How Creativity Has Been Applied to a Business Idea or Problem Essay

To make a business grow and achieve productive and efficient results you need to invoke creativity which has always been an essential business skill. Since long time creativity has been applied to a business world as companies seek to use it in all parts of the organization to make it gain more profits and to be exceptional from others. A business person has to find unique solutions every day and he has to know how to react to situation creatively. Richard Florida (2002) stated human creativity is the ultimate economic resource. The ability to come up with new ideas and better ways of doing things is ultimately what raises productivity and thus living standards. Every individual is creative. Creative person is defined as curious, optimistic, imaginative, hard – working. He enjoys challenges, are able to accept problems easily and see them as new opportunities also he does not give up easily. Each of us see things in different way people are used to see or do, we come up with c reative ideas and solutions which make us to explore our creativity in more depth. Creativity is a process from where creative ideas come from and creativity is personal skill which is essential in this process. Creative thinking skills and attributes explain how people are dealing with various problems or ideas. Skills such as imagination, problem – solving, taking – risks and reasoning help us to identify problems, find right solutions, generate and improve ideas also realize them and apply to business process. Intuition, motivation and flexibility make us to select a proper idea, explore different ways to combine and achieve it, improve attitude towards risk and eliminate boundaries. In order to achieve his purposes person has to be self– confident, determined and persistent. There are many ways how individual can improve or develop these skills. For example, JAV company ‘Sysco’ organized creative education seminars for their employers and results were stunning – every participant sales increased about 25 – 30 % bu t this is just one example how creativity has been developed in companies there are more ways to do that. First of all, we need to evolve ideas and understand that there is more than one problem solution also we have to perceive that each problem can be solved in a better or different way. The second way to improve creativity is called synthesis. Using this method more than to ideas are compared and from them combined into completely new idea. Also, in this report I would like briefly identify some of idea generation techniques which help to realize ideas in a particular business area. Smith (1998) identified 172 idea generating techniques which he allocated to smaller groups which tell us about each technique further. Idea generation technique is essential process of creativity. Brainstorming probably is the most important technique which involves generating a lot of ideas and solutions. Brainstorming was the first technique and it is called ‘the mother of all idea generation techniques’. Also, it can be used for both groups and individuals. Second technique is collaboration when group of people are working together on purpose to achieve a particular result. They share creative ideas between each other and make a final decision in order to improve the whole process. Reflection is third idea generation technique which concentrates on previous work when designers reconsider projects, schemes, plans or documents from where they can find a particular idea and develop it further. A fourth method is called socializing. It is about communicating with others about particular subject totally unrelated to the current work. Sketching similar to documenting reflects on drawing approximate scheme or plan of an idea. â€Å"In order to help individuals in the idea generation process, researchers have identified methods to stimulate creative thought, generate more ideas, and expand on the solution space.† Nowadays more and more organizations are using personality tests to evaluate their employees’ character, to find their motivations and goals, to understand their work techniques and creativity level also to discover their barriers which they need to improve in the future. Companies have started to use personality tests in the past five years so that they can find a potential employee’s strengths and weaknesses. If questions and answers are quite accurate and test is done properly it can help an employer to find more about person’s advantages and disadvantages. It is very important to know because one of the most important points is that most of personality tests help to recognize unqualified candidates. â€Å"Although experts warn that many personality assessments don’t deliver what they promise, legitimate scientifically validated tests are helping employers evaluate job candidates to select those best suited for particular positions. Other tests are designed to measure intelligence, honesty, management aptitude and other qualities.† Napoleon Hill stated ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes. When you have a great business idea it is not enough just have it somewhere in your brain, the second thing to do is to rea lize it in other words it is called idea feasibility. Same as this American author stated by having a successful idea you can open doors to new opportunities and attract fortune. The idea is like a new product which can be applied to a new business. The more successful the product is the better results it will give in the future. In this case creative thinking helps to discover new and useful ideas also it leads to new business opportunities. Realize your business idea is possible in many different ways. For instance, you can start networking with various potential business people from all over the world also you can organize a highly creative team and start working on a particular idea. Opportunities and ways are endless it is belong to you, your creativity level and idea success. The final step after idea feasibility is action planning. Once the idea is considered and discussed you need to think about the way how it will work and how long it will takes to you to achieve your aim. â€Å"Action planning is a process which will help you to focus your ideas and to decide what steps you need to take to achieve particular goals that you may have. It is a statement of what you want to achieve over a given period of time.† As every planning process it involves some of basic steps which I would like to identify in my further research. Before you start setting a plan you need to be self-motivated and innovative because our goals have to motivate us to achieve them, but not to be too difficult and unreal. Also, you have to think about all possible ways which can make you closer to your aim. Do not forget to think about barrier which you may meet during a working period and try to find solutions how to cope with them effectively. When you start working on your plan you need to identify the main objectives. The second step is to prioritize each task, what need to be done first and what after. Once the list is done, you have to start working and use your own initiat ive, some people prefer working individually others may like to work in a team, it is important to choose your preferable work technique then work will be done quicker. Also, one of the most important steps is to finish the work to a deadline. To sum up, effective planning gives us basic steps so that we would be able to reach our objectives and it helps us to realize our ideas. In this report I have considered the main topics of creativity and it process. I explained how creativity has been applied in business process and organizations. Which personal qualities make individuals be more creative and how they can apply these skills to realize business ideas or solve problems creatively. Which part personality tests take in a business companies and what is the main meaning of them, why employers use this technique when they want to select the right participant to take a place in the organization. As well as, I considered the main factors about idea feasibility and explained techniques which are essential to idea generation. I identified the basic steps of action planning also described them in more depth so that it would be more easy to understand and try it in practice. If you consider yourself being creative you have to start setting a plan how to realize your ideas and you may have considerable results in the future. Creativity is a substantial tool which lead people to find right decisions and solve problems using their own initiative or special methods which are unusual for those who are not creative. It helps to set new strategies and products that employers apply to business. â€Å"It is highly likely that your creativity has been diminished by social norms and life experience, but it can be fostered and revived. You may not even think you are creative, but that is not true. â€Å"Creativity is our birth right it is part of what makes us human.† List of References University of Kent (2010) Action Planning [online] available from < http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/skillsactionplanning.htm> [26 December 2010] The CBS Interactive Business Network (2002) Personality counts: Psychological tests can help peg the job applicants best suited for certain jobs – Cover Story [online] available from < http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_2_47/ai_83058907/> [27 December 2010] SCORE Counselors to America’s Small Business (2010) How to Incorporate Creativity into Your Business Practice [online] available from < http://www.score.org/article_how_to_creativity.html> [27 December 2010] The IEEE Computer Society (2008) Idea Generation Techniques among Creative Professionals [online] available from [28 December 2010]

The Juggler Essay

â€Å"I want to believe in faith and risk and a world where you can stand beneath the grey October sky and flash your own colours through the air like a magician† (218 -221, p. 6). These beautiful lines constitute the final conclusion of the short story, â€Å"The Juggler†, written by Ursula Hegi and published in 2001. The story deals with themes such as beauty, letting go and being stuck in the past. The short story takes place in Coeur d’ Alene in the first weekend of October. An unnamed first person narrator tells the story of her daughter, Zoe and her boyfriend, Michael who have come to visit her. It is the first time she meets Michael, who is a counsellor at the school where her daughter teaches. They go to the cinema and on a beautiful canoe trip together. Michael seems to be a very nice guy and Zoe loves him. What separates Michael from the majority, however, is the fact that he is turning blind. The mother seems to have a very difficult time handling this, which is seen in her inner monologue â€Å"I like him (Michael) – or, rather; I could like him, if only he were not turning blind. Or if he were not with my daughter. I want more for Zoe.† (ll. 115-117, p. 4). It also seems as if she has ambitions on behalf of her daughter â€Å"I want more for Zoe†. We are told that Zoe’s father left the family when she was very young. Perhaps the mother’s dreams and ambitions vanished with her housebound/boyfriend. Therefore, she now lives her life trough her daughter and has resigned and almost accepted that she is in the autumn of her life unable to see the colours of the world. Another reason for her to dislike Michael is the obvious fact that he is stealing Zoe away. This seems to be her main issue with him. She thinks that he, due to his handicap, requires too much attention from Zoe, â€Å"He’ll need you far too much†(l. 177, p. 5). To this Zoe replies, â€Å"That should feel familiar, then† (l. 178, p. 5) as a reference to what leads to another important issue in the text; the narrator has, ever since Zoe’s father left her, been very dependant on Zoe. This is suggested in one of her streams of  consciousness, â€Å"Sometimes I felt Zoe and I were growing up together. Other times I felt like I were eleven and she thirty†(ll. 91 – 92, p. 3). The mother almost bursts into self-oscillation when she tells Michael about her memories with Zoe. This could lead to the conclusion that Zoe is used to taking responsibility for other people and, seen from a homespun psychological point of view, perhaps likes the fact that Michael reminds her of her mother in the way that he needs her. Another result of the mother’s loneliness and dependency on her daughter is the fact that she cannot let her go. She lives in the past and loves the memories of a time she refuses to leave, nor can she ever leave it unless she accepts the fact that Zoe is now a grown up. She has her own life now. The bird has flown. So maybe she should just handle her over to Michael. After all he is not a maniac killer or anything. He seems rather nice and Zoe really loves him, but the narrator simply is too jealous to be happy for her daughter, â€Å"Zoe turns, smiling at him with so much light in her eyes that I have to look away† (ll. 74 – 75, p. 3). The writer leaves, in a very discrete but intelligent and awfully interesting way, many symbols and details for further interpretation. For instance, a visual description of the narrator has been left out. Therefore, she appears as a set of thoughts, which on one side means that the events that take place in the story often are followed by the narrator’s streams of consciousness, which work perfectly well and gives the reader a great understanding of the mother’s actions and issues. However, on the other side it creates a paradox and it is very ironic seen in relation to the mother’s prejudice towards Michael’s blindness. We do not see her from the outside. We only see her from the inside. In other words, we see her exactly as Michael would see her. This makes her a victim of a â€Å"blind reader†. It is a funny and interesting detail from the writer. Another paradox is the fact that the narrator plays the cello and when Zoe & Michael leaves and she finds herself in despair she listens to Vivaldi. It is funny how she finds comfort in something audial, music, when she sees Michael’s blindness as something finite, as the end of beauty. Perhaps the most important symbol is, as the title suggests, the Juggler who  sort of frames the story. At the beginning Michael, Zoe and the mother are going to the cinema. On their way to the cinema the narrator sees a man who juggles smilingly with a basin and some swords. Suddenly, he loses the basin and the narrator grasps Michael’s shoulder as were she frightened by the fact that the juggler had failed. At the end of the story the narrator sees the juggler again but this time she has got a new realization. She envies his fearlessness, â€Å"Whenever he drops something, he smiles and reaches down and juggles once again(†¦). And without fear. Fear of being ridiculed (†¦)† (ll. 111 – 216, p. 6) She also reflects on the fact that he allways juggles with two of one kind and one of another. As if an equal trinity is impossible. As if a trinity requires differences. Perhaps Michael, Zoe and the narrator are all the â€Å"one of a another† and th e â€Å"two of one kind† at the same time. Watching the Juggler leads to the incredibly beautiful ending sentence that reveals some degree of regret in the mother. â€Å"I want to believe in faith and risk and a world where you can stand beneath the grey October sky and flash your own colors through the air like a magician† (218 -221, p. 6). Do these thoughts not sum up the core of life? Faith and risk. Roman philosopher, Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said, †Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity† in other words you have to keep an open mind and be ready to take your chances when they occur – we make our own luck. It is not enough to sit and wait for your turn. You have to confront life! You have to fight a little. The mother blows her chances. Beauty is all around her; The Juggler who is not afraid of failing, the wonderful idyllic canoe trip, her daughter who is madly in love with a good man who makes her eyes light like phosphorescence in the see of the night. Is that not the dream of any parent, to see your child happy? Ironically, she realizes this to late, which is the common issue in life. It is always about timing and balance like juggling. Like flashing your colours in the autumn of your life. Like letting your beloved child fly on and feel happiness. Like defying the never-ending storms of despair and uncertainty. Like living. Beauty takes risks.

