information about himself. However, others might also have justice-based claims to be able to access that information. This suggests that there is a possible world in which one person is entitled to at least some genetic information about another, while that other person—to whom the information refers—is not, and that this world would be just. (shrink)

This paper examines the political and ethical problems which arise in the course of undertaking participatory research in developing countries. It argues that, rather than supplanting relationships of power within the knowledge creating process, most participatory research actually strengthens them. Instead a more complete form of dialogic research is required, which will involve struggles within our academies as well as in those other organisations in which our research is situated.

This paper examines the political and ethical problems which arise in the course of undertaking participatory research in developing countries. It argues that, rather than supplanting relationships of power within the knowledge creating process, most participatory research actually strengthens them. Instead a more complete form of dialogic research is required, which will involve struggles within our academies as well as in those other organisations in which our research is situated.