IATEFL Conference and Cognitive Dissonance.

 Now that the festivities are all over and the new year well underway, thoughts move on to the next big professional event:

                                          

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Greatly looking forward to it as is Angeliki who is doing a poster presentation. I’ve never been to The Pool so this is a wonderful opportunity to meet up with fellow TEFLers and to do a bit of exploring as well.

Visiting the Beatles Museum is definitely a must and I’ve heard there’s lots to do there. But right now my sights are on getting together the talk I am to deliver.                                                            

    

The subject in focus is whether teachers should be social justice warriors and what I want to explore is how our perspectives and attitudes are informed by language, experiences, etc. and how they are very subjective, individual constructs. My take on it is that we cannot necessarily pass on our particular perspectives to others simply because they are our students.

 While doing my research I have been trying to clearly define the difference between perception and perspective.  It seems the former is the information that we receive from our senses, while the latter is the frame through which we see the world. Clearly each one influences the other and there is a reflexive interrelationship there.

Related to those is the concept of attitude. This is described as a psychological construct, a mental and emotional entity that characterizes a person and is a complex, acquired state formed through ones past and present experiences. According to the ABC model, there are three key attitudinal components: affective - feelings and emotions, behavioral – previous actions or experiences and cognitive - beliefs, thoughts, etc..

And what particularly interests me is how most of us construct a fairly cohesive, unified perspective from what is essentially a fairly fragmented reality. To explain this we refer to the psychology field of cognitive dissonance. This state is described as a mental discomfort or psychological stress that is caused by being confronted with facts that contradict our beliefs, ideals and values. Whoever experiences this internal inconsistency is motivated to reduce this cognitive dissonance and make changes by justifying this stress, by adding to the cognition, or by avoiding what is causing the contradiction.

That brings me to consider something that caused me distress some time ago. We happened to be in Scotland in September 2014, at the run-up to the referendum on ‘Should Scotland be an Independent Country?’. 

We were quite by chance leaving the day before the vote. I liked to say it was because Z was afraid he might be obliged to wear the kilt, depending on how things turned out! While we were in Stirling, I was proudly wearing the NO badge, which I still retain. What disturbed me was that I saw that the “Yes Scotland’ group were using the saltire as their symbol.

 And now I understand my reaction of extreme annoyance: the saltire was for me a treasured symbol of nationality, culture and identity but here it was representing an attitude I did not hold – that Scotland be an independent country. Instant cognitive dissonance!! My perceived reality was suddenly fragmented: my beloved saltire could not be associated with what was for me a ‘bad thing’ – Scottish separatism.  My need for cohesion was dealt with not by avoiding the contradiction, but by challenging it. I walked into the NO canvassing office and gave them a good piece of my mind, stating that they had no right using our national symbol for political reasons.  The poor lad there looked somewhat perplexed and had no answer, which was not relevant – I felt better in my attempt to reduce the fragmentation in my perspective!  The results of the referendum I was happy to see were: 55.3% for the Nos, and 44.7% for the Yes group.

 It is particularly interesting to note in that referendum there was a voting turn-out of 84.% - the highest ever recorded for an election or referendum in the UK since the introduction of universal suffrage.

It is also interesting that the main reason given for the Yes votes was ‘disaffection with Westminster politics’. Which is why I am seriously rethinking my position on an independent Scotland.               

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 Ideally, I think a union with the Republic of Ireland would be an excellent solution: an alternative, enhanced Celtic Tiger – what a delightful concept!

Sophia, Telemachus, Ypatia ....And How To Cope With Them!

Sophia,Telemachos and Ypatia – why have they been in the news here recently? What do they have in common, apart from being names from Ancient Greece?

Sophia was to become the goddess of wisdom, her name coming from the Greek word sophia for wisdom, from which the word philosopher, or lover of wisdom, is derived. Incidentally, Pythagoras (c 570BC - c 495 BC) was the first to call himself a philosopher.

Moving on to Telemachus who, in Greek mythology, was the son of Odysseus and Penelope He was the central character in Homer’s Odyssey where he went in search of his father who had been in combat in the Trojan Wars.

Finally, we come to Ypatia, a very progressive lady for her time. She lived in Alexandria, Egypt and was a Hellenistic philosopher, astronomer and mathematician. Held in great esteem, she was, unfortunately, killed at the hands of a Christian mob.

We have a tendency to anthropomorphise – to confer human attributes to animals or inanimate objects. This has become particularly evident in the case of meteorological phenomena. And what these three names have in common is that they were names given to the extreme cold fronts visited upon Greece recently.

Whether some form of harbinger for what lies ahead in the new year, Sophia soon made her presence known by a sudden drop in temperature and a pretty light dusting of icing-sugar snow on the mountain tops. Pretty - but there was more to come!

                                                 

 On Friday 4^th, I made my way in a bitterly, cold wind to the surgery for my 7^th acupuncture session. There I lay, needles in situ, power-plugged-in, covered in a gossamer-light scarf, a heat-ray lamp trained on me, with feng shui background music playing. Could it get any more relaxing? And that was when it began to snow, in the fullest sense of the word. No piddling little polka-dot stuff, no dandruffy dusting, but the real deal: down-feathers fluttering down and lying firmly afoot with no intention of melting away.  Cocooned in the warmth, I joyously welcomed the arrival of Telemachus, our first really cold front. Session over, reality kicked in as I stood waiting for 20 minutes on a sea-front being attacked by the blizzard, for a local bus which came packed to the gunnels and making heavy weather - no pun intended - of the road conditions which were fast becoming treacherous. 

 

     

 I did, fortunately make it home safely, but very shortly afterwards, several local roads were declared impassable. Fortunately, too, Z had just done a big shop, so we lit the fire, and prepared to hunker down for the week-end.     

                       

                    

Safe inside and in the knowledge that Leon was protecting us and the homestead from this strange white stuff covering the garden.

                

Staying warm was the obvious priority and we all of us have different ways of getting there. I really appreciated my Christmas-gift slippers while Z downed a wee ouzo – or two – along with a meze mound.

                            

                                  

 

Continuing on the food topic, in a warm kitchen it’s a joint effort to produce the Greek dish youvarlakia, meatballs cooked in a broth and served with an egg and lemon sauce. This dish is just right for cold weather - sorry we’d already had large helpings of it before we took the picture! :o  After that, we had a clootie dumpling that I had stuffed full of lots of spices, dates, prunes, cranberries and sultanas and several glugs of brandy. Served hot with ice-cream.

                           

The cats expected – and demanded - extra portions of food during the cold spell, but they chose their snoozing areas carefully: Mr Mao has snuggled into a warm shawl, while Prunella has cleverly found a little window of sun rays playing on a warm duvet cover.

   

 

Outside the birdies have ruffled their down feathers to keep warm as they perch on our wild rose briars.  We can’t bring ourselves to prune them as they are regularly used as sparrow swings. Fortunately their red berries can still provide a nibble for our wee neighbours.

                                      

And we have other, closer neighbours. One little bird has been coming to roost over the winter months in our upper balcony for several years now – well, we assume it is the same one. He is very resourceful and managed to find a way in even after we closed off the area with perspex blinds as a wind shield. He perches on the rafters just under the roof. But in this bitterly cold spell, another little bird came in to roost on a spar above the window.

                             

 

We hope to share our accommodation with their treasured company for many a long winter.