Planning Strategic Organisational Change Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 1

Planning Strategic Organisational Change - Essay Example This is because the organization banks on the positive developments and growth changes happening on a constant basis. The change is also a response to the organization’s hard line towards its activities which have not been able to turn a new leaf towards its own development over a period of time (Ginzberg, 1957). What one must understand is the basis of growing for the sake of the organizational processes and the attached undertakings that are tied up. This will mean that the change is constructive and has a positive bearing on just about everyone present in the company as well as the processes and activities that are a vital part of the same. This paper discusses the basis of change being an important element within any organization in this day and age, and how it has been able to manifest growth, development and productivity for a long period of time now as has been proven with due research and evidence of study. Moving ahead with the discussion at hand, this change can both be external as well as internal, having either positive and negative ramifications in the long run. This is true in the case of change being a vital agent within the organization’s processes where its implementation is direly required and can have serious consequences in the long term scheme of things. The external change is not that controllable, however it is the internal change that demands a great deal of caution and care. This is because the internal change can have more drastic results than the external change can ever envisage. This is in line with the understanding that the organization must understand the basis of its success through this change which is intrinsic and which shall have a positive bearing on the people as well as the organizational processes, tasks and activities. The strategic organizational change is always internal because it involves processes which have serious and direct effect on the organization’s processes and long term future plans an d initiatives (Sugrue, 1999). This is required as it will enable the top management to decide where it wants to reach and what it wants to achieve within the shortest possible time. What is required here is a collective approach to set things right from the control perspective, which has by now come about with due hard work and dedication on the part of the people who have made the change possible. From a strategic organizational change perspective, it is always significant to note that the best possible results could be achieved when there are sequential steps to take care of the organizational hierarchies and when all of these look after the basis of growth and development for the sake of the company that one is talking about here (Brown, 1996). The change regimes are assisted duly by the role of the top management which gives the final approval for this change to come about in entirety. What one must comprehend here is the fact that change should be permanent and not eyewash alon e. It should manifest itself in such a manner that there is a win-win situation for everyone within the organization. If this does not happen, then this change has not come about and it would be better to implement it in a better way yet again. The strategic efforts within the change regimes are significant because outline the need to remain head-on with the incorporations that have been done over a period of time and which shall be the essence of achieving success in

Food Policy Reform in Schools Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Food Policy Reform in Schools - Research Paper Example For the lower socioeconomic groups, the food is free, whereas for the upper group children, it is provided at a cost but a subsidized rate. The main objective of the program is to deliver a healthy and nutritious diet for children at school and to develop good eating habits and promote healthy eating practices during the growing period when nutrition is utmost important for the development of the child (USDA 2008). More than 94% of the schools have subscribed to the NSLP and this is provided under the National School Lunch Act 1946 that was adopted as a policy by the Harry Truman Administration. About 17% of the federal budget meant for food and nutrition assistance programs actually goes to the NSLP (USDA 2008). During the implementation and development of the program initially in the 1940’s and the 1950’s, greater effort was being laid on addressing poverty, starvation and malnutrition in children. However, today, the concern is much different, and seems to be an equa l challenge that was present during the baby days of the NSLP. There is a growing concern of obesity and being overweight in children, especially in the lower socioeconomic groups who find it difficult to address their health needs (Rogers 2010). The NSLP was earlier meant to help children who were eating a diet at home to eat more and to meet their higher calorie and protein demand. Besides, there are children coming from diverse family backgrounds having diverse food nutrition and food needs and it would often be difficult to cater to their tastes. Hence, it would be difficult to meet the various needs through one lunch program. There are other concerns also including the sustaining the program through the federal funding and donations may create difficulties, facing stiff competition from the junk food sector, unnecessarily creating a crunch for the agricultural produce, and outdated structure of the program. In this paper, we would analyze one of the problems faced by the NSLP, look at the viable alternatives, and develop a solution to resolve the same (US Government Accounting Office 2003). Define and analyze the problem One of the main concerns of the NSLP is that the objectives of the program may not be in line with the requirements of the children today. When the program was being implemented during its baby days, its main aim was to address malnutrition, weakness and starvation in children and provide them with a nutritious meal for at least once daily. However, today, the program is considered as a factor that is causing obesity and unhealthy eating in children, and there is a concern on the quality of foods that is currently being served via the program. There is a growing concern whether the program is worsening the effect of obesity in the population in order to support the agricultural sector. Even the poor today are no more undernourished and are facing a stiffer problem with obesity. The program is encouraging the overconsumption of energy and fats and is also increasing the amount of food being consumed by children. As children of the poor are provided by food at lower costs, they are encouraged to eat more, not helping in reducing obesity and in the process developing eating habits that would worsen the problem further in life. The child when he or she grows into an adult would be prone to several health risks including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, stroke, etc. There were concerns as to why the NSLP was

World History.The Effects of Slavery on Slave Owners Essay

World History.The Effects of Slavery on Slave Owners - Essay Example This paper seeks to attempt to try and validate the claims that although the entire commerce that was seen to exist between slave and master can essentially be considered to be a perpetual exercise exhibiting the most boisterous passions, with one part being marked by a degrading submission and the other being fundamentally characterized by unremitting despotism. In order for one to better understand the effects that slavery is seen to have had on the slave owners, it is important that one first grasps an understanding of what exactly is meant by the use of the term slavery. Slavery can be defined as being the condition or status of a given person where by the powers that are commonly seen to be attaching to the rights of ownership are seen to exercised. The person over whom slavery is being exercised is seen to be denied of all the basic human fundamental rights by the owner who regards the person as being mere property. Slavery was seen to have some rather wide ranging effects on t he individuals who practiced it ranging from the people that actually capture the slaves and resell them, the merchants engaging in slave trade as well as the individuals that purchase these slaves and become slave owners. While engaging in slavery is seen to have caused a large number of the slave owners to become

Strategic Analysis Case Study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Strategic Analysis Case Study - Essay Example Current paper focuses on the examination of the performance of a specific British firm, O2; this firm has achieved to keep its position in its market and further expand its activities through the continuous review and update of its strategies. The specific issue is analytically examined in the sections that follow; the position of the firm in its industry will be identified and evaluated taking into account the response of the firm to the challenges set by the global political and financial crisis. The position of competitors will be also examined while specific suggestions are going to be made regarding the potential improvement of specific parts of the corporate strategy. Appropriate theoretical models (like PESTEL analysis and ANSOFF matrix) will be used in this paper in order to show the changes in the firm’s performance through the years; in this way the choice of this firm as a ‘model’ for business analysis will be justified. In Stakeholder analysis all people or groups of people influencing the firm’s performance have to be identified. In order to understand and evaluate the role of various stakeholders in the performance of O2, it is necessary primarily to identify the firm’s stakeholders; at a next level, their role in the firm’s performance within its industry is going to be appropriately evaluated. The firm’s stakeholders can be listed as follows (a numeric scale from 0-10 [10 is the highest grade] has been used in order to identify the impact/ importance of stakeholders for the performance of O2 and their influence on the firm’s success). The influence of the above listed stakeholders on the performance of O2 has to be further assessed and evaluated taking into account the conditions of the British market but also the conditions of the international market. It is clear from the list presented above that the firm’s customers have a significant influence on the firm’s success within the British market (given the rank 9);

