Zeugma

Observations upon Japanese social habits

If the title of this post has an Enlightenment ring, it’s deliberate.  This second visit I came equipped with a modest knowledge of Japanese history, which is utterly fascinating; but it’s the social habitus that seizes you.  

More thoughts on Japanese legal education

In Schiphol airport waiting for the Glasgow flight, still thinking on the experience of the seminars.  A lot of what we talked about was grounded in Dewey’s educational pragmatism (more of Dewey & Japan in another post).  For Dewey, learning is a social process primarily.  As he points out in Experience and Nature, the achievement of social ends cannot be reduced to prior rational self-interest alone.  Human learning is inevitably drawn to the social sphere where it enacts itself within a social context, and becomes more sophisticated and at the same time more open to change and improvement:

Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication. (LW, 10, 28)

Seminars: Kobe University Faculty of Law

I was invited by Akira Saito, professor of law at Kobe University Faculty of Law, to hold seminars on what we were doing in the GGSL with regard to transactional learning and technology.  I'd previously worked with another law school, Kwansei Gakuin, in Osaka, close by Kobe, where faculty developed a version of our sim software, and also used standardized clients.  On a visit to see this and to report on our progress in Glasgow what I found really interesting was the way that simulation had been interpreted locally, not just to fit legal educational and jurisdictional needs, but also to account for cultural differences in approaches to teaching and learning at a fairly deep level.  A bid to the MacArthur Foundation to investigate the way that six cultures internationally (Taiwan, Japan, Netherlands, Scotland, Australia, USA) interpreted the use of simulation in legal education didn't attract funding, but it's still a fascinating subject I want to investigate .

Intellectual tools mediating thinking

Vygotsky's notion of intellectual development was based on the idea of 'emergence or transformation of forms of mediation' (Wertsch, 1985, 15).  Certain intellectual tools, in other words (ie 'forms of mediation'), give rise to certain forms of thinking.  The remarkable thing about Vygotsky's formulation is how it liberates our thinking about culture, and particularly educational history.