Toyo Eiwa University Repository / 東洋英和女学院大学学術リポジトリ
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A Study of Psychological Care and Support for Children Suffering from Disasters : Paulette and Chihiro
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Cooperation between a Junior High School and Museum in Implementing the New Course of Study : Deepening Knowledge of One’s Own Hometown
Get PDFA deeper study of tradition and culture is thought to be important in the new course of study set by the Ministry of Education for junior high school students in Japan. How can this be achieved in social studies education? One answer to this question was proposed by Ryuta Tsuboi, a researcher of social studies education, and Satoru Mizutani, a teacher at Toyo Eiwa Junior High School. They devised a homework assignment in the form of
a study report, gave the assignment to 192 seventh grade students, and evaluated the reports submitted by the students.
From the results it was found that a deeper study of tradition and culture can occur in social studies education by implementing such a study report as an assignment. Students not only learned about the historical characters that appeared in their textbooks, but also discovered information about other persons who had contributed to
their hometowns. Furthermore, by requiring students to visit local museums, notifying the curators of the museums ahead of time, and requiring students to ask the curators for more information about their particular topics of interest, students’ learning was deepened even further.departmental bulletin pape
The Course of Study for Senior High School English: Recent Developments, Implementation to Date, and Considerations for Future Research
Get PDFThe New Course of Study 2009 for Foreign languages: English (shin gakushuu shidou youryou: gaikokugo, eigo) will be enacted at the senior high school level from April 2013. The new curriculum further advocates a communicative approach to English language teaching, yet in spite of a succession of previous reforms to the national curriculum, communicative approaches to teaching English have not been widely adopted in Japanese senior high schools. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is threefold: First, I describe and explain key developments in the new curriculum; Next, I provide a review of the most recent empirical research into the implementation of the MEXT’s curricular to date, reassessing the role of university entrance examinations and drawing attention to a range of other obstacles operating against reform; Finally, I propose a suitable theoretical framework for researching teacher beliefs and intentions regarding their implementation of the Course of Study 2009.departmental bulletin pape
Social Anxiety and Media Uses in the Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake
Get PDFThis article investigates social anxiety and media uses of indirect victims in natural disasters. Surveys were conducted after the Tohoku - Pacific Ocean Earthquake in 2011 and data were collected from undergraduates of ToyoEiwa University and their parents.
Age and gender differences were examined in social responses such as anxiety and related behaviors after the earthquake. The results confirmed prior research in the communication field that media preferences in disasters depend on mainly where indirect victims are located at the time; however this research also indicates that age differences were also a strong predictor of digital media uses.departmental bulletin pape
Terminal Care as Spiritual Care : From the Viewpoint of History of Religions
Get PDFIf the definition of a human as homo mortalis is valid, the terminal stage of a human being’s life can be qualified as especially spiritual. This is because in this stage human beings will be seriously, and in many cases pain-fully, forced to realize their essential dimension. This essential dimension is our “essence” that distinguishes us both from animals who are not conscious of their own limits of existence, and also from gods who are by definition immortal. To care for those facing their own, closely approaching death should be regarded as an important case of spiritual care.
Reflecting on this condition of death from the viewpoint of the history of religions, in this short essay the author draws the reader’s attention to the significance of “hope” as expressed in some important and famous writings by Japanese and European religious authors in the medieval and early modern era. They were written in the time when death was still apprivoisé or “tamed” (i. e. death could be still easily accepted as if it were under a person’s control), to use the expression of Philippe Ariès. Contrasting with the prevalent philosophical reflections on death that seemed to exclude categorically any possibility of an afterlife, those medieval and ancient thinkers emphasized a possibility of hope beyond bodily death. Their ideas were similar to those of Socrates who concluded his philosophical examination about death with a “good hope” for afterlife just before his own death.
According to John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish monk, hope as a theological virtue is obtained through purification of the memory. The memory is transformed into pure hope by abandoning its ordinary function. This requires forgetting everything that one has acquired during one’s life and has stored in one’s memory, including a scientific world view that might hinder the person from imagining or thinking about any kind of afterlife. (John of the Cross’s concept of memory which had been inherited from Augustine, is not the same concept that is usually described in modern science.) Such teaching may sound somewhat inhuman for many contemporary people. For him, however, this total oblivion is not a forced separation from one’s life-long experience in this world but the required condition for liberation from the anxiety and fear that causes spiritual pain and agony.