Environmental Contamination Lab Report Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Environmental Contamination - Lab Report Example Detrimental side effects of these contaminants range from carcinogenic effects to liver disease and significant influence on productivity of various plants due to effects on soil (Yan Hai et al. 5). The persistence of these contaminants in the environment should be taken special notice of. 1, 4 dioxane a toxic synthetic petrochemical is a known carcinogen that is common in most household consumer products. The most susceptible products are laundry detergents, hair care products, and cleaning products. It is a byproduct of the reaction between ethylene oxide and other ingredients in the ethoxylation processing of detergents and cleaning products. The ethoxylation process is supposed to reducing the severity of harsher ingredients (Ethan, 2010). It is ironic that the process aimed at reducing the harmful components results in a more harmful ingredient. Most labeling lacks an indication of these products. Steinman in his evaluation of conventional and natural laundry detergent brands reported P&G products to have the highest concentration of 1, 4 dioxane levels in comparison to other brands. Only two of the natural brands contained o1, 4 dioxane though the levels were significant lower than the average concentrations observed in the conventional names. This presents the idea of due diligence in assessing the suitability of various brands both on the part of the user and the regulating body (organic consumers association 8). Of the 80,000 known chemicals, EPA only tests 200 of the probable contaminants. This presents a high likelihood that some contaminants escape notice. Contaminants like 1,4 dioxane has been found to be persistent in the environment especially since it binds to water and relatively hard to remove since small concentration of it have been found in water even after purification and filtration. Most of the water supply has been found contaminated by 1, 4

Chicano Studies (Latino Narrative Film-1990 to present) Essay - 1

Chicano Studies (Latino Narrative Film-1990 to present) - Essay Example Another striking attribute of most Latin American movies is the political, economic, and social situation that prevailed in the country at the period they were created (Elena, Lopez & Salles 2004). The status of Latin American film at present is that of a sequence of average to small, at times minuscule, national movie industries, every one of them burdened with small markets and structural limitations, but teeming with imagination, talent, and creativity (Elena et al. 2004). It is also a film industry with a moving and proud history of artistry and political revolution. It is previously mentioned, among Latin American directors themselves, that they did not constantly have excellent scripts, that scripts were a weak spot and that their creation was a filmmaker’s cinema (Noriega 2000). Today they commonly recognize a different dilemma: the absence of efficient producers, who know how to build up the finance, bring the needed people together, and form a production. Nevertheless, this in turn is indicative of a bigger problem. Making a feature film is mostly a kind of organized chaos, which necessitates a strong foundation (Hart 2004). Without the types of equipment which can be undervalued only in highly industrialized economies, I have frequently thought that to succeed in creating a film in several parts of Latin America is a negligible wonder. This essay will argue that contemporary Latin American cinema does not remove form from content, but give characters murkiness and strength, affection, life and death through comparing the Andres Wood’s Machuca and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Latin American cinema becomes successful in reaching its target audience not through amazing special effects, but through building on human qualities such as courage, compassion, beauty, violence, and evil. What was specifically dreadful about the takeover of

