Notion Of Diversity Research Articles

The Acceptance and Recognition of Cultural Diversity in Foreign Language Teaching

Since we live in a multilingual and multicultural world, people having diverse cultural backgrounds are beginning to interact with each other more than ever. Therefore, in the study, the notions of cultural diversity, cultural awareness, intercultural competence and cultural dimension have been introduced. According to these concepts, people see and interpret things around themselves in different ways. What may be considered an appropriate act in a culture may not be considered so in another because when two or more people from diverse cultures try to communicate with each other, problems may arise due to their differing personal and social lives, customs and traditions, world views and so on. This is mostly because of the different foreign languages and cultures the interlocutors possess. Hence, learning and teaching a language requires having knowledge about another culture. In order to be a competent language learner, it is crucial to know the cultural context of which the language is a component. To do so, culture has to be incorporated into foreign language teaching. This can be achieved by helping the students overcome barriers that would hinder the growth of intercultural competence. Also, the teachers should help their students to gain an insight into different cultures. The learners should be aware of the fact that there are various cultures to be accepted, recognized, tolerated and respected other than theirs.

Dangerosité et milieu militaire

Objectives This work consists in a study of the links between the concept of dangerousness and military environment so as to clarify predominant factors, which have an influence on the expression of a potential dangerousness in a hierarchical and well-organized setting. Methods The concept of dangerousness refers to the uncertain eventuality of a threat, by implying potential realization of a danger, which can express himself according to multiple modalities, the common denominator of which articulates around a dimension of violence. The explicitation of the diverse notions, which are frequently associated with it in a partial semantic stepping, was a preliminary exercise necessary for the study of this complex phenomenon, by distinguishing what is of the register of the subject, its environment and the present situation. From these preliminary data, our study of the dangerousness was limited to that of a dangerousness applied to a given environment, the military environment, going from theoretical general points to a more restricted expression of the dangerousness. This transition finds its relevance in the absence of specificity a priori of the military population in comparison with the general population, where only the function here comes to particularize the subject. Peculiarities of expression of the dangerousness due to the dimension of constraints that the military environment implies, but also because of specificities organized around two essential coordinates, that liking the question of the weapons the availability of which appears to the foundation of the exercise of the function of serviceman and that bound to the question of the group within, which evolves the subject the interrelations of which modulate and sometimes condition the emergence of a potential dangerousness. Thus was described a particular dangerous collective phenomenon, the panic, whose emergence can deeply disorganize the group by representing a serious danger for its timelessness. The importance of the figure of the chief was emphasized by creating the unity of the group and giving sense to action; his lapse especially during time of war can be the source of important failures in the collective working leading to severe damages. Conclusions Dangerousness seems to be connected with army for intrinsic reasons, as the use of weapons, which is correlative to its missions and the interrelations between a subject and a group whose disorganization can induce grave consequences. Military constraints due to its strict rules and discipline can participate to an appearance of dangerousness in particular during operational situations, whereas training and preparation enable to reduce the dangerousness, which is involved in these extreme conditions.

Notions of diversity, British identities and citizenship belonging

This article reports on a small‐scale research study commissioned by the then Department for Education and Skills ([DfES] now the Department for Children, Schools and Families [DCSF]) in June 2006 to aid the work of the Diversity and Citizenship Curriculum Review Group, headed by Sir Keith Ajegbo. The findings concentrate on how ‘diversity’ is viewed by schools and the implications of this for developing pupil understanding of British diversity, British identities and citizenship belonging. The article highlights student perceptions and experience of a diverse curriculum together with their perceptions of ‘Britishness’ and citizenship belonging. In examining school and student understanding of diversity, this article explores two discrete aspects: ‘diversity’ education and education about ‘Britishness’. While supporting the need to value British diversity, the article nevertheless challenges the assumption that ethnic or cultural ‘heritage’ is always positive and/or learning about it positive.

