Used as the basis of the program at the Equinox Holistic Alternative School in Toronto, The Holistic Curriculum advocates for an integrative approach to teaching and learning with a focus on developing a deep connection between mind and body.

When the accrediting association for collegiate schools of business, AACSB International, reformulated its accreditation standards to include a systematic assessment of undergraduates’ progress in analytic and reflective thinking, our interdisciplinary team looked at available instruments. Logistical problems, concerns about validity, and an interest in assessing quantitative skills not covered in the available instruments led us to devise the Texas Assessment of Critical Thinking Skills™ (TACTS™). As part of the process we followed a suggestion from Scriven and Fisher and incorporated novel (...) multiple-rating items. We went through a lengthy process of test validation, employing both expert consultants and a large-scale comparison between performances on a standard critical thinking skills test and the TACTS™. Consequently, our university is in a position to regularly assess the progress made by undergraduates from our College of Business in acquiring the relevant analytic and reflective thinking skills. (shrink)

When the accrediting association for collegiate schools of business, AACSB International, reformulated its accreditation standards to include a systematic assessment of undergraduates’ progress in analytic and reflective thinking, our interdisciplinary team looked at available instruments. Logistical problems, concerns about validity, and an interest in assessing quantitative skills not covered in the available instruments led us to devise the Texas Assessment of Critical Thinking Skills™ (TACTS™). As part of the process we followed a suggestion from Scriven and Fisher and incorporated novel (...) multiple-rating items. We went through a lengthy process of test validation, employing both expert consultants and a large-scale comparison between performances on a standard critical thinking skills test and the TACTS™. Consequently, our university is in a position to regularly assess the progress made by undergraduates from our College of Business in acquiring the relevant analytic and reflective thinking skills. (shrink)

The recent highlighting of meat’s environmental costs has added acute urgency to longstanding moral and political contestations around animal agriculture and the meat economy. This introductory essay sets out the volume’s key premise that the practices of our contemporary meat regime are shaped as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by ecological debate, political deliberation and moral reasoning. Specifically, drawing on work by Melanie Joy, Annie Potts and Nick Fiddes, we explore the value of literary-critical perspectives as a complement (...) to the more familiar ethical and political analyses. We begin by offering an historical overview of meat culture as it has developed in the last century in Europe and North America before outlining the ways in which a post-anthropocentric literary practice is emerging in relation to this context. This survey allows us to articulate the volume’s contribution to work in animal studies and the more recent field of vegan studies, as formulated by Laura Wright and others. (shrink)

This collection of essays centers on literary representations of meat-eating, bringing aesthetic questions into dialogue with more established research on the ethics and politics of meat. From the decline of traditional animal husbandry to the emergence of intensive agriculture and the biotechnological innovation of in vitro meat, the last hundred years have seen dramatic changes in meat production. Meat consumption has risen substantially, inciting the emergence of new forms of political subjectivity, such as the radical rejection of meat production in (...) veganism. Featuring essays on both canonical and lesser-known authors, Literature and Meat Since 1900 illustrates the ways in which our meat regime is shaped, reproduced and challenged as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by political contestation and moral reasoning. (shrink)

Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach. By Nel Noddings. Pp. 319. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. $30 (US). ISBN 0-521-85188-2 (hbk).

Among the claims made for online learning is its potential to foster critical thinking, particularly by engaging students in asynchronous discussions conducted in writing. This paper reviews and critiques these claims. It first examines the uses of writing and classroom discussion in modeling and encouraging critical thinking. It then reviews some of the arguments for the possible advantages of online interaction over face-to-face discussion. Finally, it critiques these claims by comparing the specific features, which distinguish the experience of participation in (...) asynchronous written discussions from synchronous oraldiscussion. This comparison illuminates the role of oral discussion in modeling and developing students’ critical thinking skills and points out difficulty of doing so through asynchronous computer-mediated discussions. (shrink)

Holistic Learning is designed as a practical guide for teachers on how to integrate curriculum around human processes and human themes. Specifically, problem solving (human process) and mythology (human theme) have been selected as vehicles for curriculum integration. Along with a number of specific strategies for classroom use, the book includes a rationale and framework for integrated studies, teaching approaches in problem solving and mythology, guidelines for writing units in integrated studies, and implementation strategies for integrated studies. The primary audience (...) is teachers at the intermediate and senior levels, although muc of the material is applicable to teachers at all levels of the curriculum. Individuals in curriculum leadership positions (e.g., principals, co-ordinators, and superintendents) should also find the work of interest. Holistic Learning is a practical guide for teachers seeking approaches to integrate diverse subject matter. (shrink)

Descende caelo, Horace's ode 3.4, challenges the reader with an elaborate Pindaric architecture embracing seemingly disparate elements. After an opening invocation, the poet discourses at length on how the Muses protect him, then abruptly notes that those goddesses also nourished Octavian after his recent military campaign. This breaks off into a composite Titanomachy/Gigantomachy, followed by a set of maxims which the poet further illustrates with other mythical exempla. This paper contends that the relationship among these various parts comes into clearest (...) focus in the five-line description of the god Apollo that closes the Gigantomachy. This passage lies at the heart of the entire poem's major interpretive issuespoetics, panegyric, allusion, and structure but its pivotal role in the ode deserves fuller acknowledgement. (shrink)

It is a dreadful thing to see men, especially in public life, parade the superiority of their moral choice. It is dreadful because it leaves one helpless. One knows one can’t differ with them on the basis named, namely a choice of good over evil. You can talk to a man who chooses IBM for a rise in the market, but not to a man who chooses right or wrong, or says he does. Discourse collapses.

Who Moved My Cheese? showed readers how to adapt to change. Fish! helped raise flagging morale. Execution guided readers to overcome the inability to get things done. QBQ! The Question Behind the Question , already a phenomenon in its self-published edition, addresses the most important issue in business and society today: personal accountability. The lack of personal accountability has resulted in an epidemic of blame, complaining, and procrastination. No organization-or individual-can achieve goals, compete in the marketplace, fulfill a vision, or (...) develop people and teams without personal accountability. The solution involves an entirely new approach. We can no longer ask, "Who dropped the ball?" "Why can't they do their work properly?" or "Why do we have to go through all these changes?" Instead, every individual has to ask the question behind the question: "How can I improve this situation?" "What can I contribute?" or "How can I make a difference?" Succinct, insightful, and practical, QBQ! The Question Behind the Question provides a method for putting personal accountability into daily action, which can bring astonishing results: problems get solved, barriers come down, service improves, teamwork grows, and people adapt to change. (shrink)

In his “Theology and Falsification” Professor Antony Flew challenges the sophisticated religious believer to state under what conceivable occurrences he would concede that there really is no God Who loves mankind: ‘Just what would have to happen not merely to tempt but also, logically and rightly, to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put…the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you (...) a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God”?’. (shrink)

While it is still some way from commercial production, in vitro meat is drawing significant media coverage. IVM’s promise is meat without suffering, with a diminished ecological footprint and potential for addressing global food shortages. For all its novelty, IVM has been present in creative literature since at least 1881, with a particular concentration of references appearing in Cold War science fiction. After an initial survey of the literary pre-history of in vitro meat, this chapter focuses on Frederik Pohl and (...) Cyril Kornbluth’s 1952 novel The Space Merchants, a stinging critique of post-war programmes of agricultural intensification that revolves around Chicken Little, a decades-old “hundred-ton lump of grey-brown rubbery flesh”. Although the novel nostalgically valorises a lost pastoral world of purportedly authentic human–animal relations, The Space Merchants is not a straightforwardly conservative text, however, but one which raises crucial questions about the cultural meaning and ideological function of IVM. (shrink)

In every domain, the philosopher finds some principle which is unfalsifiable in so far as all experience is interpreted in accordance with it. This principle is tautologous or analytic-within-its domain in that it defines fundamental terms with which it characterizes experiences: Newton’s Laws define “mass” and “the equality of times”; the Principle of the Rectilinear Propagation of LIght defines “light”; the Principle of Evolution defines “adaptation” and “natural selection”; and the Principle of the Conservation of Energy defines “a closed system.” (...) Moreover, each principle is employed as a methodological rule or a tacit imperative to the investigator to interpret experience or to draw inferences in accordance with it. Nevertheless, each principle has empirical content: not only by virtue of its place within its respective domain but also because there are sufficient rules of correspondence which make the statement-form empirically relevant; not only because the principle itself is taken to be true but also because empirical inferences are drawn in accordance with it. To construe these principles as mere counterfactuals would be clearly incorrect. Counterfactuals, as Rescher would characterize them, are “belief-contravening suppositions” because certain beliefs are excluded if one is to be consistent. Although this is certainly true of these principles, the range of beliefs contravened is far larger than those beliefs excluded in mere laws of nature. For, to give up these principles would be to give up explaining the entire domain of experience to which they are applicable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtual GalleryJohn Clair Miller* Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair (...) Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller. Click for larger view View full resolutionPhotograph by John Clair Miller.Footnotes* The photographs in this issue were taken by John Clair Miller, an architect who has a practice in the upstate New York area and is currently a Professor of Design in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. The black border which frames each image was made in the darkroom by printing the edge of the negative at the same time as the picture was printed. These photographs are part of a series, “Reading the Surface,” and all are “Untitled.” Professor Miller began this series in 1977 on the coast of Maine, Down East.Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtual GalleryThe collages were constructed by John Clair Miller, an architect and currently a Professor of Design in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. They are part of a series produced in Rome, Italy, while teaching in the Cornell Architecture Program in Rome, Fall 1998. The material used in the compositions was collected from layers of old and recent posters mounted in the streets of Rome, and they (...) were composed in a sketchbook five by eight inches. They are formal compositions without subject matter. Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolutionCopyright © 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)