What Is Literature Essay Example for Free

What Is Literature Essay I am grateful for help with this book from many people, especially Julian Wolfreys, Jason Wohlstadter, and Barbara Caldwell, my â€Å"Senior Editor† and invaluable assistant at the University of California, Irvine. I thank Simon Critchley for ? rst suggesting that I might write this book for the series he edits, as well as for his careful reading of the manuscript. I am grateful also to the co-editor of the series, Richard Kearney, for a helpful reading of the manuscript. Muna Khogali and Tony Bruce, of Routledge, have been unfailingly generous and courteous. Tony Bruce read the manuscript with care and made useful suggestions. A preliminary version of some of the ideas in this book, especially those in Chapter 4, was presented as a lecture for the Koehn Endowed Lectureship at the University of California, Irvine, in Febuary 2001. The lecture was called â€Å"On the Authority of Literature. † Subsequently, the talk was given as the ? rst annual Lecture on Modern Literature for the Department of English at Baylor University in April, 2001. The lecture was then printed there as a pamphlet for local circulation. I am grateful to my host and sponsor at Baylor, Professor William Davis, for his many kindnesses. Di?  erent versions of the talk were given at two conferences, in August 2001, in the People’s Republic of China: at a triennial conference of the Chinese Association for Sino-Foreign Literary and xi On Literature Cultural Theory, held in Shenyang, and at an International Symposium on Globalizing Comparative Literature, sponsored by Yale and Tsinghua Universities. I thank Professor Wang Ning for arranging these invitations and for many other courtesies. A German translation will be published as my contribution to a research project on â€Å"representative validity,† sponsored by the Zentrum fur Literaturforschung in Berlin. I especially thank Ingo Berensmeyer, as well as other colleagues in Berlin, for the chance to try out my ideas on them. A Bulgarian translation will be published in a Festschrift for Simeon Hadjikosev, of So? a University. I thank Ognyan Kovachev for inviting me, and for other kindnesses. Altogether, my preliminary ideas for Chapter 4 and for some other germs of this book have had the bene? t of many helpful comments and reactions. Finally, I thank the dedicatee of this book for su? ering once more through my ordeals of composition. She had to endure my faraway look, my dreamy absentmindedness. I was dwelling again in imagination on the other side of Alice’s looking-glass or on the deserted island where the Swiss Family Robinson made such an enchanting home. It has taken me a good many months to ? gure out what to say about that experience. Sedgwick, Maine December 15, 2001 xii Acknowledgements What is Literature? One FAREWELL LITERATURE? The end of literature is at hand. Literature’s time is almost up. It is about time. It is about, that is, the di? erent epochs of di? erent media. Literature, in spite of its approaching end, is nevertheless perennial and universal. It will survive all historical and technological changes. Literature is a feature of any human culture at any time and place. These two contradictory premises must govern all serious re? ection â€Å"on literature† these days. What brings about this paradoxical situation? Literature has a history. I mean â€Å"literature† in the sense we in the West use the word in our various languages: â€Å"literature† (French or English) â€Å"letteratura† (Italian), â€Å"literatura† (Spanish), â€Å"Literatur† (German). As Jacques Derrida observes in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, the word literature comes from a Latin stem. It cannot be detached from its Roman-ChristianEuropean roots. Literature in our modern sense, however, appeared in the European West and began in the late seventeenth century, at the earliest. Even then the word did not have its modern meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word â€Å"literature† was ? rst used in our current sense only quite recently. Even a de? nition of â€Å"literature† as including memoirs, history, collections of letters, learned treatises, etc. , as well as poems, printed plays, and 1 On Literature  novels, comes after the time of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755). The restricted sense of literature as just poems, plays, and novels is even more recent. The word â€Å"literature† is de? ned by Johnson exclusively in the now obsolescent sense of â€Å"Acqaintance with ‘letters’ or books; polite or humane learning; literary culture. † One example the OED gives is as late as 1880: â€Å"He was a man of very small literature. † Only by the third de? nition in the OED does one get to: Literary production as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the grounds of beauty of form or emotional effect. This de? nition, says the OED, â€Å"is of very recent emergence both in England and France. † Its establishment may be conveniently dated in the mid-eighteenth century and associated, in England at least, with the work of Joseph and Thomas Wharton (1722–1800; 1728–90). They were hailed by Edmund Gosse, in an essay of 1915–16 (â€Å"Two Pioneers of Romanticism: Joseph and Thomas Wharton†), as giving literature its modern de? nition. Literature in that sense is now coming to an end, as new media gradually replace the printed book. WHAT HAS MADE LITERATURE POSSIBLE? 2 On Literature What are the cultural features that are necessary concomitants of literature as we have known it in the West? Western literature belongs to the age of the printed book and of other print forms like newspapers, magazines, and periodicals generally. Literature is associated with the gradual rise of almost universal literacy in the West. No widespread literacy, no literature. Literacy, furthermore, is associated with the gradual appearance from the seventeenth century onward of Western-style democracies. This means regimes with expanded su? rage, government by legislatures, regulated judicial systems, and fundamental human rights or civil liberties. Such democracies slowly developed more or less universal education. They also allowed citizens more or less free access to printed materials and to the means of printing new ones. This freedom, of course, has never been complete. Various forms of censorship, in even the freest democracies today, limit the power of the printing press. Nevertheless, no technology has ever been more e? ective than the printing press in breaking down class hierarchies of power. The printing press made democratic revolutions like the French Revolution or the American Revolution possible. The Internet is performing a similar function today. The printing and circulation of clandestine newspapers, manifestoes, and emancipatory literary works was essential to those earlier revolutions, just as email, the Internet, the cell phone, and the â€Å"hand-held† will be essential to whatever revolutions we may have from now on. Both these communication regimes are also, of course, powerful instruments of repression. The rise of modern democracies has meant the appearance of the modern nation-state, with its encouragement of a sense of ethnic and linguistic uniformity in each state’s citizens. Modern literature is vernacular literature. It began to appear as the use of Latin as a lingua franca gradually disappeared. Along with the nation-state has gone the notion of national literature, that is, literature written in the language and idiom of a particular country. This concept remains strongly codi? ed in school and university study of literature. It is institutionalized 3 What is Literature? in separate departments of French, German, English, Slavic, Italian, and Spanish. Tremendous resistance exists today to the recon? guration of those departments that will be necessary if they are not simply to disappear. The modern Western concept of literature became ? rmly established at the same time as the appearance of the modern research university. The latter is commonly identi? ed with the founding of the University of Berlin around 1810, under the guidance of a plan devised by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The modern research university has a double charge. One is Wissenschaft, ? nding out the truth about everything. The other is Bildung, training citizens (originally almost exclusively male ones) of a given nation-state in the ethos appropriate for that state. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that the modern concept of literature was created by the research university and by lower-school training in preparation for the university. After all, newspapers, journals, non-university critics and reviewers also contributed, for example Samuel Johnson or Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England. Nevertheless, our sense of literature was strongly shaped by university-trained writers. Examples are the Schlegel brothers in Germany, along with the whole circle of critics and philosophers within German Romanticism. English examples would include William Wordsworth, a Cambridge graduate. His â€Å"Preface to Lyrical Ballads† de? ned poetry and its uses for generations. In the Victorian period Matthew Arnold, trained at Oxford, was a founding force behind English and United States institutionalized study of literature. Arnold’s thinking is still not without force in conservative circles today. Arnold, with some help from the Germans, presided over the transfer from philosophy to literature of the responsibility for Bildung. Literature would shape citizens by giving them 4 On Literature knowledge of what Arnold called â€Å"the best that is known and thought in the world. † This â€Å"best† was, for Arnold, enshrined in canonical Western works from Homer and the Bible to Goethe or Wordsworth. Most people still ? rst hear that there is such a thing as literature from their school teachers. Universities, moreover, have been traditionally charged with the storage, cataloguing, preservation, commentary, and interpretation of literature through the accumulations of books, periodicals, and manuscripts in research libraries and special collections. That was literature’s share in the university’s responsibility for Wissenschaft, as opposed to Bildung. This double responsibility was still very much alive in the literature departments of The Johns Hopkins University when I taught there in the 1950s and 1960s. It has by no means disappeared today. Perhaps the most important feature making literature possible in modern democracies has been freedom of speech. This is the freedom to say, write, or publish more or less anything. Free speech allows everyone to criticize everything, to question everything. It confers the right even to criticize the right to free speech. Literature, in the Western sense, as Jacques Derrida has forcefully argued, depends, moreover, not just on the right to say anything but also on the right not to be held responsible for what one says. How can this be? Since literature belongs to the realm of the imaginary, whatever is said in a literary work can always be claimed to be experimental, hypothetical, cut o? from referential or performative claims. Dostoevsky is not an ax murderer, nor is he advocating ax murder in Crime and Punishment. He is writing a ? ctive work in which he imagines what it might be like to be an ax murderer. A ritual formula is printed at the beginning of many modern detective stories: â€Å"Any 5 What is Literature? resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. †This (often false) claim is not only a safeguard against lawsuits. It also codi? es the freedom from referential responsibility that is an essential feature of literature in the modern sense. A ? nal feature of modern Western literature seemingly contradicts the freedom to say anything. Even though democratic freedom of speech in principle allows anyone to say anything, that freedom has always been severely curtailed, in various ways. Authors during the epoch of printed literature have de facto been held responsible not only for the opinions expressed in literary works but also for such political or social e?ects as those works have had or have been believed to have had. Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have in di? erent ways been held responsible for causing the American Civil War, the former by instilling absurdly outmoded ideas of chivalry in Southern gentry, the latter by decisively encouraging support for the abolition of slavery. Nor are these claims nonsensical. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Chinese translation was one of Mao Tse Tung’s favorite books. Even today, an author would be unlikely to get away before a court of law with a claim that  it is not he or she speaking in a given work but an imaginary character uttering imaginary opinions. Just as important as the development of print culture or the rise of modern democracies in the development of modern Western literature, has been the invention, conventionally associated with Descartes and Locke, of our modern sense of the self. From the Cartesian cogito, followed by the invention of identity, consciousness, and self in Chapter 27, Book II, of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the sovereign. I or Ich of Fichte, to absolute consciousness in Hegel, to the I as 6 On Literature  the agent of the will to power in Nietzsche, to the ego as one element of the self in Freud, to Husserl’s phenomenological ego, to the Dasein of Heidegger, explicitly opposed to the Cartesian ego, but nevertheless a modi? ed form of subjectivity, to the I as the agent of performative utterances such as â€Å"I promise† or â€Å"I bet† in the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others, to the subject not as something abolished but as a problem to be interrogated within deconstructive or postmodern thinking – the whole period of literature’s heyday has depended on one or another idea of the self as a selfconscious and responsible agent. The modern self can be held liable for what it says, thinks, or does, including what it does in the way of writing works of literature. Literature in our conventional sense has also depended on a new sense of the author and of authorship. This was legalized in modern copyright laws. All the salient forms and techniques of literature have, moreover, exploited the new sense of selfhood. Early ? rst-person novels like Robinson Crusoe adopted the direct presentation of interiority characteristic of seventeenth-century Protestant confessional works. Eighteenth-century novels in letters exploited epistolary presentations of subjectivity. Romantic poetry a? rmed a lyric â€Å"I. † Nineteenth-century novels developed sophisticated forms of third-person narration. These allowed a double simultaneous presentation by way of indirect discourse of two subjectivities, that of the narrator, that of the character. Twentieth-century novels present directly in words the â€Å"stream of consciousness† of ? ctional protagonists. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is the paradigmatic case of the latter. 7 What is Literature? THE END OF THE PRINT AGE Most of these features making modern literature possible are now undergoing rapid transformation or putting in question. People are now not so certain of the unity and perdurance of the self, nor so certain that the work can be explained by the authority of the author. Foucault’s â€Å"What is an Author? † and Roland Barthes’s â€Å"The Death of the Author† signaled the end of the old tie between the literary work and its author considered as a unitary self, the real person William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf. Literature itself has contributed to the fragmentation of the self. Forces of economic, political, and technological globalization are in many ways bringing about a weakening of the nation-state’s separateness, unity, and integrity. Most countries are now multilingual and multi-ethnic. Nations today are seen to be divided within as well as existing within more permeable borders. American literature now includes works written in Spanish, Chinese, Native American languages, Yiddish, French, and so on, as well as works written in English from within those groups, for example African-American literature. Over sixty minority languages and cultures are recognized in the People’s Republic of China. South Africa after apartheid has eleven o? cial languages, nine African languages along with English and Afrikaans. This recognition of internal division is ending literary study’s institutionalization according to national literatures, each with its presumedly selfenclosed literary history, each written in a single national language. The terrible events of the mid-twentieth century, World War II and the Holocaust, transformed our civilization and Western literature with it. Maurice Blanchot and others have even argued persuasively that literature in the old sense is impossible after the Holocaust. 8 On Literature In addition, technological changes and the concomitant development of new media are bringing about the gradual death of literature in the modern sense of the word. We all know what those new media are: radio, cinema, television, video, and the Internet, soon universal wireless video. A recent workshop I attended in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) brought together American literary scholars and representatives of the Chinese Writers Association. At that meeting it became evident that the most respected and in? uential Chinese writers today are those whose novels or stories are turned into one or another television series. The major monthly journal printing poetry in the PRC has in the last decade declined in circulation from an amazing 700,000 to a â€Å"mere† 30,000, though the proliferation of a dozen or more new in? uential poetry journals mitigates that decline somewhat and is a healthy sign of diversi? cation. Nevertheless, the shift to the new media is decisive. Printed literature used to be a primary way in which citizens of a given nation state were inculcated with the ideals, ideologies, ways of behavior and judgment that made them good citizens. Now that role is being increasingly played, all over the world, for better or for worse, by radio, cinema, television, VCRs, DVDs, and the Internet. This is one explanation for the di? culties literature departments have these days in getting funding. Society no longer needs the university as the primary place where the national ethos is inculcated in citizens. That work used to be done by the humanities departments in colleges and universities, primarily through literary study. Now it is increasingly done by television, radio talk shows, and by cinema. People cannot be reading Charles Dickens or Henry James or Toni Morrison and at the same time watching television or a ? lm on VCR, though some 9 What is Literature? people may claim they can do that. The evidence suggests that people spend more and more time watching television or sur? ng the Internet. More people, by far, probably, have seen the recent ? lms of novels by Austen, Dickens, Trollope, or James than have actually read those works. In some cases (though I wonder how often), people read the book because they have seen the television adaptation. The printed book will retain cultural force for a good while yet, but its reign is clearly ending. The new media are more or less rapidly replacing it. This is not the end of the world, only the dawn of a new one dominated by new media. One of the strongest symptoms of the imminent death of literature is the way younger faculty members, in departments of literature all over the world, are turning in droves from literary study to theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies (? lm, television, etc. ), popular culture studies, Women’s studies, African-American studies, and so on. They often write and teach in ways that are closer to the social sciences than to the humanities as traditionally conceived. Their writing and teaching often marginalizes or ignores literature. This is so even though many of them were trained in old-fashioned literary history and the close reading of canonical texts. These young people are not stupid, nor are they ignorant barbarians. They are not bent on destroying literature nor on destroying literary study. They know better than their elders often do, however, which way the wind is blowing. They have a deep and laudable interest in ? lm or popular culture, partly because it has done so much to form them as what they are. They also have a proleptic sense that traditional literary study is on the way to being declared obsolete by society and by university authorities. This will probably happen not in so 10 On Literature many words. University administrators do not work that way. It will happen by the more e? ective device of withdrawing funding in the name of â€Å"necessary economies† or â€Å"downsizing. † Departments of classics and modern languages other than English, in United States universities, will go ?rst. Indeed, they are in many universities already going, initially through amalgamation. Any United States English department, however, will soon join the rest, if it is foolish enough to go on teaching primarily canonical British literature under the illusion that it is exempt from cuts because it teaches texts in the dominant language of the country. Even the traditional function of the university as the place where libraries store literature from all ages and in all languages, along with secondary material, is now being rapidly usurped by digitized databases. Many of the latter are available to anyone with a computer, a modem, and access to the Internet through a server. More and more literary works are freely available online, through various websites. An example is â€Å"The Voice of the Shuttle,† maintained by Alan Liu and his colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara (http://vos. ucsb. edu/). The Johns Hopkins â€Å"Project Muse† makes a large number of journals available (http:// muse. jhu. edu/journals/index_text. html). A spectacular example of this making obsolete the research library is the William Blake Archive website (http:// www.blakearchive. org/). This is being developed by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. Anyone anywhere who has a computer with an Internet connection (I for example on the remote island o? the coast of Maine where I live most of the year and am writing this) may access, download, and print out spectacularly accurate reproductions of major versions of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and some 11 What is Literature? of his other prophetic books. The original versions of these â€Å"illuminated books† are dispersed in many di? erent research libraries in England and the United States. Formerly they were available only to specialists in Blake, to scholars with a lot of money for research travel. Research libraries will still need to take good care of the originals of all those books and manuscripts. They will less and less function, however, as the primary means of access to those materials. Literature on the computer screen is subtly changed by the new medium. It becomes something other to itself. Literature is changed by the ease of new forms of searching and manipulation, and by each work’s juxtaposition with the innumerable swarm of other images on the Web. These are all on the same plane of immediacy and distance. They are instantaneously brought close and yet made alien, strange, seemingly far away. All sites on the Web, including literary works, dwell together as inhabitants of that non-spatial space we call cyberspace. Manipulating a computer is a radically di? erent bodily activity from holding a book in one’s hands and turning the pages one by one. I have earnestly tried to read literary works on the screen, for example Henry James’s The Sacred Fount. I happened at one moment not to have at hand a printed version of that work, but found one on the Web. I found it di? cult to read it in that form. This no doubt identi? es me as someone whose bodily habits have been permanently wired by the age of the printed book. WHAT THEN IS LITERATURE? 12 On Literature If, on the one hand, literature’s time (as I began by saying) is nearly up, if the handwriting is on the wall, or rather if the pixels are on the computer screen, on the other hand, literature or â€Å"the literary† is (as I also began by saying) universal and perennial. It is a certain use of words or other signs that exists in some form or other in any human culture at any time. Literature in the ? rst sense, as a Western cultural institution, is a special, historically conditioned form of literature in the second sense. In the second sense, literature is a universal aptitude for words or other signs to be taken as literature. About the political and social utility, import, e? ectiveness of literature I shall write later, in Chapter 4, â€Å"Why Read Literature? † At this point my goal is to identify what sort of thing literature is. What then is literature? What is that â€Å"certain use of words or other signs† we call literary? What does it mean to take a text â€Å"as literature†? These questions have often been asked. They almost seem like non-questions. Everyone knows what literature is. It is all those novels, poems, and plays that are designated as literature by libraries, by the media, by commercial and university presses, and by teachers and scholars in schools and universities. To say that does not help much, however. It suggests that literature is whatever is designated as literature. There is some truth to that. Literature is whatever bookstores put in the shelves marked â€Å"Literature† or some subset of that: â€Å"Classics,† â€Å"Poetry,† â€Å"Fiction,† â€Å"Mysteries,† and so on. It is nevertheless also the case that certain formal features allow anyone dwelling within Western culture to say with conviction, â€Å"This is a novel,† or â€Å"This is a poem,† or â€Å"This is a play. † Title pages, aspects of print format, for example the printing of poetry in lines with capitals at the beginning of each line, are as important in segregating literature from other print forms as internal features of language that tell the adept reader he or she has a literary work in hand. The co-presence of all these features allows certain collocations of  13 What is Literature? printed words to be taken as literature. Such writings can be used as literature, by those who are adept at doing that. What does it mean to â€Å"use a text as literature†? Readers of Proust will remember the account at the beginning of A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) of the magic lantern his hero, Marcel, had as a child. It projected on Marcel’s walls and even on his doorknob images of the villainous Golo and the unfortunate Genevieve de Brabant, brought into his bedroom from the Merovingian past. My version of that was a box of stereopticon photographs, probably by Matthew Brady, of American Civil War scenes. As a child, I was allowed to look at these at my maternal grandparents’ farm in Virginia. My great-grandfather was a soldier in the Confederate Army. I did not know that then, though I was told that a great-uncle had been killed in the Second Battle of Bull Run. I remember in those awful pictures as much the dead horses as the bodies of dead soldiers. Far more important for me as magic lanterns, however, were the books my mother read to me and that I then  learned to read for myself. When I was a child I did not want to know that The Swiss Family Robinson had an author. To me it seemed a collection of words fallen from the sky and into my hands. Those words allowed me magical access to a pre-existing world of people and their adventures. The words transported me there. The book wielded what Simon During, in Modern Enchantments, calls in his subtitle, â€Å"the cultural power of secular magic. † I am not sure, however, that secular and sacred magics can be all that easily distinguished. This other world I reached through reading The Swiss Family Robinson, it seemed to me, did not depend for its existence on the words of the book, even though those words were my only window on that virtual reality. The 14 On Literature LITERATURE AS A CERTAIN USE OF WORDS Literature exploits a certain potentiality in human beings as sign-using animals. A sign, for example a word, functions in the absence of the thing named to designate that thing, to â€Å"refer to it,† as linguists say. Reference is an inalienable aspect of words. When we say that a word functions in the absence of the thing to name the thing, the natural assumption is that the thing named exists. It is really there, somewhere or other, perhaps not all that far away. We need words or other signs to substitute for things while those things are temporarily absent. If I am out walking, for example, and see a sign with the 15 What is Literature? window, I would now say, no doubt shaped that reality through various rhetorical devices. The window was not entirely colorless and transparent. I was, however, blissfully unaware of that. I saw through the words to what  seemed to me beyond them and not dependent on them, even though I could get there in no other way than by reading those words. I resented being told that the name on the title page was that of the â€Å"author† who had made it all up. Whether many other people have had the same experience, I do not know, but I confess to being curious to ? nd out. It is not too much to say that this whole book has been written to account for this experience. Was it no more than childish naivete, or was I responding, in however childish a way, to something essential about literature? Now I am older and wiser. I know that The Swiss Family Robinson was written in German by a Swiss author, Johann David Wyss (1743 –1818), and that I was reading an English translation. Nevertheless, I believe my childhood experience had validity. It can serve as a clue to answering the question, â€Å"What is literature? † word â€Å"Gate,† I assume that somewhere nearby is an actual gate that I can see with my eyes and grasp with my hands to open or shut it, once I get in sight of it and get my hands on it. This is especially the case if the word â€Å"Gate† on the sign is accompanied by a pointing arrow and the words â€Å"? mile,† or something of the sort. The real, tangible, usable gate is a quarter of a mile away, out of sight in the woods. The sign, however, promises that if I follow the arrow I shall soon be face to face with the gate. The word â€Å"gate† is charged with signifying power by its reference to real gates. Of course, the word’s meaning is also generated by that word’s place in a complex di? erential system of words in a given language. That system distinguishes â€Å"gate† from all other words. The word â€Å"gate,† however, once it is charged with signi? cance by its reference to real gates, retains its signi? cance or signifying function even if the gate is not there at all. The sign has meaning even if it is a lie put up by someone to lead me astray on my walk. The word â€Å"Gate† on the sign then refers to a phantom gate that is not there anywhere in the phenomenal world. Literature exploits this extraordinary power of words to go on signifying in the total absence of any phenomenal referent. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s quaint terminology, literature makes use of a â€Å"non-transcendent† orientation of words. Sartre meant by this that the words of a literary work do not transcend themselves toward the phenomenal things to which they refer. The whole power of literature is there in the simplest word or sentence used in this ? ctitious way. Franz Kafka testi? ed to this power. He said that the entire potentiality of literature to create a world out of words is there in a sentence like, â€Å"He opened the window. † Kafka’s ? rst great masterpiece, â€Å"The Judgment,† uses that power at 16 On Literature the end of its ? rst paragraph. There the protagonist, Georg Bendemann, is shown sitting â€Å"with one elbow propped on his desk . . . looking out the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank with their tender green. † Stephane Mallarme gave witness to the same amazing magic of words, in this case a single word. In a famous formulation, he pronounced: â€Å"I say: a ? ower! and, outside the forgetting to which my voice relegates any contour, in the form of something other than known callices, musically there rises, the suave idea itself, the absence of all bouquets. † Words used as signi? ers without referents generate with amazing ease people with subjectivities, things, places, actions, all the paraphernalia of poems, plays, and novels with which adept readers are familiar.

