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development holistically. However, if collaboration is formal, when students do something together to meet the imposed expectations of teachers, the acquired skill will not be internalized and will not enter the personal hierarchy of values, thus it will remain external to students and will not foster their self-development.
We hold that discovery, is another way to acquire “personal” or “alive living knowledge” which resonates personal experience and attitudes of students. Students discover personal knowledge when they can conduct independent research. This is, when they analyse and define significance of meaningful things and events, when they reveal the sense of the happenings, model new situations and reflect on their experiences. Each of the above ways of personal discovery will foster developing the potential human identity of students, if it evokes their true interests and makes them fully involved.
Role modelling can also become a personal discovery if it provides conditions for transformation of meanings and values as well as for developing wide and flexible behavioural repertoires for students to prepare them to act effectively in a new cultural/social setting. In our classes we focus on a dramaturgical approach through the use of role plays, performing, and visual arts, as methods of meaningful learning/teaching. Although the use of role plays is not new as a training method, we use narrative plays and theatre training to encourage the search for personal meanings, which is novel. The dialogue of meanings takes place when students explore their “telling moments”, sculpt images of various characters and make their dramas. In this way they take experience from their inner world, give it a form and make it accessible to those in the outer world. Thus, students develop an authentic voice which enables them to make choices based on their values and experiences.
Through the medium of discovery, be it a role play, or a drama, or a research project, students adopt an integrative multisensory holistic approach to the concept of meaningful learning. They are encouraged to utilize the physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive processes to experience meaningful learning; improve self-knowledge and metacognition; acquire an enhanced understanding of the feelings and motivation of others; bolster self-efficacy.
Teaching is viewed in this context as facilitation of personal self-development of students. The teacher’s personality is crucial in meaningful education. She/he must be the author of her/his own way to be able to facilitate students’ personal growth. No teaching technique will help if teachers are not “authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives...”
(Palmer, 1998, p. 33). Authority comes when we, as educators, reclaim our identity and integrity. “Then teaching can come from the depth of my own truth – and the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind” (Palmer, Ibid, p.33).
Every generation reaches new boundaries while creating and developing its culture; and each individual internalizes both universal and national cultural attributes, thus forming and transforming a unique combination of personal, national and universal attributes as her/his own identity. Each individual and each successive generation depend on their predominant values and meanings while obtaining a more increased human cultural heritage and integrating personal culture in order to fulfil the inborn pursuit of identity. We speculate that global learning activities imbedded in regular academic studies facilitate the formation of an identity due to a broader context of universal, national and individual cultural attributes involved in the formation.
Synchronically, meaningful teaching/learning, applied in a global learning classroom, serves to facilitate personal self-growth of global graduates because it increases the anthropological constituency of her/his studies.
Meaningful learning and nurturing supports students’ innate aspirations to unfold uniqueness in the process of self-creation; which is experiential by nature and it moves them toward understanding the global world and themselves in relation to it. The main outcome of
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meaningful education is the student’s “awakened” ability to self-develop and to construct/fulfil her/his own life strategy according to her/his personal hierarchy of meanings and values. This outcome is hardly assessable in a traditional way as “it is pervasive and it makes a difference in a personality” (Combs, 1999, p.204). According to A. Nagata, “It involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters our way of being in the world” (Nagata, 2007, p.16). Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer uses the term mindfulness to describe “the continuous creation of implicit self-awareness of more than one perspective in life” (Langer, 2000, p.19).
By observation, the students who engaged in global learning activities within a meaningful curriculum, acquired skills of co-constructing personal knowledge while interacting with their peers in regular academic classes, which is novel in contrast with former “knowledge gathering” from teachers and books. For example, they are more actively involved in dialogues and reflections in academic classes, and they perceive things more critically. They obviously became more open and less rigid in expressing themselves in and outside classrooms. Their attitude toward school changed immensely since they discovered that they can use their own experience and feel personal engagement in studies.
Reaching out contributed a lot to overcome egocentrism of ideas as expressed in students' essays: “Global learning activities embedded in our intercultural communication class help us understand what we are and how we relate to each other as individuals from different cultures, this motivates me to learn more about myself as a human being “, “I realized that cage painting reveals much of what we have in common with other cultures as well as how different we are, and this makes me appreciate the diversity in the world” . We concluded from students’ academic and social performances and from student completed questionnaires
(winter term, 2008), that in the process of learning strategies of intercultural communication, they acquired self-management skills, became more efficient in planning and setting goals, and raised their degree of satisfaction with self-realization.
Interviews with students revealed that global learning activities enriched their personal meanings and transformed their hierarchies of values. The students increasingly recognized the value of a unique individual and his/her freedom to consciously construct her/his life strategy on the basis of universal moral values. The locus of self-control indicates that they are getting more and more control over their lives as they engage in meaningful global learning activities. We regard these indicators as subtle but promising indicators of students’ activated capabilities to taking more responsibilities for the authenticities of their lives.
According to the related literature on philosophy and psychology of a human being’s development, this can/will facilitate their efforts to grow personally and professionally, if their education supports it. As educators, we consider it our major task – to provide conditions for meaningful education with global learning activities imbedded, in order to provide opportunities for an individual to become an author of her/his life.
