Ephemeral Experiences Research Articles

Teaching science in museums: The pedagogy and goals of museum educators

AbstractMuseum educators have a longstanding presence in museums and play a significant role in the institutions' educational agenda. However, research on field trips to science museums has predominantly explored teachers' and students' perspectives with little acknowledgment of the museum educators who develop and implement the educational programs the students experience. This study sought to describe instruction undertaken in, and goals driving, science museums' lessons through observations of museum educators followed by conversations with them immediately afterwards. Findings showed the ways in which educators adapted their preplanned lessons to the students' interests, needs, and understanding by manipulating the sequence and timing. The data revealed that, contrary to depictions in the research literature of teaching in museums as didactic and lecture oriented, there was creativity, complexity, and skills involved in teaching science in museums. Finally, the educators' teaching actions were predominantly influenced by their affective goals to nurture interests in science and learning. Although their lessons were ephemeral experiences, these educators operated from a perspective, which regarded a school field trip to the science museum, not as a one‐time event, but as part of a continuum of visiting such institutions well beyond school and childhood. These findings have implications for the pedagogical practices employed by museum educators, and the relationship between teachers and educators during school field trips, which are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 91:278–297, 2007

Ekstasis and the internet: liminality and computer-mediated communication

Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct significance to advancing understandings of the internet. The internet is a natural environment for liminality and ekstasis, a place where self and society must be made to exist in a process where both are translated into the conventions of the medium. Some people actively toy with these representations while others do not. However, in the final analysis these communicative dynamics are rooted in the liminal characteristics of the medium - not the motivations and intents of internet users themselves. Approaching the internet in this way stands in stark contrast to other latent conceptual orientations that are largely concerned with moral dynamics.

Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction in Coleridge's "Notebooks"

THE LAST THING COLERIDGE WANTED TO BE CALLED WAS AN EMPIRICIST, yet he devoted hours of his life to minute descriptions of optical illusions, hallucinations, and sensory oddities--spectra, as he calls them. He records occurrences as ordinary as after-images of colors, (1) double vision (N 1863, 2632), double take (N 2212), and reflections taken as objects (N 1844, 2557, 3159), and as dramatic as flowers on the curtain that turn into faces (N 2082); spectrum, of a Pheasant's Tail, that altered thro' various degredations into round wrinkly shapes (N 1681); a spectrum of his own thigh that registered touches as luminous white trails (N 1108); and the apparition of an acquaintance whom he knows not to be in the room. On the occasion of this last hallucination Coleridge recalls, once told a Lady, the reason why I did not believe in the existence of Ghosts c complementarily, he could not always summon fear and love for things that he thought real, pressing, fearsome, and lovable. His exclamation about the stars and moon in Dejection: An Ode--I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!(3)--is exemplary of the state of mind in question, one long contemplated in the secondary literature and considered utterly characteristic of Coleridge. Coleridge's generally pleasurable absorption in spectra stands in contrast to his terror of certain other, equally ephemeral experiences: obsessive thoughts and ideas, memories, and dreams as opposed to daydreams. Although they may seem similar--and what's worse, one may turn into the other--there is a strong distinction for Coleridge between spectra and these mental phenomena, which he calls spectres. While spectra are collaborations with the sensorium, spectres usually seem to take place inside the self, lack visual distance, and are involuntary: they are unwelcome, intractable impositions. (4) If Coleridge is sometimes puzzled by his attraction to spectra, he is even more puzzled and frustrated by his fear of spectres he doesn't believe in. Most men affected by belief of reality attached to the wild-weed spectres of infantine nervousness, he notes in a jotting of 1806, but I affected by them simply, & of themselves (N 2944). Coleridge's concerns--his investment in phenomena in whose reality he doesn't believe and his perplexity about what he should feel toward them--are not his alone. Qualities of derealization and hyperlucidity have been treated as signatures of the aesthetic and of ideology. Recent analyses of ideology observe that ideology can captivate while leaving reality testing untouched: the magic of commodity fetishes and the senseless resilience of cultural prejudices affect many people simply and of themselves. (5) Various philosophical traditions struggle, as Coleridge does, to articulate relations to merely apparitional appearances. In the history of these struggles, I want to suggest, attitudes toward phenomenality recurrently depend on attitudes toward diffuse, low-level dissatisfaction. In classical skepticism, dissatisfaction is what we're supposed to feel toward mere phenomena: the principle of akatalepsia, the idea that appearance tells nothing about nonappearance, is often treated as though it meant that appearance told nothing worth knowing. …

Culture Ingested: On the Indigenization of Phillipine Food

Other| February 01 2003 Culture Ingested: On the Indigenization of Phillipine Food Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Doreen G. Fernandez Doreen G. Fernandez Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2003) 3 (1): 58–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2003.3.1.58 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Doreen G. Fernandez; Culture Ingested: On the Indigenization of Phillipine Food. Gastronomica 1 February 2003; 3 (1): 58–71. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2003.3.1.58 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search This content is only available via PDF. Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Nomadic Tourism and Fleeting Place Encounters: Exploring Different Aspects of Sightseeing

This study scrutinizes the brief visual sensations of places and landscapes experienced by nomadic sightseeing tourists. It is argued that the comprehension of itinerant sightseeing excursions is influenced by the hegemonic time standards set by "travellers" and travel writers from foreign countries. To illuminate certain aspects of ephemeral experiences of places in mobile sightseeing tourism, the article refers loosely to the notions of natural attitude, contra-structure, and adventure. It is asserted that the transient encounter bestows access to adventure-like experiences of places and landscapes, as tourists are always in danger of being caught up in other roles, or of becoming embroiled in new everyday life routines, and may thus cease to notice the numerous facets of the places they visit. A noteworthy limitation of transient and ocular travel experiences is that certain aspects of foreign places cannot be understood or experienced in the course of a brief tourist visit alone. It is suggested that the time restrictions inherent in regular holiday tours usually result in a transient experience of places and landscapes as the only alternative for those desiring to gain first-hand and predominantly visual impressions of distant territories.

The Contours of the Visual Arts in Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Text/Image/Phantasm

One of the chief concerns of German Romanticism is the nature of the relationship between the subjective character of perception and its artistic representation. The Romantics asked, moreover, whether the possibility of that representation somehow presupposes a clear and certain answer to the question as to whether there exists a world external to our perception of it. This was by no means a settled score for German Romantic thought. If there is anything beyond our )wing: internal perceptions, then, for the Romantics, both canvas and page become sites of contestation, as they are the spaces on which ephemeral experience is said to be represented in the material world. Art understood in these terms becomes the point at which something absent and intangible appears present and graspable. :land The fact that it exists simultaneously in the spaces of the material world and in pry the imagination produces contradictory relations of presence and absence -e reflected in figures such as metaphors and in psychological formations such as fetishes that have similar structures in that they invoke something intangible ty beyond that which is available to the hand or eye. These questions date at least ity as far back as antiquity, but in order to discuss them as they figure in German ty Romantic thought, and in particular that of Ludwig Tieck, we will begin with an Enlightenment treatment of the question, that of Lessing, as his aesthetic rloo arguments render explicit the division between the material world and the space iversity of consciousness. In this sense, the Romantic representation of the problem can be understood as an extended rhapsody on this Enlightenment theme. his support. In Laokoon, oder fiber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie Lessing prescriptively outlines the boundaries of poesie and the visual arts, with the