UNDERSTANDING THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTIES OF ASSESSMENT Essay Example for Free

UNDERSTANDING THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTIES OF ASSESSMENT Essay During the initial assessment the assessor must ensure the learner knowledge performance and practical skills. The assessor must ensure that the learning understands their course, The assessor must explain all the units to the learner and support them in choosing the most suited units for their learner. The assessor and the learner must decide on an assessment plan. Setting dates and times to meet with the learner.as well as Agreeing on the best assessment method. The assessor will be able to use question, observation and examine the learners work. The learner must submit assignment or evidence. That their assessor must review to ensure that they have done what was asked for. The assessor must provide feedback to the learning . the feedback must be positive, constructed and encouraging. Once this has been done a feedback form must be used. Here the assessor can recommend ways of improvement and log, what agreements have been made with the learner and set deadline. The assessor needs to cross reference the leaner work with the assessment criteria to ensure the leaner work and evidence is valid and proves that the leaner is competent in the unit. DEFINE THE KEY CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES OF ASSESSMENT. As an assessor you will be observing what the learner are doing. Asking them question and reviewing their progress. The key concepts and principles of assessments would be  INITIAL ASSESSMENT The result of the initial assessment will provide the assessor with information of any previous knowledge or experience on the subject to be assessed. The information can be obtained through application form and interviews. This will help the assessor, assess the learner on any specific requirements their learner may need (I.e. their learning style or any further training they may need. ASSESSMENT PLANNING Planning a suitable types and method of assessment with the learner. Setting appropriate target dates. Always involving other colleagues or supervisors. ASSESSMENT ACTIVITY Observation and questioning the learning. Completing assignments. Writing statements or gathering appropriate evidence of competence .Assessments can be on going or summative at the end. ASSESSMENT DECISION AND FEEDBACK Giving constructive feedback. Always supporting your learner and agreeing and further action that may be needed. Making records of what was assessed and the decision made should always be maintained. REVIEW PROGRESS The assessment plan of the learner can be reviewed updated at any time unit the learner completes . reviewing progress with the learning will give the assessor the opportunity to discuss any other issues that may be relevant to their progress. Assessment activities will give you the opportunity to amend them if necessary. EXPLAIN THE RESONSIBILITIES OF THE ASSESSOR The main role of an assessor is to assess their learner in relation to the agreed criteria to enable the learner to become qualified in their subject. The assessor responsibilities include planning assessment, giving learner feedback, assessing the learner knowledge and understanding of the subject .keeping accurate records. There will be certain records and documents that the assessor will need to maintain. These will include assessment plans. Feedback records and review of progress and overall track sheets. All record must be maintained to organisational and regulatory requirements. An assessor should also store confidential documents and audio or video records that include learner.

