Curriculum, Critical Common-Sensism, Scholasticism, and the Growth of Democratic Character

My paper concentrates on Peirce’s late essay, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” which identifies “critical common-sensism” and Scotistic realism as the two primary products of pragmaticism. I argue that the doctrines of Peirce’s critical common-sensism provide a host of commendable curricular objectives for democratic Bildung. The second half of my paper explores Peirce’s Scotistic realism. I argue that Peirce eventually returned to Aristotelian intuitions that led him to a more robust realism. I focus on the development of signs from the vague and indeterminate to the determinate and universal. The primary example will be the evolution of the very idea of number. I believe we will never arrive at the end of number history because we can never fully contain creativity. I draw similar conclusions for the idea of curriculum. Whether or not there is an end to the evolution of signs in Peirce is a matter of debate. I incline toward the opinion there is not, though I am unsure. I conclude by arguing that rationality itself is but the form and structure of poetic creation and that we should embrace paradox and even contradiction rather that become caught in totalizing and totalitarian end of history stories.     

Time course of linguistic information extraction from consecutive words during eye fixations in reading

Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these assumptions, sentences were constructed with a critical pretarget-target word sequence, and the temporal availability of the (parafoveal) target preview was manipulated while the pretarget word was fixated. Target viewing effects, examined as a function of prior target visibility, revealed that extraction of linguistic target information began 70-140 ms after the onset of pretarget viewing. Critically, acquisition of useful linguistic information from a target was not confined to the ending period of pretarget viewing. These results favor theoretical conceptions in which there is some temporal overlap in the linguistic processing of a fixated and parafoveally visible word during reading.     

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions

This article examines the human face as a transmitter of expression signals and the brain as a decoder of these expression signals. If the face has evolved to optimize transmission of such signals, the basic facial expressions should have minimal overlap in their information. If the brain has evolved to optimize categorization of expressions, it should be efficient with the information available from the transmitter for the task. In this article, we characterize the information underlying the recognition of the six basic facial expression signals and evaluate how efficiently each expression is decoded by the underlying brain structures.     

Towards a new philosophy of education: Extending the conversational metaphor for thinking

Recently, feminists like Jane Roland-Martin, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, and others have advocated a conversational metaphor for thinking and rationality, and our image of the rational person. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl refers to thinking as a “constant interconnecting of representations of experiences and an extension of how we hear ourselves and others. There are numerous disadvantages to thinking about thinking as a conversation.We think there are difficulties in accepting the current formulation of the conversational metaphor without question. First, there is danger that we will lose important dialectical connections like that between the self and society. Second, the conversational metaphor alone cannot fully express the way conversations are constructed. We will want to take up the notion of narrative as a metaphor for thinking advocated by Susan Bordo, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jerome Bruner, and others, including Mary Belenky and her colleagues.Eventually, we want to champion narrative and the dramatic narrative of culture as a metaphor for thinking that involves such expressions as sights, insights, silences, as well as sounds, moments of mood and poetic moments. The dramatic narrative provides the structural possibilities needed to criticize certain kinds of conversations, in order to talk about the relations of public and private, self and society and most importantly, about the drama of our lives within and without.The dramatic narrative for thinking helps dispel the dangerous dualisms of mind and body that not even conversation or narration alone can banish, and allows us to frame questions about education that do not require us to separate mind from body. The dramatic narrative metaphor for thinking lets us show who we are, act out what we think, and reconstruct rationality to reflect what many women, and some men, do.     

‘Heroines in the making’: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as an instance of amour-propre in education

This paper addresses Rousseau's contribution to educational practice by illustrating the ways in which his notion of amour-propre distorts the teacher-student relationship in Muriel Spark's novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Though some of Rousseau's pedagogical methods may appear impractical and problematic, his insights into the psychological distortions of amour-propre bear directly on teaching because it is such an important instance of the relationship between self and others. The protagonist, Jean Brodie, is shown to be not only an inadequate teacher but a morally destructive one as well because she violates the teacher-student relationship by both encouraging amourpropre among her students and using those same students primarily to satisfy her own need for power and self-aggrandizement. Her eventual ruin at the hands of her best student results from the amour-propre both share. Miss Brodie's failure illustrates the dangers of looking at teaching as self-expression, personal fulfillment etc., to the extent of forgetting what it actually is — the careful addressing of students' experience both as individuals and as learners.The author wishes to acknowledge the comments of two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this paper for their very helpful suggestions. Whatever errors and omissions remain result from insufficient attention to their advice.     

