"Humiliation in the Academic Setting"

A Special Symposium Issue of
Experiments in Education
published by the S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, XXXVI, 3, March 2008

The S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research is a non-profit organization in Chennai, India. It was founded by the late Padma Shri. S. Natarjan. It is promoting research and development in the field of education. It has its official journal Experiments in Education, both printed and e-version, and is supplied free to members. ISSN 0970-7409.


This is the cover page - please click on this picture to see it larger

Editor: Dakshinamoorthi Raja Ganesan


Guest Editor: Philip Brown

Where the Mind is Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broke up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
- Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate (Literature), 1913

Introduction to the Special Symposium Issue by Dr. D. Raja Ganesan
This issue of Experiments in Education is a special symposium issue on the theme of Humiliation in the Academic Setting.
We requested Dr. Evelin G. Lindner, Founding Director and President of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies and recipient of the 2006 SBAP Award for Applied Psychology (http://www.humiliationstudies.org/) to contribute an article for our special issue and also suggest a Guest Editor for the symposium. She suggested Prof. Philip M. Brown whom we then invited. Prof. Philip M. Brown, the Director of New Jersey Center for Character Education, located in Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University kindly accepted our invitation and also contributed an introduction to the special issue.
Dr (Ms). A. Renuka, our Associate Editor, has taken on the responsibility to coordinate the publication of this issue.
Dr. D. Raja Ganesan
Editor, Experiments in Education

General background of the journal
Experiments in Education is a monthly professional journal, currently in its thirty fourth year of continuous publication, enjoying all India circulation and being brought out by the SITU Council of Educational Research, a registered, voluntary, non-profit association of teachers, teacher educators, and other professionals and academicians interested in the cause of educational research and development. The council was established in 1954--that is, fifty two years ago.

Earlier editions of Experiments in Education included an editorial that Dakshinamoorthi Raja Ganesan wrote on "Humiliation in the Classroom." Dakshinamoorthi Raja Ganesan carried a series in the mid-eighties on "New Horizons for Educational Research" and it was inaugurated with a contribution written specifically for the journal by the late Dr. Malcolm Adisesiah, who had been Acting Director General of UNESCO. Dakshinamoorthi Raja Ganesan contributed with articles such as "Humour in the Classroom," "Boredom and Education," "Suicide and Education," "Anger and Education," "Depression and Education."

As Secretary of the S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, Dakshinamoorthi Raja Ganesan kindly offers to print and circulate extra copies of the journal inland among teacher education institutions which are not currently in the mailing list and also among fellow members on two committees on curriculum and on evaluation of the National Council for Teacher Education on which he is a member, and the members of the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the National Council for Educational Research and Training. He also kindly offers to send it to fellow members in the South Asian Consortium for Teacher Education and Development comprising India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maledives.

Dr. D. Raja Ganesan in June 2005
If our symposium will spark interest in studying and comparing the experience of humiliation across at least two countries I feel we can feel proud and happy about it.
Pre-announcement of the upcoming Special Symposium Issue on "Humiliation in the Academic Setting."

 

Contents List

1. Ganesan, Dakshinamoorthi Raja (2008)
Symposium on Humiliation in the Educational Setting: Introductionary Note by Dakshinamoorthi Raja Ganesan
In Ganesan, Dakshinamoorthi Raja, and Brown, Philip M. (Eds.), Humiliation in the Academic Setting: A Special Symposium Issue of ‘Experiments in Education’, New Delhi: S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, XXXVI (3, March 2008), pp. 4-8.

2. Brown, Philip M. (2008)
Humiliation in the Educational Setting Introduction to the Special Issue: Editorial by Philip M. Brown
In Ganesan, Dakshinamoorthi Raja, and Brown, Philip M. (Eds.), Humiliation in the Academic Setting: A Special Symposium Issue of ‘Experiments in Education’, New Delhi: S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, XXXVI (3, March 2008), pp. 9-50.