Piagets Cognitive Theory Children And Young People Essay

Piagets Cognitive Theory Children And Young People Essay b. The basic concept of Piagets theory of cognitive development. As we know, the famous theory of cognitive development was found by Jean Piaget. He was born in 1896 (Newkirk, 2009). Newkirk also mentioned that Piaget was a theorists and also a biologist. Besides,the author reported that Piaget did observing his own children and attracted to changes that occured and developed in childrens mind and the factors behind these changes. In addition, Gartrell (2011) also stated that Piagets method by questioning the children is called as clinical method. Children started to develop their understanding through their surrounding based on four stages of cognitive development. As mentioned by Gartrell the stages are the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and lastly formal operations stage. The first stage is sensorimotor stage which starts when the babies were born until age of 2 years old while second stage starts around the age of 2 to 7 years (Santrock, 2011). The author also claimed about the other stages, that are the third stage, concrete operational stage which lasts from 7 until 11 or 12 years old and lastly moving to the fourth stage is formal operations stage. Compared to the other three stages earlier which involving babies and children, this last stage is involving with the adolescence and adulthood. This is the highest stage in cognitive development because this is where a person can make such reasoning and hypothesis (Santrock, 2011) for example, not only concrete events but also towards abstract events such as feelings or inferencing scientific experiments. Furthermore, Santrock (2011) proposed that there are two basic tendencies that will go together with these four stages, which are organization and adaption. Ormrod (2011) stated that organization is possibility of a person to handle their process of thinking. It is also called as schemes which means the building block of intelligent behavior. Next, adaption is the process of an individual to adapt to the environment (Ormrod, 2011). In the same way, Ormrod stated that there are two basic processes in adaption which are assimilation and accommodation. According to Krause, Bochner and Duchesne, cognition is the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, understanding and recalling information (2007, p43). Piagets theory of cognitive is underline into the consciousness of mind and thinking. As children are developing, their way of thinking started to change from time to time accordingly to the four stages. Piaget was not really interested into the knowledge having by the children but he was more fascinated by the way of children think, observe their surrounding and how they express it into speeches (Krause et al., 2007). The authors too found that Piaget and his theory are important because he is the first theorists that came out with such theory about development of children from the aspect of cognitive and his idea is still be using untill now even though it has been years. c. Discuss how the Piagets theory apply to child development. Self development is very important in childrens life because it develop in them while they are growing up. In Piagets theory of cognitive development, he focused of four stages of children development that are, sensorimotor stage as the first, secondly is preoperational stage, next concrete operational stage and last but not least formal operations stage. As explained earlier, sensorimotor stage is occured from the birth untill the age of 2 years. According to Krause et al.,(2007), infants in this stage will begin to develope their reflexes by doing some motor activities and senses. They are trying to understand the world around them. For example, infants will show happy expression or laughing when we are teasing and cuddling with them, this shows that infants started to make sense things around them but with limited abilities because it is only based on what they get through their senses. In sensorimotor, there are sub-stages that divided into 6 categories, that are reflexes, primary circular reactions, secondary circular reactions, coordination of reactions, tertiary circular reactions and early representional thought (Brenda, 2010). The first sub-stage is reflexes, according to Brenda (2010) this sub-stage is occured from the birth of the infants until 1 month old. During this stage, infants understand their surrounding by using si mple reflexes for example they will starting to smile. Next, primary circular reactions sub-stage is when the infants are 1 to 4 months. Variety of actions will be perform. For instance, infants are sucking his or her thumb, and as a result they will repeat the same actions because it pleasure them. As it goes on, third sub-stage is secondary circular reactions which occured during 4 to 8 months. Brenda (2010) mentioned in this sub-stage, the infants will be doing the same actions but it extends out to the environment such as replacing sucking their thumbs with rubber toys. In other words the infants are having improvement in their reactions. Moreover, in fourth sub-stage which is coordination of reactions from the age of 8 to 12 months. They will begin to show clear actions and observe others behavior other than starting to develop ability in recognizing the things that had been shown to them. As example, instead of sucking thumb, infants will replace it with their toys. They may s queeze their rubber toys, when it goes mooo mooo, they will get excited and squeeze it again. Krause et al.,(2007) proposed that the infants also will understand that their toys are exist even though they cannot be seen or touch it or called it as object permanance. For example, a doll at first was played by infant, when we put and hide it under blanket the infant will be able to look for it. Infants who do not reach this sub-stage will not be able to look for it, but they will just not realize it. As the infants are growing up to become toddlers, the sub-stages also moving to the next, tertiary secular reactions where occured during toddler age 12 to 18 months. This is the time where toddlers will learn the concept of trial-error experiments with the purpose of getting attention (Brenda, 2010). Specifically, one of the activity might be doing by toddlers is hitting fork and spoon on the dining table, just to know what will happen, what sound will come out, and what are the reaction s they will get from others. Krause et al. called this process as goal-directed or intentional action (2007, p46). Last but not least sub-stage is early representional talk, from the toddlers at age of 18 until 24 months old (Krause et al., 2007). Based on the authors, this last sub-stage is where we can see the toddlers start to imitate others. During this stage, people around them need to be careful and only if possible showing them the good side especially their parents. This is because since parents are the closest people in toddlers life, they will observe what their parents are doing. For example, if the mothers usually sweeping the house at the morning, the toddlers will observe it and will do the same action of sweeping the house even though it is without the broom. As I experienced this too, during my visits to my aunties home, she has a 19 months old toddlers. I realized that her child keep following my way of reading magazines and drinking coffee from my mug. Even though the objects are not with the baby, but she followed my actions. In my opinion, parents need to get close with toddler to help their growth and try to play game with them such as peek-a-boo game because this will help the children to strenghten their object-permanance ability and moving to the next stages as Piaget had observed. The second stage that apply to child development is preoperational stage, which occured within the age of 2 to 7 years old. Newkirk (2009) proposed that children in this stage will develop from several aspects. They will be more capable in the usage of language skills for instance they can explain the objects by replacing it with pictures or words. But they still not be able to speak like adult, they can at least use one or two-words sentences to delivered messages. According to Newkirk, imagination level of children in this stage will usually increase and they are more curious to all things instead of being logical. Unlikely the first stage, in this second stage children will spend more of their time by putting role while they are playing. For instance, children always pretend a box is a house for them to shelter. Even myself experienced that during my childhood. I built my so-called home by using boxes and I create my own family members using my dolls to stay in that house, I even pretend cooked meals for my family. This prove that childrens imagination during this stage is very high but they still need supervision from parents in case they are exposed to unappropriate elements. Krause et al. (2007) noted that there are three main characteristics of preoperational stage which are egocentrism, centration and animism. The author define egocentric as the person who is unable to share another persons idea or view because the person considered that all view are the same with he or she. Piagets had done with the Three Mountain Tasks model experiments, and as the result the children expects that the person on other side of the model is seeing the same view as them (Krause et al., 2007). Next is centration, the authors described the meaning as the children focus on one feature of problems while ignoring other features. For example, children will not understand if we tell them Your sister is my daughter because their ability is limited. Moving on, the last characteris tic is animism. In this characteristic, the authors claimed that children belief that all things have lives. They considered inanimate objects have emotions and feelings like them. For example, a girl who age 3 years old always talk with her teddy bear as the teddy bear is alive and answers her. Piagets third stage in child development is concrete operational stage which is from the age of 7 to 11 years (Santrock, 2011). During this stage, children are able to logically think about the concrete events and starting to eliminate their egocentrism which means they started to learn to view others perspective too. Even though they are getting capable in the usage of logic but they still having the difficulty in understanding the hypothetical concepts (Krause et al., 2007). The authors also claimed that there are several processes in this stage that involve in child development, that are reversibility where the children have the ability to think about the reverse event such as in mathematical solving problems where they need to add and subtract and add it back, secondly is seriation which menas the ability to mentally put things in order according to its features for example size, weight, and height. Next is compensation, where the children have the ability see that something is i ncrease because of something is decrease such as the height is increasing because of the width s decreasing and vice versa. Besides, the fourth is classficiation which means the ability that children have to name and identify the sets or group of the objects by its features such as size, colours and appearance. Class inclusion is the fifth processes mentioned by the authors which bring the meaning of ability to understand that a small amount of groups can be combine to form a large group as Krause et al. called it as multiple classification (2007, p53). For example a car can be include into its brand name such as Proton or under large group of vehicles. Last but not least the processes found by Krause et al. (2007) is conservation, whereby children at last know that quantities, or lenghts are not related at all to the arrangement or appearance of the things. For example, a child is presented with two same sized of bowls filled with flour, but when one of the full bowl flour is pour into jar with different sized he and she or he will still know that the quantity of the flour is the same either it is in bowl or jar. Lastly, the fourth stages in Piagetian is formal operations which occur to 11 years old children and beyond (Santrock, 2011). As we can see, this is the highest level of child development in Piagets theory as it goes until our adulthood. Santrock stated that in this stages people continue to develop ability of thinking with presence of abstract concept. Logically, children begin to take notes about the possibility of the consequences of every events they experienced and also started to think in a formal way. Besides, Krause et al. (2007) suggested that children in this stage are already know how to use deductive and inductive reasoning. As the author define deductive reasoning as the potentiality of children to use a general principle to determine a specific outcome, on the other hand inductive reasoning is using and observing specific outcome to include general principles. In this final stage also children will develop their problem solving activities. When entering adoloscence, the y are able to do systematic planning in their life and also make a hypothesis, inference far better than stages before (Brenda, 2010). Overall, that are the four stages that involve in child development until adolescence. d. Discuss how the Piagets theory apply children in preschool and early primary levels. Preschool children are basically who are still develop their cognitive abilities in stage two, preoperational. As stated by Krause et al. (2007) regarding applying Piagets theory into preschoolchildren who are still in stage two, there will be at least two parties that involved in helping to apply this cognitive theory to children firstly parents, secondly educators or teachers.Moreover, by introduce to children this concept means we are letting them to be independent and explore their world by themselves. Preschool children who are basically age between 4 to 6 years are in preoperaional stage. As I explained in previous sub-questions, children in this stage has become more capable in obtaining language skills and using it to represent objects but still limited because they cannot reached the events where explanation need to relate with concrete logic. Firstly as parents, they must give freedom to their children especially preschool children to play with their friends since children in this stage will spent more of their time with playing (Krause et al., 2007). Nowadays, majority of parents always having misconceptions, they think that they cannot let their children play too much, in fact they should not too strict in controlling their children. What parents should do is by letting their children play with their friends but make sure to supervision who are their friends. Logically, according to Krause et al., by giving children chance to play, they will explored their world while inter acting with friends (2007). Create a safe-mode place for them to play so that they feels your attention towards them, during this process children will encounter some problems. This is the right time to let them be independence by solving their problems but with supervision. Even though at first they might not really capable in solving it but it will be better as they go through this process and get knowledge from what we called as hands-on experiences (Krause et al., 2007). Besides, Ormrod suggested that parents should always communicate with their children especially who are in this stage. This is because children may feel left out if their parents are too busy and even do not have time to spend with them. In other way, this also a good opportunities to increas the level of self-esteem of the children. On the other hand, teachers also play an important role in applying preoperational stage towards preschool children. Newkirk found out that since children during this stage will usually be in egocentrism state, they do not realize about other perspectives (2009). So, as a teacher need to know how to handle this situation for example letting the children having conversation with the peers in class will enhance their understanding of others world or teachers can create a questions and answers session with the preschool students. The purpose of doing that is because to increase the self esteem of children and to let them hear others views too so that their level of egocentrism can be decrease. As an educators,creactivity is needed to attract preschool children in learning such as by using visual aids to stimulate the childrens mind (Newkirk, 2009). Examples of visual aids are like bringing props such as the real fruits if teachers want to teach about type of fruits in class. After finis hed teaching, teachers can serve the students with the fruits, and let them have the hands-on experience. The author also did mentioned that in order to develop preoperational stage between the children, use things that are different for examples cue cards written words and ask them to create sentences based on cards that they have or teachers can ask the preschool students to work in a group. In addition, interactions with peers will help the preschool children to improve their cognitive development or it is called as disequilibrium (Ormrod, 2011). Why talking with peers can help the children? This is because, logically the children and peers are at the same age level, so they can be more understanding between their group. How can we know if the children are applying preoperation stage in their cognitive development? Krause et al. (2007) described that the development at each cognitive stages is called as milestones. In this preoperational stage, Krause et al. also reported the childrens milestones development is from the aspect of thinking and language skill whereby they know to replace objects with drawing, words or gestures. As for instance, when children are at shopping mall, they are able to tell their parents by pointing to the things that attract them such as toys and dolls. Besides children also learnt to produce sound for example while they are playing with their soldier toys, they can make sound like dush dush to indicate the soldier toys they are playing with are fighting. In contrast, children who do not develop well in this stage will no be able to differentiate between the living things and inanimate objects. For example, they are treating the real cats and cat doll the same as both have feelings, emotions and know how to feel hungry whereas only the living things can feel all that. In a nutshell, children will reached each stages when the readiness come and they still need to be taught to guide to the right path. Krause et al. (2007) did proposed that teachers and parents should not teach their children the highest level of stages if it is not the right time by means the children are just not ready yet. e. Summary. In conclusion, I agreed with propose suggested by Ormrod (2011), Piagets theory have its own benefits and disadvantegous. As Piagets idea was the first to talk about cognitive development among children, his idea is the famous one and still be used even until today. In my opinion, Piagets theory had changed peoples view about children development. Even though as reported by Newkirk (2009), children development are not always moving from each stage according to the age that Piagets planned, but they still will moving according to the stage either it is fast or late. Last but not least, implementation of cognitive theory in children development is very effective as it will be very helpful towards the children themselves as this theory help to influence children in the aspects of biological maturation, activities, social experiences and equilibration.

Our Father Who Art in Heav...Our Mind :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Our Father Who Art in Heav...Our Mind Be careful when you mention your religious experiences or any supernatural experiences that you have had with God, the gods, or the universe. The person that you report them to may quickly reduce your experiences to a simple decrease or increase in electrical activity within specific parts of your brain. While you may believe that your experiences are as real as the piercing sound of your alarm, waking you from your blissful "flying" dreams, you should know that the research performed and documented by scientists, concerning the experience of God, is also real. Have you ever heard the professed beliefs that Moses, who spoke to the Christian God for the first time through an angel in a flaming fire in a bush, and several times afterwards in the Old Testament of the Bible, was a sufferer of temporal lobe epilepsy? (1). Thus, his experiences with God were, merely, figments of his imagination, or more scientifically, over-activity within the temporal lobes of his brain. To the Christian, including myself, this belief sounds absurd. How can one reduce what is deemed Holy to an organic brain dysfunction? The neurobiological bases of religious experiences has not only been researched through examination of temporal lobe epileptic seizures, but it has also been researched in the meditative states and prayer sessions of Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns, respectively (5).) This paper seeks to present and examine some scientific observations that link the experience of God (thus, surpassing the argument that God exists), and the changes in neurological activity that occur during these experiences. Prior to taking this course in neurobiology and behavior, I firmly believed that the brain equals behavior and that additional experiences of the mind and soul arose from the multitude of activity within the brain. However, I still questioned my assumption that the soul lies within the brain. Subsequently, I came across a Newsweek article titled "Searching For t he God Within," respectively (5).) The article presents the research of Dr. Andrew Newberg and his research team. He and his team examined the brain activity of Tibetan Monks during their peak transcendent state during which they say they experience a oneness with the universe. Upon examination of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images of a resting brain and a meditative brain, Dr. Newberg concluded that there was a noticeable difference in the activity of the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain (7).

Spanish Colonialism and the Indigenous People of Bolivia Essay

Spanish Colonialism and the Indigenous People of Bolivia Prior to Spanish discovery of the new world, the area now known as Bolivia was home to three major ethnic and linguistic groups; the Uru, Aymara, and Quechua. The Uru lived on rafts, fishing and foraging along the shore of Lake Titicaca. The Aymara dominated the Uru, reducing their status to poor fishermen and landless workers. Aymara society was built upon a basic social unit of kinship that organized the distribution of labor, and this system, termed â€Å"ayllu,† was later adopted by conquering Quechua. The Aymara are known for their practice of ‘freeze drying’ potatoes high in the mountains, for their organized systems of irrigation, and their control of colonies in warm lowlands to produce food. By the early 15th century the Quechua dominated the northern highlands of the Andes, and by the later half of the century had adopted the name of their supreme ruler, the Inca. The Inca led a series of invasions into weakening Aymara kingdoms in the south Andean regio n. The Inca quickly became a successful empire, a relative ethnic minority which controlled a diverse region of peoples. Conquered groups were allowed to maintain local chiefs, cultures, religion and language, bound together only through payments and work for the Inca. The mita (forced labor) system facilitated the lives of common laborers and recruited soldiers while vast tracts of roadways allowed for trade between the high and lowlands. The Inca accumulated great wealth, thus significant artistic and architectural achievements were made with textiles, metal working, and the practice of fitting stones together for building without the use of mortar. Many of these walls survive today. Although the Aymara attem... ...t the year in search of temporary job opportunities. One might argue that indigenous groups continue to seek independence in the twenty-first century against a backdrop of capitalistic globalization, a lucrative drug trade, and struggles between conservative, liberal, and militant leaders. Works Cited Minahan, James. Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: Volume III. Westport Connectcut: Greenwood Press, 2002. S. Olson, James. The Indians of Central and South America: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary. Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1991. Regional Surveys of the World: South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Ed. Jacqueline West. 10th ed. Europa Publications: Taylor and Francis Group, 2002 Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture: Volume I. Simon and Schuster, 1996. http://www.countryreports.org/history/bolihist.htm

