Wednesday, August 26, 2015

A to Z: Cultural Perspectives in Education

Vaughan M. Blaney
Director
BSc(UNB,Canada), BEd(UNB,Canada), TEFLA(University of Cambridge), MEd(HKU, Hong Kong)

Book: "A to Z: Cultural Perspectives in Education"


The Letter 'Z'...

Zany poetry
Thought-provoking art
Each has different tastes
Yet all comes from the heart

Zealously we maintain our differences, still all can agree that we:
  • feel a zap if we touch electricity
  • know zucchini is healthy
  • have a zodiac sign
  • know that a zither is a musical instrument
  • like to draw a zigzag pattern
  • realize zero means ‘none’
  • know that zaire is the monetary unit in Zaire
  • think zinnia is an unusual name for a plant
  • recognize a zorilla as an animal from Africa
  • know how to print the letter Z

We found that culture/person exchanges are mediated not only by language, visual means or actions but also, at a subconscious level, by an affectively charged conglomerate of representations, figures and experiential memories that we called background thinking. When a person speaks or thinks about any meaningful group, men, women, Black, White or whatever, the content of emotional memories, desires, interests is subconsciously activated at the periphery of consciousness.

We could describe background thinking in the area of personal and social identity, as a compression, experienced subconsciously, of all the contexts in which words, representations, or actions dealing with Self, Alter and society have occurred under conditions of affective arousal. When we display this “compressed material” through the method of representational contextualization, we find an invariant structure that I have called the affective-representational circuit, and the content of this structure, evolves in a continuous resonance with the world.


Zavalloni, Marisa

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