Editor's Note, April 2005
Elizabeth Haller
PhD Student and Instructor, Kent State University
E-mail: editoraee@hotmail.com
As always, enjoy this issue's submissions and, as you do, consider offering us a piece of your work for publication. We invite your continued perusal and encourage you to submit articles, poetry, and fiction for consideration in future issues of AEE. Please review our Call for Papers on this site for more details on submission requirements. If you are unsure whether your contribution would be suitable under the terms of our Call for Papers, please send along an inquiry, and I will be happy to respond forthwith. As always, do not forget to check out Grist for the Mill for possible submission ideas.
Lynne Fukuda provides us with the third of four insightful entries in a series titled "Curses, Nightmarchers, Wasps, and Archaeology: My Summer Adventures with the University of Hawaii Archaeological Fieldschool" for her monthly column, "The View from Here." According to Fukuda:
The supernatural was not a very popular topic in my youth, with the exception of the movie, Exorcist. Younger people nowadays are more open to the supernatural, accepting that, perhaps, there is an afterlife. More books are being published on ghosts, ESP, space aliens, near-death experiences, past life regressions, etc. It is a more acceptable world now, and for that I am very thankful; I will not be locked up in an institution for the insane. We are all natural beings. Our bodies go back to the Earth when we pass on, and yet, where does our soul go? Religions teach that souls go to Heaven or to the next world. And yet, do we have proof? It is some of us who are fortunate, or unfortunate, who are able to see, hear, or experience the spirits or ghosts of the dead. I am one of them. And thus, I write about them, hoping that even the dead can send us some of their wisdom so that we can still learn from them. We are all connected, the living and the dead. Death is not the end of life, but a continuation. We should never be sad that we are dying. Instead, celebrate life each minute, each day, because we are all in the process of dying. Faster or slower, we all end up in the same place. Archaeology speaks for the dead who left us clues to their daily lives. It is from them that we learn about their sufferings and their triumphs. Please let us give them applause. It has always been a harsh world and those who survive with stone-age technology were more creative and innovate than we can ever be today.
Our opening featured article is the second in a series written by Donovan Landers (see March 2005 issue). Stay tuned to the next and future issues of AEE to see where Landers will take you. I assure you it is well worth both the read and the wait. In this second installment, "Don's house call on a pregnant student becomes a descent into the bowels of eccentricity, classes in the 'bathroom' continue along the vector of the unorthodox, and a taste of bureaucracy becomes the taste of drama."
Mary Breunig's "Experiential Education-Principles and Practices Summary" is our second featured article. According to Breunig, this article "provides an overview of experiential education, exploring its historical underpinnings and offering examples of some of the principles and practices that support this pedagogy. The purpose is for educators to better understand experiential education theory as a means to develop ways of integrating it more fully into various sites of learning and teaching practice."
Christine A. James closes out this month's features with her article, "The Benefits of Comedy: Teaching Ethics through Shared Laughter." James notes that the article "elaborates on the value of comedy as a teaching tool for philosophers and professors. A number of examples show how comedy can provide fertile examples of ethical theory at work and how it can also be used to clarify cultural norms and values. The political activism and student empowerment involved in teaching Philosophy, Comedy and Film in southern Georgia" is also discussed in the article.
Samaa Gamie's contribution to AEE is comprised of six poems. Three were published in the March 2005 issue of AEE, and three appear here. Gamie has provided the following abstract for her poetry: "These poems reflect on the life of an Arab woman struggling to establish her self-worthiness and sense of self as opposed to all the inadequacies she was raised to embrace. They reflect on the loss of loved ones and the confusion and sense of injustice many Arabs feel as they live in countries controlled by autocratic regimes. I also reflected on the different thoughts and feelings that arise out of the constant media portrayal of Arab countries as the possible new 'enemy' after the end of the cold war and the defeat of communism. I tried to present in the poems an insight into who I am as an Arab woman and my deepest and innermost thoughts, insecurities and hopes."
Enjoy!
Academic Exchange Extra invites reader response to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.
- Web Editor
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Citation Reference: Haller, Elizabeth. (2005). AE-Extra. April. Available Online. [URL: < >. Created: 23 March 2005. Updated: --. Accessed: ] |