There is hardly any aspect of our lives that is unaffected by globalization and our increasing interdependence. One way to prepare our future graduates for a world with more demands for collaboration, multiple thinking perspectives and global outlook, is to integrate meaningful learning experiences into global learning throughout the education systems.
During the 2006-2007 years we implemented certain global learning activities in our intercultural communication classes, and we applied meaningful education approaches as a resource to prepare a global graduate. As we stated earlier, the outcome of such an integrated approach in education is hard to access or measure since it embraces a holistic transformation of an individual and her/his perspectives in life. Our considerations included the consistency
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of global learning activities embedded in meaningful teaching/learning, a larger group of students engaged in meaningful intercultural classes and the desire to develop a global educational program aimed at preparation of global graduates. We also discussed the options of assessing the resourcefulness of integrating different cultural/educational perspectives in a global educational curriculum.
Developing a personality is an ongoing journey, everlasting throughout life. Developing global learning competence is also such an ongoing process. Complementarity and variety of activities and approaches enrich one another. Meaningful education and global learning philosophies have much in common: the recognition that the individual becomes the centre of her/his own development, which entails that no one imposes her/his expectations on the individual, the acceptance of such universal cultural values and norms as freedom, creativity and responsibility. Psychologically, both approaches recognize the dialogic nature of human relations, and “doing” orientation of a human being, as well as use reflective experiences as psychological tools to apply in education/pedagogy. The philosophy of personality selfdevelopment can/will support different experiences in global learning, not limited to the ones, described in the paper, because it appeals to human transformations as a means of human survival and evolution. We think of this integration as a step in conceptualization of a new educational program.
For us, educators from different cultures, it is an invitation to develop higher awareness about each other and our educational perspectives, which add resources and opportunities for us to contribute to the improvement of the world. It is an opportunity to increase our consciousness and enlarge our sense of humanity and personal humanness. Since this is not a direct experience with another culture, the incorporation of videoconferences pertaining to the philosophies of education in our cultures, and reflective papers and journals among educators will facilitate the exchange of ideas and the development of new strategies for a global educational program.
Our vision is to create an online laboratory of global perspectives in education, with database systems accessible to broad audiences, providing information, research and papers on various educational experiences regarding global graduates’ preparation. The broad professional input from various philosophies of education will enable us to share and learn from each other as well to gain richer experiences of how to apply integrated approaches from various cultural perspectives and to research educational outcomes. Meaningful education focuses on personality self-development, thus it conceptualizes the process of self – improvement and world improvement. We consider that intercultural partnership in conceptualizing the process of self and world improvement into a program of global education can/will be beneficial for a global community because it meets its major expectations: peace and prosperity on planet Earth.
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Yulia A. Lamasheva
PhD in Social Sciences of Niigata University, Senior Instructor, Department of World Economy and External Economic Relations of Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law
TRANSNATIONAL IDENTIFY IN NORTHEAST ASIA
Enlargement, economic and political cooperation and integration are distinctive features of the international political and economic scene at the beginning of the 21st century. Whereas the European Union (EU) is fully integrated, Asia on the other hand still lags behind with regard to economic and political cooperation. Therefore there is an ongoing discussion about possibility of cooperation in Northeast Asia.
Traditionally cooperation of any kind is viewed through incentive theories, which are based on rational choice and game theory. Game theory begins with a set of actors, each of whom has a set of choices. When the players each make their choice, there is an outcome that is jointly determined by the choices of the players. The outcome determines the payoffs to the players. Traditionally, game theory has calculated what players will do by assuming the players are rational, that they know the other players are rational, and that everyone has the ability to do unlimited calculation. Clearly, the assumption of rationally is very strong.
In an iterated game, a player can use strategy that relies on the information available so far to decide at each move which choice to make. Since the players do not know when the game will end, they both have an incentive and an opportunity to develop cooperation based upon reciprocity. The shadow of the future provides the basis for cooperation, even among egoists. To specify a game, one needs to specify the players, the choices, the outcomes as determined jointly by the choices, and the payoffs to the players associated with the outcomes. One also needs a way of determining how the players will make their choices, or in the case of an iterated game how they will select their strategies.
Cooperation theory has three central theoretical questions:
1.Under what conditions can cooperation emerge and be sustained among actors who are egoists?
2.What advice can be offered to a player in a given setting about the best strategy to use?
3.What advice can be offered to reformers who want to alter the very terms of the interaction so as to promote the emergence of cooperation?
The cooperation theory answers them as follows.
An indefinite number of interactions is a condition under which cooperation can emerge. For cooperation to prove stable, the future must be a sufficiently large shadow. This means that the importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy. It requires that players have a large enough chance of meeting again and they do not discount the significance of their next meeting too greatly. In order for cooperation to get started in the first place, one more condition is required. The problem is that in the world of unconditional defection, a single individual that offers cooperation cannot prosper unless some others are around who will reciprocate. On the other hand, cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other. So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: the strategy cooperates on the first move, and discriminate between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not.
The answer for the question about the best strategy is reciprocity. Four properties make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary conflict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness