Paradoxes Of Learning

As more is discovered about the powerful impact of lifelong learning on adults, educators are changing their views about how, when and where we learn. Learning is no longer defined only in the context of formal educational settings but in social context as well – including families, the workplace, and religious and political groups. This book explores how learning is our lifetime quest to understand personal identity, purpose and meaning while conforming and adapting to the perceived and real confines of our paradoxical society. The author examines the complex social experience of learning, revealing how culture, gender, race and other societal factors shape an individual’s identity and ability to function in relationships – the basis of all learning. He also discusses the difficult paradox of cultivating creative thinking and reflective action in a society that values the acquisition of degrees, certificates and titles over actual learning and growth.

Learning from Singapore tells the inside story of the country’s journey in transforming its education system from a struggling one to one that is hailed internationally as effective and successful. It is a story not of the glory of international test results, but of the hard work and tenacity of a few generations of policy makers, practitioners and teacher trainers. Despite its success, Singapore continues to reform its education system, and is willing to deal with difficult issues and challenges of change. Citing Singapore's transformation, author Pak Tee Ng highlights how context and culture affect education policy formulation and implementation. Showing how difficult education reform can be when a system needs to negotiate between competing philosophies, significant trade-offs, or paradoxical positions, this book explores the successes and struggles of the Singapore system and examines its future direction and areas of tension. The book also explores how national education systems can be strengthened by embracing the creative tensions generated by paradoxes such as the co-existence of timely change and timeless constants, centralisation and decentralisation, meritocracy and compassion, and teaching less and learning more. Learning from Singapore brings to the world the learning from Singapore—what Singapore has learned from half a century of educational change—and encourages every education system to bring hope to and secure a future for the next generation.

The world of 2017 is unrecognisable. In September, a robot, YuMi (with incredibly expressive nuances) will conduct a Tuscan orchestra while Andrea Bocelli sings Woman is Fickle (La donna è mobile) from Verdi’s Rigoletto. University students have invented a ‘rowbot’ which is faster than the Cambridge and Oxford boat crews in the annual regatta and they are challenging rivals to compete in a new hi-tech event: the Rowbot race. The Australians have developed Hadrian X which can lay 1000 bricks an hour – a task that would take two humans a day or two. De Laval International’s cow-milking robot is being deployed in America to challenge the humans! All routine jobs will soon be carried out by robotic machines. This situation is depressing students who are striving to find jobs and feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of life. Education promotes compliant rather than creative learners, employing out-dated teaching models, which aimed to prepare pupils for routine work in factories and other places. Today, these mundane tasks are being taken over by artificial intelligence, so greater attention to learning needs and personal development is required for higher-level work, to be ahead of our new robot rivals! Students must acquire excellent abilities to communicate, collaborate and create, for coping with a rapidly changing, challenging, complex world. This book is the output of the first UK Doctorates by Professional Record, who have studied present society needs, formulating and implementing new ideas into their practice, to make learning more holistic, relevant and fun! Their suggestions encourage us to reflect, review and refine our present, outdated systems and produce a blue-print for a brave new world. Stories will make you smile at successes and wince at the failures. Sharing experiences, supports, energises and expands learning. The authors hope that students will not leave school hanging on the negatives but will in future be swinging with the positives, that a radical new approach to learning brings for them. Chapters in this book are contributed by: Jonathan Adeniji, Max Coates, Richard Davies, Rob Loe, Pauline Lovelock, Riccarda Matteucci, Elizabeth Negus, Kim Orton, Luke Sage, Rosemary Sage, and Sera Shortland.

"Learning from Lying narrates a new literary history as seen through the lens of mystification. Beginning with an examination of mystification's elaboration during the century of Enlightenment, the book accounts for mystification's distinctiveness relative to other deceptive forms, particularly forgery, and provides a timely intervention in current debates about the study of fakes. Readings of works by Denis Diderot, Prosper Merimee, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer follow out the cosmopolitan roots of the genre in the Republic of Letters and show how it theorizes literature through practical experiment. For when textual imitation is revealed, it unveils the necessary collusion between reader and writer that allows literature to exist as such."--BOOK JACKET.

Why do great companies and other organizations fail, sometimes abruptly? Why do admired leaders fall from their organizational pedestals? Why do young and promising managers derail? Why do organizations create and reinforce rules that manifestly damage both them and those that they employ, serve and sustain? Leadership is a much-discussed but ill-defined idea in business and management circles. Analysing and understanding the skills and behaviours exhibited in leadership practice reveal that leaders exhibit paradoxical activities that challenge our understanding of organizations. In this text, the authors identify leadership behaviours that compete towards business equilibrium: selfish versus selfless, distance versus proximity, consistency versus individuality, enforcing professional standards versus flexibility and control versus autonomy. These paradoxical dilemmas require a reflexive and analytical approach to a subject that is tricky to define. The book explores the paradoxes of power and leadership not as a panacea for solving organizational problems but as a lens through which leadership and power are seen as an exercise in dynamic balance. Read this book as an invitation to the paradoxes of power and leadership that frame organizational life today. Be prepared to find surprises – and some counterintuitive arguments. Providing a thought-provoking guide to the traits and skills that will help readers to understand and navigate paradoxical leadership behaviour, this reflexive book will be a useful reading for students and scholars of business, management and psychology globally.

Teaching is a paradoxical activity, beset by ironies and apparent contradictions: Educated people are autonomous and self-directed, but schooling generally involves expert direction of compliant and dependent students. Empathy, imagination, and creativity characterize fully actualized people, but these qualities seem at odds with mastering received bodies of material. Societies value testable facts and abilities, but these are of little use, and can even be dangerous, without maturity of character. Educators rightly value teaching for maturity, but risk in the process indoctrination or natural resistance. Modeling forthrightness would seem indispensable to character development, but some of the most effective teachers induce learning by good-natured trickery. These are genuine paradoxes, in that even when we work out credible resolutions for them they tend not stay solved. Their tensions continue to bedevil us in each new class, with each new student, and at each phase of learning. The insights and conclusions of this conversation are neither inflexible doctrines nor a compendium of abstract disputes unrelated to actual teaching practices. Rather, the reader at once witnesses and participates in the philosophy of education as a vital process, experiencing the kind of passionate and imaginative conversations that good teachers often have, and from which they learn to understand and engage the elusive art of teaching.