Using forum theatre as university widening participation (WP) for social well-being agendas

This article traces a case study of how participatory theatre is used to make a positive impact on the widening participation (WP) agenda for one particular university in the United Kingdom. The WP agenda is a philosophical position taken by the UK government to restructure access to higher education and is underpinned by notions of equality and diversity to improve social health and national well-being. The project titled H.E. for me ? is a joint venue between academic staff and students on a BA (Hons) Acting degree programme and several external partners. H.E. for me ? aims to provide sixth formers with helpful information and insights into life at university. This innovative approach to dealing with WP uses the well-established convention of forum theatre in fulfilling objectives which give young people the opportunity to explore and interrogate HE related issues. Accounts of the lead in period and the creative engagement phase of the project are offered, as well as the research outcomes. This article identifies the impact of, and the lessons emerging from, this pilot (intended to become an ongoing programme) and raises several pertinent issues relating to the researchability of applied theatre.

Shakespeare and Happiness

This article addresses the idea of happiness in Shakespeare in light of new developments in psychology and moral philosophy. Shakespeare scholarship has been well served by these two critical discourses, both of which are instrumentally concerned with the subject of happiness. The recent spate of research on happiness within and across the two fields, as evidenced by the revival of classical virtue ethics and by the advent of new fields such as positive psychology, attests to the enduring relevance of the topic. Moreover, it provides a grand opportunity for scholars to reconsider what happiness means for Shakespeare, both as a psychological condition and as a philosophical ideal. This article suggests direction for further inquiry into the subject of Shakespeare and happiness by examining two plays: Richard III and Troilus and Cressida. Together, the plays showcase not only the depth of Shakespeare’s concern with happiness, but also the tragic potential that underlies a world where diverse notions of happiness compete for our interest.

Exploring the potential for a culturally relevant HIV intervention project: a Swaziland example

Typically, humanitarian workers view local conceptions of healing and disease as barriers to the prevention and treatment of HIV. This project aimed to engage Swazi traditional healers in discussions about the potential utility of conceptualizing HIV within the framework of Swazi traditional healing beliefs in order to determine the benefits and challenges of developing a locally-adapted HIV prevention model for Swaziland. Fieldwork was conducted in Swaziland from May through July 2006 to explore this hypothesis. The project evolved, through interactions with healers, to include observations on the dynamic nature of Swazi traditional healing beliefs and intervention practice. The study concludes that ethnographic approaches have the potential to enhance HIV intervention planning models by illustrating the complexities associated with collaboration. An anthropological perspective was able to facilitate an analysis of the diverse notions of ‘culture’ and the political and economic interests involved, which in turn proved useful in understanding what was at stake in this situation.

Introduction: investing in cultural diversity

The aim of this introduction is to contextualise the multifarious notion of cultural diversity by analysing, firstly, its relations with globalisation as well as the different normative actions undertaken by UNESCO to protect it against the negative impacts of the globalisation processes. This introduction also explains how globalisation can be beneficial for cultural diversity and contribute to new, fluid and deterritorialised phenomena. Finally, fear of cultural diversity, characterised by ethnocentric attitudes that attempt to preserve “authentic identities”, is briefly touched upon, along with the obvious limitations of such stances. The second part of this introduction presents the articles selected for this issue among the background papers commissioned by UNESCO to help to draft the 2009 World Report on cultural diversity. Each article sheds light on particular dimensions of cultural diversity: in combination, they provide a valuable overview of its multiple meanings and contexts.

Critical perspectives on cultural diversity in early childhood: building an inclusive curriculum and provision

This paper presents a discussion of the complexities that arise from addressing issues of cultural diversity in the early years context. It explores the challenges of developing an effective early years provision and pedagogy that values cultural difference within the framework of a mandated curriculum, The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in England. The discussion presents a critical debate based on the argument that the task of constructing an inclusive early years curriculum remains contentious. This is especially the case as children’s cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds challenge the assumptions of normality and universality that are typically produced within policy rhetoric and curricular guidelines for group provision. The discussion draws on the poststructuralist theoretical framework of Foucault and Derrida to critique notions of diversity and difference. It then provides an analysis of the EYFS as an example of the challenges that arise from attempts to address cultural diversity through the curriculum.