Is it impossible for the people living (and dying) in our contemporary, civilized society to accept such ancient or medieval ways of conceiving a bodily death with a purified hope for afterlife? To answer the urgent question of how to care for the dying in the present day, historians of religions seek to contribute by interpreting past ways of thinking, living, and dying that could be very different from ours today. They also contribute by rethinking such historical themes to enlarge our own ossibilities.departmental bulletin pape
Connecting historical topics and civics lessons in junior high school social-studies education : Using the Taisho democracy as an example
Get PDFIn 2007, the National School Education Law was revised in Japan. The revisions put priority on developing students’ academic skills from elementary school to high school. In particular, improving students’ thinking power, judgment, and power of expression was insisted upon clearly. Now in 2012 in junior high schools, the new course of study has been fully carried out in all levels. When the new junior high school social studies curriculum is examined, it can be seen that substantial language development activities have been carried out. Furthermore, for junior high school students over the three years, the number of classroom hours increased from 315 hours to 350 hours for social studies. Modern history is
being studied still more deeply by being presented within historical contexts. For students in their 3rd year, the government guidelines for teaching require that history should be taught first for 40 hours, and civics should be taught for 100 hours after that. This means that in junior high school, social studies education there is a new subject that includes both the study of modern history and how it is connected to topics in civics. In this subject, students should be able to practice connecting ideas from different historical fields, and improve their thinking
power, judgment, and power of expression. In this paper the implementation of the social studies curriculum in 2011 in Toyo Eiwa Junior High School is evaluated. In particular, the topic of the establishment of the Universal Male Suffrage Act of the Taisho democracy, and whether students’ understanding of it has been deepened by their integrated study of the election system in civics will be examined. Data include students’ lesson notes, their answers to essay test questions, and their performance on the final examination.departmental bulletin pape
A Day in the Life of a Seagull : One Product of a Co-creative Bodily Expression Workshop in the Earthquake Disaster Area
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John Smith and Platonism in A Discourse Concerning the True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge
Get PDFThis article aims to clarify how Platonism functioned in the thinking of John Smith in his theological and philosophical work, A Discourse Concerning the True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge. Smith's Platonism consists not so much in a legalistic and petrified ideology as in incessant motion and ascent, driven by the love of wisdom and the ultimate truth. This basic mentality is reflected in Smith's understandings of "innate ideas" as being by nature resident within everyone's soul and making it possible to know God, of "Divinity" or "Theology" as "a Divine life" rather than "a Divine science," of the seat and place where the divine truth lies as having to be sought within man's soul, not outside of man, of the purification of man's soul as a prerequisite for attaining to divine knowledge, of warning against premature judgments in order not to fall into errors of dogmatism and fanaticism, and of the way of virtue as the formation of virtue and goodness within man's soul, a true living sense of them, and the vision of God with the eyes of a purified intellect (nous). Smith elucidates the ascents to divine knowledge in accordance with the explanation of the Stoic Platonist Epictetus. He shows that a man's soul progresses step by step to the upper dimensions ofcontemplating the truth in parallel with the degrees of the purification of the soul. Ascents start from the stage of an obscure opinion (doxa) to the stage of a more distinct opinion, then proceed to the lower level of science (episte-me-), and ultimately attain to divine knowledge. This is the way upward which is to be trodden by "the true and sober Christian who lives in Him who is Life itself, and is enlightened by Him who is the Truth itself, and is made partaker of the DivineUnction, and knoweth all things." This was nothing other than the way that John Smith, Platonist Christian, trod and that took him to the home above.departmental bulletin pape
Rebirth into Nothingness : Arthur Schopenhauer's Arguments on Life after Death
Get PDFMuch time has passed since life after death ceased being regarded as a serious theme of philosophy. This is due to both a decline in the Christian worldview, and due also to the epistemological limitations of metaphysical knowledge established by Kant. Arthur Schopenhauer belongs, despite his grounding in Kantian thought, to those last philosophers who discussed the afterlife. In this article, the author situates Schopenhauer’s views of life, death, and the afterlife in the context of his overall philosophical framework, and discusses their implication for contemporary thanatology.
As is well known, for Schopenhauer this world is both the objectification of the ultimate entity called “Will” (Wille) and the imaginary constitution of human “Representations” (Vorstellungen). For Schopenhauer, human life is the result of the blind force of the Will, a fate that must be overcome. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer death has the positive function of emancipating the ego-being from the laws of “principium individuationis” and “Satz vom Grunde,” which strictly determine the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer denied the idea of personal survival after death and argued that the human consciousness returns to the Will as Oneness. At the same time, influenced by Buddhist thought, he discusses the possibility of “rebirth” (not the reincarnation of the same ego-personality). Seeking empirical evidence for his metaphysical views, Schopenhauer was also absorbed in the study of contemporary literature about “animal magnetism,” but he was critical of naive spiritualistic interpretations of the phenomena.
The motive of the self-overcoming of the will is identifiable throughout the philosophy of Schopenhauer. This self-overcoming is realized both before and after death when the distinction between life and death will be transcended. It is not only the individual pursuit of the ascetics but also the process of emancipation of the cosmological Will itself from its blind urge. Seen from this world, the world that emerges after the overcoming of the Will seems to be “nothing.” After Schopenhauer, however, the “signature” of nothingness and being is reversed in the other world. Death and self-overcoming of the Will is, as it were, a new birth into Nothingness.departmental bulletin pape