3.  Greene, Michael B. (2008)
School Violence, Human Rights, Dignity and Humiliation
In Ganesan, Dakshinamoorthi Raja, and Brown, Philip M. (Eds.), Humiliation in the Academic Setting: A Special Symposium Issue of ‘Experiments in Education’, New Delhi: S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, XXXVI (3, March 2008), pp. 51-60.

Abstract: School violence is generally divided into two major classes: serious violence which includes behaviors that are intended to cause physical injury to the victim and less-serious forms of violence in which behaviors or actions are intended to cause distress, fear, humiliation, physical discomfort, or intimidation in the victim. In this paper, school violence is examined through the lens of a comprehensive norm-based, human rights perspective. A human rights framework (HRF) for understanding and responding to school violence is presented in this paper, which is based on the Charter of the United Nations as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Within the HRF, dignity and honor are centrally valued. The paper advocates that by making the different forms of violence in the school setting visible, through the active participation of students in their own learning experiences, and in critiquing and generating human codes of conduct, students, staff, and administrators learn to recognize, analyze and find just solutions to these problems.

4.  Lindner, Evelin Gerda (2008)
The Educational Environment as a Place for Humiliating Indoctrination or Dignifying Empowerment
In Ganesan, Dakshinamoorthi Raja, and Brown, Philip M. (Eds.), Humiliation in the Academic Setting: A Special Symposium Issue of ‘Experiments in Education’, New Delhi: S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, XXXVI (3, March 2008), pp. 61-70.

Abstract:
This article addresses the way the educational environment has contributed to the manipulation of young students to perpetrate atrocities. In Japan, it was the quest of young brilliant students for aesthetics, beauty, meaning and their sincerity and dedication that was manipulated so as to make them 'volunteer' to die as suicide pilots. In Rwanda , academia was also involved in instigating genocide. ' Africa 's Murderous Professors' is the title of an article describing how scholars paved the way for genocide. Radio Mille Collines blasted genocidal propaganda into the air. The entire society was mobilised, and academia was deeply implicated in efforts to promote ethnic cleansing.
It is suggested that it is a fundamental responsibility to protect children, students and societies in the future from being manipulated into perpetrating mayhem. Educators should consider it a critical aspect of their work to empower students to enable them to resist manipulation. But first we must understand how manipulation works in the context of a true telling of our histories. Do we realize to what extent atrocities were introduced as 'noble duty'? Do we know about the humiliating effect of duping people into perpetrating atrocities?

5.  Peck, Yoav (2008)
Human Dignity in Schools: A Practical Approach
In Ganesan, Dakshinamoorthi Raja, and Brown, Philip M. (Eds.), Humiliation in the Academic Setting: A Special Symposium Issue of ‘Experiments in Education’, New Delhi: S.I.T.U. Council of Educational Research, XXXVI (3, March 2008), pp, 71-78.

Abstract: The discussion of the paper is centered on a Human-Dignity Advancement Project being successfully carried out in the school system at Israel for the past 12 years. The project aims at developing ‘the good enough educator’—one who can strike the delicate balance between empathic relationships and clear limits, recognizing that each child makes the transition from dependence to independence at his/her own pace. The program proceeds along two central axes: (1) Consciousness-raising with regard to human dignity and (2) Awareness of distinctions between dignified and undignified behavior, leading to a visible and measurable, dignity-advancing innovation.
The impact of this project has been quite encouraging that using this model, teachers and trainers in Serbia have been trained and it has also been introduced into the Missouri Department of Social Services in the United States.

6.   A select and sharply focused bibliography

 

Guidelines to Contributors

Length of each article
Each article should be running to about 6 pages, with a cushion space of one page for notes and references. The average number of words per page is 400 (four hundred)

Format
Standard format for documentation and reference should follow the APA guidelines:

The documentation of references will be iIn the case of books:
Autbor's name, initials, year of publication in brackets, title of the book in italics, place of publication and publisher's name

For journal articles;
Author's name, initials, year of publication, title of the article, name of the journal in italics, volume and issue number, and pages.