Waag En Wen

Age of Heroes

CHILDREN OF THE GODS! Born of the Gods, created to be their champions, their names echo in eternity: Theseus, Perseus, Hippolyta, Heracles, Helen of Troy and all their half-mortal ilk. But the Age of Heroes is long past, and no more epics are told of their deeds. Blessed – and cursed – with eternal life, they have walked the Earth for millennia, doing their best to fit in among ordinary humans, taking new names and living new lives. And one by one, the demigods are meeting terrible, bloody ends. Now it’s up to Theseus, comfortably ensconced in New York and making his living as a crime fiction writer, to investigate the deaths. His search for the culprit draws him back into the lives of his dysfunctional extended family, and into a world of tragedy and long-held grudges that he thought, and hoped, he’d put behind him.

Weeskinders

Culture in Education and Education in Culture

In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability – in local living as well as in education – is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.