Badiou and the philosophy of social work: a reply to Stephen Webb

Imre R. Badiou and the philosophy of social work: a reply to Stephen WebbInt J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 253–258 © 2010 The Author, Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare.Stephen Webb's recent article ‘Against diversity and difference in social work’ claims that the work of Alain Badiou has the potential to be of great use in social work practice. Webb is faced with the problem of a discourse that has eroded any practical meaning attached to notions of diversity and difference, he laments the ‘ethical turn’ in social work practice and blames post‐modernism. Webb views the work of Badiou as a way to reinvigorate social work practice. I claim that Badiou's Being and Event is exclusive to ontology. Connections between Being and Event and possible ‘uses’ of Badiou's subtractive ontology, as an instrumentalisation, are not worthwhile. Critiquing Badiou's non‐ontological philosophies and political polemics is a better way to assess the practicality of his thought outside of his ontology. Webb's conflation of post‐modernism, neoliberalism and the difference, diversity and ethics discourse is also problematic and is critiqued here.

Board diversity, the logic of difference & the logic of equivalence: a critical study of the emergence of corporate democracy

Within the corporate governance literature the notion of diversity has emerged as an important regulatory mechanism (See for example the Tyson Report 2003). This interest has emerged in part due to various national legislative reforms introducing mandatory quotas for female directors. As the debate surrounding these reforms emerges and begins to take form, it is important that the prevailing paradigm of democracy is not taken for granted but is subject to critical scrutiny. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason in particular, the paper attempts to problematize notions of difference and representational democracy that lie at the heart of the reforms. The aim of the paper is to stimulate further debate on the democratizing potential of the recent political interventions in the composition of the boards of directors.

A Boat of Light: Zoharic Images in Zelda's Poetry

This intertextual study examines the relationship between Zelda's poetry and the Zohar , the chief canonical work of Jewish mysticism. The Zohar , with its poetic nature, is a fertile source for Zelda. I shall point out commonalities in a few of Zelda's poems with some core zoharic symbolism, engaging close readings of the modern poems alongside the kabbalistic texts. This intertextuality draws on the similar essence of mystical and literary texts, which alike aspire to express the inexpressible. My analysis adopts the notion of diversity of interpretations, attuned with zoharic hermeneutics. I read Zelda's poetry as a manifestation of the female's vantage point upon herself. For Zelda, the diverse character of the divine female, the Shekhinah , is a fruitful source both for identification and for a deep investigation of love relationships from a feminine perspective.

Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism

Since the early 1990s, language used to speak of cultural practices once thought of as "folklore" has become increasingly standardized around the term intangible heritage. Supranational intangible heritage policies promote a contradictory package that aims to preserve local identity and cultural diversity while promoting democratic values and economic development. Such efforts may contribute to the deployment of language that stresses mutual exclusivity and incommensurability, with important consequences for individual and group access to resources. This article examines these tensions with ethnographic attention to a Hungarian folk revival movement, illuminating how local histories of "heritage protection" meet with the global norm of heritage governance in complicated ways. I suggest the paradoxical predicament that both "liberal" notions of diversity and ethno-national boundaries are co-produced through a number of processes in late capitalism, most notably connected to changing relations of property and citizenship regimes.

Imagining a Peace Curriculum: What Second‐Language Education Brings to the Table

Just as peace and justice studies contributes much to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, the reverse is also true: second‐language classes are particularly rich sites to explore diverse notions of the common good and implications for peace and war. Because of the intercultural interactions in such classrooms, and because such classes focus on language and communication, these settings offer unique opportunities to develop pedagogies addressing interethnic conflict and the dehumanizing language and images that promote it. English as a Second Language classrooms are productive settings for the telling of stories that counter official ones. Here we focus on critical pedagogies and curricula in two classroom settings. In the first, a class including Muslim students employs a critical media literacy perspective to investigate post‐September 11th biases against Muslims. In the second, students read literature related to war and peace, examine its language, and make connections with their own stories and identities.

Women's rights in Peru: insights from two organizations

AbstractIn this article we explore the appropriation of ideas about women's rights in Lima, Peru through an ethnographic study of two non‐governmental organizations. SEA is a local NGO grounded in the Catholic Church's liberation theology movement, which seeks to promote integrated human development, and is linked to the worldwide Catholic Church. DEMUS, the second NGO, with feminist roots, actively fights gender discrimination and belongs to networks of international women's human rights movements and UN organizations. We argue that the struggle for women's rights is part of a broader struggle for recognition and equality for the poor, shaped by changing notions of national identity, citizenship and diversity. Our research revealed clear examples of vernacularization, whereby local context, values and culture played a decisive role in the adoption of women rights ideas. Encounters with other concepts and movements, including social justice, family violence and women's mobilization, intimately shaped the vernacularization of women's rights. Ultimately, the adoption of rights ideas involved changes in women's individual and collective empowerment.

Including disabled children at school: is it really as simple as ‘a, c, d’?

This paper presents and discusses a social justice strategy that may progress inclusion in schools. The framework for this strategy is grounded in the theoretical discussions by Nancy Fraser and Trevor Gale about distributive, redistributive, and recognitive models of social justice. None of these theoretical frameworks, however, in themselves, offer a clear way forward for marginalised and misrecognised groups, such as disabled children, who need both educational resources and recognition in inclusive classrooms. The authors propose, however, that the work of Fraser and Gale combines into a social justice strategy, which consists of three elements (agency, competency, and diversity, or ‘a, c, d’) that can lead to inclusion. When disabled children are provided with the opportunity to exercise their agency, demonstrate their competence, and transform and affirm notions of diversity, then inclusion is more likely to occur in the classroom. Data from two research projects are presented using this framework to illustrate this argument, and the proposed ‘a, c, d’ social justice strategy towards inclusion.

Enculturating human–computer interaction

This special issue of AI and Society is based on a workshop held in conjunction with Intelligent User Interfaces 2008 and brings together selected papers from this workshop as well as additional work on cultural aspects of human– computer interaction. The idea for this workshop was born from discussions in the German–Japanese project CUBE-G (CUlture-adaptive BEhavior Generation), which focuses on the challenge of integrating cultural heuristics into the interactive behavior of multimodal systems. Although cultural usability is a well-established field, deeper levels of intelligent multimodal interfaces lack sophisticated models of culturally influenced interaction. That is amazing insofar as our social and cultural background (our identity) influences how we behave and how we interpret behavior. Thus, it seems for instance inevitable for a persuasive system to adhere to the persuasive strategies that are predominant in the user’s culture. What are the main challenges for integrating cultural aspects in the human–computer interaction? First of all, we have to cope with the problem that culture is an ill-defined domain (Blanchard and Mizoguchi 2008) meaning that it is easy to argue with culture in an everyday conversation, but it is hard to pinpoint down the constituents of culture and its effect on interaction. Moreover, culture is a multilevel concept incorporating such diverse notions as national culture, work culture, music culture and many others, which each might specify situated and contextual heuristics for an interaction. To be able to enculturate human– computer interaction, parameterizable models of cultural interactions are necessary to prevent building unique versions for each culture in which a system is going to be deployed. In addition, different layers of phenomena exist that are influenced by culture like the verbal and non-verbal behavior, appearance, proxemics, learning strategies and many more. Data on cultural heuristics are sparse and often the structure of the available data on a specific phenomenon is inconsistent over different cultures due to an asynchronic data collection. The workshop brought together researchers focusing on bits and pieces of these problems allowing us to outline the challenges that lie ahead of us more clearly. Ideally, this will trigger the rise of a new research community working on cultural aspects of interactive systems beyond aspects of usability. The promising results from the first workshop led to a follow-up event, a parallel session on Enculturating HCI that will take place at HCI International 2009. M. Rehm (&) E. Andre Faculty of Applied Informatics, Augsburg University, Universitatsstr. 6a, 86159 Augsburg, Germany e-mail: rehm@informatik.uni-augsburg.de

