Engaging with Contemporary Challenges through Science Education Research
Engaging with Contemporary Challenges through Science Education Research

Author: Olivia Levrini

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-24

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 3030744906

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This book starts with the premise that beauty can be an engine of transformation and authentic engagement in an increasingly complex world. It presents an organized picture of highlights from the 13th European Science Education Research Association Conference, ESERA 2019, held in Bologna, Italy. The collection includes contributions that discuss contemporary issues such as climate change, multiculturalism, and the flourishing of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including the application of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities to science education research. It also highlights learners’ difficulties engaging with socio-scientific issues in a digital and post-truth era. The volume demonstrates that deepening our understanding is the preferred way to address these challenges and that science education has a key role to play in this effort. In particular, the book advances the argument that the deep and novel character of these challenges requires a collective search for new narratives and languages, an expanding knowledge base and new theoretical perspectives and methods of research. The book provides a contemporary picture of science education research and looks to the theoretical and practical societal challenges of the future.

The Art Instinct
The Art Instinct

Author: Denis Dutton

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0199539421

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The Dinka have a connoisseur's appreciation of the patterns and colours of the markings on their cattle. The Japanese tea ceremony is regarded as a performance art. Some cultures produce carving but no drawing; others specialize in poetry. Yet despite the rich variety of artistic expression to be found across many cultures, we all share a deep sense of aesthetic pleasure. The need to create art of some form is found in every human society.In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton explores the idea that this need has an evolutionary basis: how the feelings that we all share when we see a wonderful landscape or a beautiful sunset evolved as a useful adaptation in our hunter-gather ancestors, and have been passed on to us today, manifest in our artistic natures. Why do people indulge in displaying their artistic skills? How can we understand artistic genius? Why do we value art, and what is it for? These questions have long been asked by scholars in the humanities and in literature, but this is the first book to consider the biological basis of this deep human need.This sparking and intelligent book looks at these deep and fundamental questions, and combines the science of evolutionary psychology with aesthetics, to shed new light on longstanding questions about the nature of art.

Unwanted Beauty
Unwanted Beauty

Author: Brett Ashley Kaplan

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0252030931

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Controversial questions about beauty in artistic depictions of the Holocaust

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Author: Richard P. Feynman

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2005-04-06

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0465013120

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This collection from scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner highlights the achievements of a man whose career reshaped the world's understanding of quantum electrodynamics. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman-from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science-a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas.

The Book of (More) Delights
The Book of (More) Delights

Author: Ross Gay

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1643755471

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From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Perfect Me
Perfect Me

Author: Heather Widdows

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0691197148

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How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Roger Scruton

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2011-03-24

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0199229759

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In a book that is itself beautifully written, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful.--From publisher description.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

Author: Arthur C. Danto

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780674903463

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Danto argues that recent developments in art--in particular the production of works that cannot be told from ordinary things--make urgent the need for a new theory of art. He demonstrates the relationship between philosophy and art and the connections that hold between art, social institutions, and art history.