Multicultural Education and Feminist Ethics

Feminist ethics supports the contemporary educational trend toward increased multiculturalism and a diminished emphasis on the Western canon. First, I outline a feminist ethical justification for this development. Second, I argue that Western canon studies should not be altogether abandoned in a multicultural curriculum. Third, I suggest that multicultural education should help combat oppression in addition to simply promoting awareness of diversity. Fourth, I caution against an arrogant moralism in the teaching of multiculturalism.     

Globalization or indigenization: New alignments between knowledge and culture

The pace, shape and meaning of development are cultural phenomena—fundamentally driven by the meanings people ascribe to their action, to the symbols they aspire to, and by the wider values contexts within which they are acting. However, people participating within the development process continuously confront a tension between the assertion of the cultural meanings of the local known social world and the assertion of the meanings of an idealized largely unknown social world that stretches beyond immediate experience, and that is particularly represented in commodity symbols and media images. Tension is therefore between indigenization or globalization. The product, greater valence of indigenization or globalization, results from the alternative ways in which tension between the two domains is resolved. In the modern social world access to knowledge, as well as the impact of knowledge embodied within technological artifacts, are key drivers in both the level of participation in development and the level of colonization of indigenized meanings by globalized frameworks of understanding. The current paper therefore focuses on the role of knowledge within the interactions between globalization and indigenization. The paper demonstrates that the general trend of development during the last half of the twentieth century has driven cultural change towards more globalized meanings and dependencies. The dynamics of technological access and change are centrally implicated. However, new opportunities are opening up at both local indigenized levels and within modernizing sectors, and the essence of these opportunities lies in capturing a cultural advantage. At the indigenous society level, a focus on capitalizing on indigenous technical knowledge can have enormous payoffs in terms of economic development outcomes. Meanwhile, a focus on linking local with modernizing sectors through bridging technologies and knowledge across indigenous and global cultures allows indigenous cultures to share in the economic benefits of modernization. And finally, a new wave of change is emerging in the modernized sector itself, opening up quite new opportunities for “small players”—whether they be small firms or small countries. The opportunities are set within change in the global orders of technology and science over the last five to ten years. What matters is the ability of these small players to be highly responsive, to capture knowledge flows through both technical and social capabilities of their people; in other words, global advantage follows from capture of local cultural strength. Stephen Hill is foundation director for the Center for Research Policy, located at the University of Wollongong, and established as a special research center of the Australian Research Council. More recently, he was appointed Regional Director of UNESCO for South East Asia and the Pacific. Professor Hill will assume his new appointment in June, 1995.     

See me,hear me: Using film in health-care classes

This essay argues that film deserves a place within the medical humanities curriculum and demonstrates effective strategies for employing it within medical ethics and humanities classrooms. Part One of the article emphasizes how and why medical ethics teachers can utilize documentary and fictional films, such as “Thomas Szasz and the Myth of Mental Illness,” “The Deadly Deception,”Whose Life Is It Anyway? and “Voices From the Front” in their courses. Such films encourage students to move beyond abstract debates and confront the human pain inherent in all ethical dilemmas. Part Two focuses on documentary and fiction film in the medical humanities classroom. In this section, the author details how to incorporates films, such asThe Doctor, The Waterdance andHospital, into the humanities classroom, juxtaposing them with various literary works, such asOther Women's Children, Borrowed Time, andCeremony. Part Three of the essay presents a detailed discussion ofThe Elephant Man andFrankenstein, illustrating how visual and literary texts compliment each other within the humanities classroom. Overall, the author demonstrates how films function as engaging and complex visual texts providing unique insights in the particularities of American health care and, as such, can become valuable components within medical ethics and humanities classrooms.     

A behavioral link between the oculomotor and cardiovascular systems

Although the eyes and the heart serve very different purposes, each receives autonomic innervation. Capitalizing on recent theoretical and technological innovations in the understanding and assessment of oculomotor and cardiovascular behavior, three experiments measured behavioral covariation between the oculomotor and cardiovascular systems. Measures of dark focus and dark vergence indexed oculomotor tone, and the spectral decomposition of variations in heart rate indexed cardiovascular control mechanisms. In Experiment 1, individual differences in cardiovascular parameters could predict individuals’ dark vergence (R²=.806) but not their dark focus (R²=.404). In Experiment 2, the same parameters were measured from subjects who experience either panic attacks (n=11) or blood phobia (n=9). Heart rate was positively correlated with dark vergence and the two subject groups were separable based on both oculomotor and cardiovascular variables. Using a within-subjects approach, Experiment 3 found that both dark vergence and dark focus tended to be nearer during sympathetic dominance of the heart than during parasympathetic dominance, within-subjects variations in cardiovascular parameters could predict dark focus, and between-subjects variations in interbeat intervals could predict dark vergence. Shared patterns of autonomic activation may be responsible for this eye-heart link.     

Memory impairment and source misattribution in postevent misinformation experiments with short retention intervals

The four experiments reported here provide evidence that (1) misleading postevent suggestions can impair memory for details in a witnessed event and (2) subjects sometimes remember sug-gested details as things seen in the event itself. All four experiments used recall tests in which subjects were warned of the possibility that the postevent information included misleading sug-gestions and were instructed to report both what they witnessed in the event and what was men-tioned in the postevent narrative. Recall of event details was poorer on misled items than on control items, and subjects sometimes misidentified the sources of their recollections. Our re-sults suggest that these findings are not due to guessing or response biases, but rather reflect genuine memory impairment and source monitoring confusions.     

Investigating the effects of multiple primes: An analysis of theoretical mechanisms

Is the size of a semantic-priming effect a function of the strength of the semantic context? This issue was examined in four studies using a single categorically related prime as the weaker context and four categorically related primes as the stronger context. Results indicate that, independently of prime-target SOA, four primes provide a larger priming effect than a single prime in a lexical-decision task, but not in a naming task. These data provide further support for the argument that different mechanisms mediate priming in the two tasks. In particular, only the lexical-decision task appears to be susceptible to higher-level processes that can be influenced by the number of primes. Priming in a naming task appears to be driven by more automatic processes. Possible accounts of this multiple-prime advantage in lexical-decision tasks are considered.     

Gts and interrogative tableaux

A variant of the standard deductive tableau system is introduced, and interrogative rules are added, resulting in a so-called interrogative tableau system. A game-theoretical account of entailment is sketched, and the deductive tableau system is interpreted in these terms. Finally, it is shown how to extend this account of entailment into an account of interrogative entailment, thereby providing a semantics for the interrogative tableau system.     

Teaching the Rescorla-Wagner model using STELLA-II

Although the Rescorla-Wagner model is widely taught in learning courses, most textbooks present a simplified version that does not contain all of its parameters. On the basis of Rescorla and Wagner 1972) and the Turbo PASCAL program by Lachnit, Schneider, Lipp, and Kimme! (1988), we created a simulation using STELLA-II, an icon-based program by High Performance Systems, Inc. We argue that this simulation facilitates teaching the complete Rescorla-Wagner model. Using trans-switching (Kimmel & Ray, 1978; Lachnit, 1986; Murrin & Kimmel, 1986) as an example, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the STELLA-II version of the Rescorla-Wagner model as a heuristic tool.