Confessions of the ‘unhealthy’ – eating chocolate in the halls and smoking behind the bus garage: teachers as health missionaries

By drawing on interviews with administrators, faculty and staff at one school in the northeastern United States, this qualitative work considers the ways in which school leaders negotiate, resist or draw upon discourses associated with health, weight, nutrition and fitness to understand and experience their own bodies and interpret their roles and responsibilities at the school. Analysis of the narratives suggest that school leaders saw themselves as public examples from which students might resist and/or mimic (ill‐)health. Further, school leaders believed that it was only through their active engagement in and display of health that they were able to effectively evangelize their commitment to the social project of self. Thus, while schools could provide an important venue for young people to experience diverse notions of health and well‐being, without a school leader’s knowledge of or commit to exploring these alternatives, this outcome is unlikely.

Pendidikan Multikultural Sebagai Upaya Mewujudkan Perdamaian di Indonesia

This essay deals with the issue of multiculturality as a social reality and the need to implement a multicultural education to deepen the social knowledge of Indonesia and the Indonesians. The process of globalization has been invading almost all aspect of human life, which force ordinary Indonesians to come to terms with this global movement. The notion of diversity is very strong in Indonesia and eventually considered as an internal power to deal with the diversified society. However, not every Indonesian seems to understand and live this variety as a blessing. Many even consider it as a destructive factor, a lot of social unrests in Indonesia recently were actually caused by this lack of understanding. Therefore, the author suggests that a multicultural education is very crucial and urgently needed. The national constitution and other regulations are highlighted as the legal basis of the proposed education. Meanwhile, the implementation of this kind of education needs cooperation between all social elements in Indonesia.

An Implementation of the CORDRA Architecture Enhanced for Systematic Reuse of Learning Objects

The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) specification defines metadata of learning objects, which are used as the elementary reusable components in distance learning. The Content Object Repository Discovery And Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA) specification provides a common architecture for the resolution, discovery, and sharing of these learning objects. These two specifications together define standardized ways in which learning objects can be discovered and reused by content designers. However, the current CORDRA and the definition of objects in SCORM only allow an object to be copied, updated, and reorganized in a new content aggregation, which is used as a delivery package to end users. This paper proposes a revised CORDRA architecture and a reusability mechanism to make instruction design easier. In particular, it proposes a structure called a reusability tree for tracking the history of reuse of learning objects in CORDRA. This paper also defines the notions of similarity, diversity, and relevancy of learning objects to make it easier for users to precisely search for and reuse learning objects.

Strange fruit: why both sides are wrong in the race debate

The debate about race is back - and with a vengeance. In the past, scientific ideas of race reflected political ideas of inferiority and superiority, whereas today it reflects contemporary notions of diversity. Malik challenges both sides of the race debate, controversially revealing that it is not through the scientific study of human differences but through our political obsession with identity and diversity that racial ideas are once more catching fire. Weaving together politics, history, science, and philosophy, Strange Fruit discusses issues ranging from the science of skull measurement to the politics of the Holocaust; from diabetes rates among Hispanics to the fate of the Elgin Marbles; from the genetics of altruism to the struggle for Aboriginal rights; and, from the successes of Human Genome Project to the failures of multiculturalism. Huge in its reach and powerful in its grasp, the book uproots the conventional ways of thinking about race, science, and identity.