Hermeneutic listening: An approach to understanding in multicultural conversations

Listening is crucial to reaching multicultural understanding. Borrowing from the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer we develop a hermeneutics of listening. To listen we must risk our prejudices, but these prejudices constitute our very identity. In this paper we attempt to answer the question, “Why Listen?” if listening is such a potentially dangerous activity.     

INCREASING SPONTANEOUS VERBAL RESPONDING IN AUTUSTIC CHILDREN USING A TIME DELAY PROCEDURE

One oft-cited problem with teaching speech skills to autistic children isthe failure of the speech to be spontaneous. That is, the children's speech often remains underthe control of the verbal behavior of others rather than underthe control of other nonverbal referents inthe environment. We investigatedthe effectiveness of a time delay procedure to increasethe spontaneous speech of seven autistic children. Initially, the experimenter presented a desired object (e.g., cookie) and immediately modeledthe appropriate response “I want (cookie).” Gradually, asthe child imitatedthe vocalization, the experimenter increasedthe time between presentation of the object andthe modeled vocalization in an attempt to transfer stimulus control of the child's vocalization fromthe experimenter's model tothe object. Results indicated that allthe children learned to request items spontaneously and generalized this behavior across settings, people, situations, and to objects which had not been taught. These results are discussed in relation tothe literature on spontaneous speech, prompting, and generalization.     

Undesirable life-events and depression in young adolescents

We compared the relationship between individual undesirable life-events and comprehensive life-event factors, as well as major depression in adolescents. Students in four public suburban middle schools were screened for depressive symptomatology and life-events by a self-administered questionnaire. Seven of 21 individual events (parents' divorce, parental job loss, problems between parents, problems between the adolescent and his/her parents, failing a grade in school, school suspension, death of a close friend) and three of six life-event factors (conflict/disappointment, marital discord, maladjustment) were significantly related to depression in univariate models. A multivariate examination of the individual events was difficult to interpret, but examination of the event factors found maladjustment and conflict/disappointment significant. Analyses using the undesirable life-event factors provided a clearer picture of the relationships investigated by grouping related events into a more manageable number of independent categories. Specific combinations of life-events suggest stronger associations with adolescent depression than others. Clinicians may identify youths at risk for depression when specific combinations of undesirable life-events occur.     

Relationships between perceptual and conceptual mediational systems in young children

Children aged 48–77 months were afforded experience in either color oddity or nominal class sorting prior to a transfer task testing the ability to apply the oddity rule (“which one doesn't belong”) to three picture arrays where solution was based on nominal class membership. The youngest children in the sample did not benefit from either perceptual rule experience or nominal sorting experience. Subsequent age groups benefited first from the nominal sorting treatment, then from both perceptual rule and nominal sorting activities, and finally the older children did not require priming in either the perceptual or nominal domain for success on the transfer task.     

Family and psychosocial predictors of obsessive compulsive disorder in a community sample of young adolescents

A two-stage epidemiologic study conducted between 1986 and 1988 in the southeastern United States investigated family and psychosocial predictors of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and subclinical OCD in young adolescents. In the first stage, a life-event schedule and a family adaptability and cohesion scale were administered to a community sample of 3,283 adolescents. In stage two, the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia in School Age Children and the Children's Global Assessment Scale were administered to 488 mother-child pairs. In multivariable models family cohesion was the only significant correlate of OCD (odds ratio=0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.91–0.98). Gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, guardian status, adaptability, undesirable life events and desirable life events were not found to be significant predictors of OCD in models adjusting for cohesion. Note of the above variables were significantly associated with subclinical OCD. However, separate analyses of the 41 individual life events indicated seven specific events were significantly associated with OCD or subclinical OCD. These findings are at odds with the theory that overinvolvement of family members is a risk factor for OCD, though an association with overly rigid family structure cannot be eliminated based on these data. Further exploration of family characteristics is warranted.