Critical and Creative Thinking Essay

INTRODUCTION What is thinking? Basically, thinking is one way for human to practice the act or exercise their intellectual or process of thought. In other way, thinking can also mean as a way of reasoning and judgment. In easier words, thinking is the active process by which human develops by understandings of us, others and our world. The process of thinking enables us to solve problems, interpret information, make sense of our feelings and attitudes, discuss important issues, establish beliefs, and work toward the completion of goals. Thinking is an essential component in our life as a human being. As saying by Bill Beattie goes, â€Å"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think – rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.† Thinking can be derived in two ways, critical thinking and also creative thinking. Critical thinking is active and purposeful thinking about how we arrive at our understandings of everything in this world and selecting those modes of thinking which are most successful in clarifying and enhancing our understanding. Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. People who think critically in a consistent manner attempt to live rationally, reasonably, and empathically. â€Å"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.† – Martin Luther King, Jr. Critical thinking is an exceptional mode of thinking about any subject, content, or problem – in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skilfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them. Creative thinking is a way of looking at problems or situations from a fresh perspective that suggests unusual solutions which may look unsettling at first but eventually become useful and brilliant. Creative thinking can be inspired both by an unstructured process such as brainstorming, and by a structured process such as lateral thinking (higher order thinking). A simple definition of creativity is the ability to imagine or invent something new. However, creativity is not the ability to create out of nothing, but the ability to generate new ideas by combining, changing, or reapplying existing ideas. Some creative ideas are surprising and brilliant, while others are just simple, good, practical ideas that no one seems to have thought of yet. â€Å"Creative thinking is not a talent; it is a skill that can be learnt. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improves teamwork, productivity and where appropriate profits.† — Edward de Bono Creative thinking is the process which we use when we come up with a new idea. It is the merging of ideas which have not been merged before. Brainstorming is one form of creative thinking: it works by merging someone else’s ideas with your own to create a new one. You are using the ideas of others as a stimulus for your own. This creative thinking process can be accidental or deliberate. â€Å"It is the function of creative people to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to combine them into some new forms, the power to connect the seemingly in connected.† – William Plomer The importance of critical and creative thinking is undeniable. In order to comply with the National Education Philosophy; which emphasize on the development of a whole-rounded individuals and capable of taking challenges, CCTS is very crucial and important to be nurtured in every students or individual. Part 1 – CURRENT SITUATION OF CCTS IN SCHOOL. I have been working as a contract teacher for 3 years in two different schools. Throughout those 3 years, I have been teaching Mathematics for one year and teaching English Language for about 2 years. As far as I can remember, during my contract as an English teacher, CCTS was not being implemented and in fact, I don’t even know the importance of critical and creative thinking skills that have to be highlighted and implemented to the students. But, I realize that the Literature Component that currently being taught in school is very suitable and able to nurture CCTS in students. This is because, it promotes students to think of the situation, analyse the current situation and interpret what is going to happen in the future. Besides, some of the literature components such as poems make students think something outside of the ordinary and be creative to play with the words and also the meaning of the sentences. I remember from my previous course on Literature Component during my contract teacher is that, the awareness as to the need to cultivate CCTS among students in Malaysia has been an issue of concern to many. Malachi Edwin (1992) stated that literature in English besides developing reading skills will also help develop students’ critical thinking skills. He adds that these skills will in turn provide students opportunities to understand themselves and their fellow human beings better. In line with Malachi Edwin’s view on the potentials of literature and its role in the cultivation of CCTS, the present research is aimed at using literature as the base through which CCTS can be promoted effectively. Literature in English has been chosen from the many subjects offered in the Malaysian curriculum for two reasons. Firstly, literature in English can be seen to cut across the various subjects in the curriculum as the contents of literary texts are so diverse that they incorporate social, political, scientific, technological, medical and all other areas of life. Secondly it is an undeniable fact that literature plays an important role in our present curriculum since it is now being taught to students from Form 1 to Form 5 as a component of the English Language syllabus. There is no doubt that the very nature of the subject which requires analysis, solving problems and interpretation can encourages critical and creative thinking. In English Language, other syllabus that are currently being taught such as grammar, reading comprehension and others would not make student to fully use their thinking process. As the knowledge is something that you can remember and it is basically a skill that u can achieve. It is strongly believe that learners can only become proficient language users if they, besides using the language and knowing the meaning, could display creative and critical thinking through the language (Kamarul Kabilan, 2000). This suggests that the learners must be creative in their production of ideas, and critically support them with logical and rational explanation, details and particulars and also examples. For me, as a teacher, it is essential for us to recognise the subject in our curriculum before we can understand and trying to teach students or cultivating CCTS in studying literature. The role of literature in English in the Malaysian curriculum has gone through tremendous changes. Before this, literature components that have been taught in school are just simple to know about the story and how to answer the examination. Most of the students or even teacher do not know that the literature components is actually a powerful tool that can be used to instil critical and creative thinking in students. The English language syllabus for Form Four states clearly a number of objectives of the curriculum but the objective which is of relevance to the present study is Objective Number Three as quoted below: ‘listen to, view, read and respond to different texts, and express ideas, opinions, thoughts and feelings imaginatively and creatively in spoken and written form’. (Huraian Sukatan Pelajaran, Ting IV. KPM, 2003) Part 2 – CHALLENGES FACED IN IMPLEMENTING CCTS IN SCHOOL. There are basically three reasons why CCTS is quite difficult to be implemented in school. They are: 1) Teachers themselves, 2) Students background, and 3) School Authority. First, during my contract with the school, I have never been exposed to CCTS. I don’t even know the existence of CCTS in school. The first time I heard about CCTS is when all English teacher was sent to short courses on Literature Component in 2009. Besides that, I have never know about the training in CCTS and the school never emphasize and put interest in getting the teacher trained in CCTS. Even though the teachers has been sent to the courses on the implementation of CCTS in Literature Component, we have no idea on how to implement the CCTS and still lacking in the idea to teach CCTS in class. We basically have the basic idea of CCTS but the problem is, we do not know how to implement the skills in teaching the language. Besides that, teachers have a lot of responsible rather than teaching students. There is lots of clerical work that should be done. This is somehow can interrupt teachers focus in giving all out in class. Teachers were given work out of their scope. There is too much administrative work and teaching subjects they were not trained for. In Malaysian education context, teachers play huge role in teaching and learning. They determine and direct the content, activities and processes of teaching and learning in classrooms. It is the teachers who decide on the aims, goals, and strategies of teaching to be implemented in classrooms. Unfortunately, not all teachers have the same idea about teaching. It is not only the students who need to think and act creatively and critically but the teacher should also do the same. When I was thinking about the Set Induction for my lesson, I had been challenged to think of a set induction that I had never use or seen before. In making the students interested to what the lesson are going to be for that day, I have been using songs, drama or even quotes from famous celebrities for my induction set. Secondly, the education system should teach students to be great thinkers, not followers. Unfortunately, it did not work out that well. This might be happening because of the student’s background. Sometimes, the family is not very helpful in ensuring the successfulness of one student. Parents also play an important role in providing encouragement for children to learn. Encouragement and incentives such as praise and prizes should be given to kids if they get good results. The education of the child is the collective responsibility of the family members. The education of the children in a family is the collective responsibility of all family members. The student will become a good thinker and they should be able to master critical and creative thinking. As such, they should be trained with activities that have been focused and aimed to produce a high intellect thinker. Unfortunately, not all students are interested because they fail to see the importance of thinking skills or even learning English. In short they do not know why they need to learn English. One way to solve this problem is, we as a teachers have to give a reason and rational in learning English. I have to do this, because students nowadays always want to know or have rewards when they do things, including studying. Thirdly, the school authority can also become a problem for teacher to implement the CCTS. The task given to teachers by the school authority sometimes can take teachers time and energy. Besides that, the teachers need to comply with the syllabus that they had to finish in the given time. This is sometimes can become a challenge for teacher to spend time in conducting critical and creative thinking in class. Even when I was a teacher, I have some difficulties in finishing the syllabus on time, especially Literature Component. When teaching Literature Component, I need to take some extra time to let the students think about the story or poems. Some students do not know how to interpret the information from the poem. This is actually quite hard for teacher to teach the students the thinking skills when there is no enough time. Thinking skills is not something that the teacher can teach over night, but it takes some time to do it. Part 3 – POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS AND RECOMMENDATION Every problem must have a cure. In order for CCTS to be fully implemented and useful in school system, all the teachers need to be exposed to any new invention in general and ‘thinking skills’ specifically as well as how to incorporate them in the lessons, such as through videos, workshops, talks, and others. Besides that, continuous development must be carried out from time to time as ‘refresher’ course for the teachers. This is because, teacher are just like another human being that always forgets and tend to be careless. Apart from that, teachers need to be aware of the importance of thinking skills so that it will be carried out in the classroom more and can be fully utilised on classroom. Furthermore, the questions asked in the classrooms will determine the ‘thinking’ that the pupils are doing, so teachers need to be exposed and nurtured to have and apply questions and questioning technique that will elicit thinking. Teachers should also know the activity that will be done in classroom. The activity should be able to get students to observe the texts particularly literature components carefully and critically, to draw upon their vocabulary and to think creatively and critically about the material given. Besides training and preparing teacher to be critical and creative, problem-based learning (PBL) can also be one of the methods that can be used to challenge students to learn how to think. Students will work cooperatively in groups to find solutions to real world problems and more importantly, to develop skills to become self-directed learners. Here, the goal of problem-based learning is viewed as learning for capability rather than learning for the sake of acquiring knowledge. Students develop critical thinking abilities by constantly relating what ideas they generate and to what they want to do with the information (Gallagher, 1997). In an activity like problem solving, both kinds of thinking are significant to us. First, we must examine and study the problem; then we must create potential solutions; next we must pick and implement the best solution; and finally, we must assess the efficiency of the solution. As you can see, this process reveals an alternation between the two kinds of thinking, critical and creative. In practice, both kinds of thinking operate together much of the time and are not really independent of each other. Furthermore, for me, as a teacher we have to think aloud in front of our students. Let them hear what are we thinking and puzzling our way slowly through problems in the subject. I have tried to think aloud in class in front of my students, and they show a good response. Especially, when they say that they never think the way that I thought and surprise to hear my thought. But, when doing this, the teacher should voice our thinking slowly and clearly, so the students able to hear them and response to them. In Critical and Creative Thinking Skills class, I have learned about Socratic questioning. Now I know that as a teacher, we have to regularly question our students Socratically. Such as, investigating various dimensions of their thinking: their purpose, their evidence, reasons, data, their claims, beliefs, interpretations, deductions, conclusions, the implications and consequences of their thought, their response to alternative thinking from contrasting points of view, and others. CONCLUSION Creative and critical thinking skills should not be taught separately as an isolated entity, but embedded in the subject matter and woven into the curriculum. Due to this, the present educational system in Malaysia no longer put emphasis on the 3Rs but rather stressed critical thinking skills, scientific skills as well as technological skills in the schools’ curriculum. It is in fact possible to do creative and critical thinking activity often, in any English language class. However, being stuck in the curriculum system as in Malaysia, with the exam-oriented teaching and learning in school, I tend to predict that CCTS will be quite hard to be fully implemented in school. However, with the fresh English curriculum introduced by the Ministry of Education starting from year 2010, I really expect that students will be further exposed with new ways of teaching and learning in English. It was stated that the change of the curriculum involves the language art and grammar components with focus on fun learning as well as the ability converse in Standard English, with emphasis on pronunciation and phonics (Ministry of Education, 2009). If the changes are actually applied and assessments are made on the result, I am certain that we can do better in enlightening the teaching and learning of English in Malaysia and at the same time produce students who are able to think critically and creatively in any situations. REFERENCES Beyer, B. (1987). â€Å"Practical Strategies for the Teaching of Thinking.† Boston: Ally and Bacon Inc. Kamarul Kabilan ( 2000) .Creative and Critical Thinking in language Classroom.The internet TESL Journal, Vol. VI, No. 6, June 2000 retrieved 16th April 2010 from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kabilan-CriticalThinking.html Moore,K.D. (2005). Effective instructional strategies: from theory to practice. California: Sage Publications Inc Nurliza Othman (2002) Thinking Skills; A motivational Factor in ELT. Jurnal Pendidikan IPBA (2) 5 2002 ; 101-109 White, R.V. (1995) .New Ways in Teaching Writing. USA : Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages ,Inc