Capabilities from IB Learners profile

Inquirers: They develop their natural curiosity. They acquire the skills necessary to conduct inquiry and research and show independence in learning. They actively enjoy learning and this love of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.

Communicators: They understand and express ideas and information confidently and creatively in more than one language and in a variety of modes of communication. They work effectively and willingly in collaboration with others.

Open-minded: They understand and appreciate their own cultures and personal histories, and are open to the perspectives, values and traditions of other individuals and communities. They are accustomed to seeking and evaluating a range of points of view, and are willing to grow from the experience.

Caring:  They show empathy, compassion and respect towards the needs and feelings of others. They have a personal commitment to service, and act to make a positive difference to the lives of others and to the environment.

Risk-takers: They approach unfamiliar situations and uncertainty with courage and forethought, and have the independence of spirit to explore new roles, ideas and strategies. They are brave and articulate in defending their beliefs.

Reflective: They give thoughtful consideration to their own learning and experience. They are able to assess and understand their strengths and limitations in order to support their learning and personal development.

why use the IB capacitie´s? they were designed for children, in school environments and meant to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world. which seems to speak of social networks, therefore is in line with my line of research.

Definition of Social Sustainability

Social sustainability can be defined as  a life-enhancing condition within communities, and a process within communities that can achieve that condition (McKenzie, 2004)

OR from a section of the definition by the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development: 

Social sustainability blends traditional social policy areas and principles, such as equity and health, with emerging issues concerning participation, needs, social capital, the economy, the environment, and more recently, with the notions of happiness, wellbeing and quality of life

Colantonio, A. and Dixon, T. (2009) Measuring Socially Sustainable Urban Regeneration in  
  Europe, Oxford Brookes University: Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD)

what will we focus on?

Maybe on friendly behaviour, that is behaviour that promotes the creation of strong social networks, which not only provides benefits like a sense of belonging, and increased access to local information, but can increase a community´s opportunity to successfully pursue common goals, and according to Michael Woolcock, a senior Social Scientist at the World Bank and a lecturer in Public Policy at
Harvard University, well-connected inddividuals have an increased likelyhood of being hired, housed, healthy and happy. All important elements of Social Sustainability.

Woolcock, M. (2001) ‘The place of social capital in understanding social and economic    
  outcomes’, Canadian Journal of Policy Research, 2 (1), pp. 11-17

Heidegger and Art

From: Heidegger, Creativity, and what Poets do: On Living in a Silent Shack for Three Months and not Going Mad

Author: Dan Disney

In his essay, ’The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1971), philosopher Martin Heidegger sets out to explore the relationship art shares with truth.

Via a series of looping questions -’Where and how does art occur?’; ’what and how is a work of art?’; ’how does truth happen?’; ’(w)hat is art?’ and what is art ’that we call it rightly an origin?’ (17-69) -the philosopher finally proposes art to be ’truth setting itself to work’ (38). Heidegger instructively sets out to reject the Ancient quarrel between philosophies and poetries by calling poetry an ’illuminating projection’ with ’a privileged position in the domain of the arts’ (70-71).

Throughout the essays collected in Poetry, Language, Thought, the philosopher stakes a series of stunning claims for poetry from the bleakness of ’(i)n the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be
experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss’ (that is, poets. See 90), to the oblique ’(p)oetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’ (216). Throughout Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger privileges poets as language users who apprehend and then construct dynamic truths. There is something to this theory of creativity that promises not only compliments but, potentially, illumination and self-knowing.

’The Thinker as Poet’ (Heidegger, 1971) scans more like a manifesto than poetically-figured language. But the philosopher’s adoption of a ’poetic’ form indicates no small faith in poetry as a mode of expressing truthfulness. His notion of poets singing the species into being seems a skewed anthropo-morphism, but what Heidegger is suggesting is that poets use a resonant language, and that part of the resonance is neither simply syntactical nor sonic. The singing/thinking of poems is a way for humans a just-begun poem to
ontologise ’their’ world.

In ’The Thinker as Poet’, for example, I am struck by how much the philosopher seems to fathom where poems come from: we never come to thoughts. They come to us. (16)

At his most ineffable, the philosopher proposes a distinction between two poetic modes in ’The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1971) dichtung and poesie and it is dichtung, a primordial and extra-linguistic framing essence that makes poesie, the manifestation of poetry in language, possible:

Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their conflict and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry (dichtung) is the saying of the uncon-cealedness of what is. (71)

To Heidegger, dichtung is a wordless creative essence the ’poetry’ that bespeaks ’of what is’ embedding not only the poesie of language expressed as poem; indeed, according to Heidegger, the universe is shot through with this originary impulse, which a poem mimetically enacts as it languages beings. In other words, reality may indeed be out there, somewhere (just like Bruegel’s universal language). But, as theorist Terry Eagleton (2007) puts it, ’(p)oetry is an image of the truth that language is not what shuts us off from reality, but
what yields us the deepest access to it’ (69). To arrive at a junction of these ideas, then, a poet’s making might be regarded as seeing into the heart of matters, into the truth of beings, and so into the being-ness of dichtung’s truth: what dichtung creates is an opening into which unconcealed beings ’shine and ring out’ (Heidegger, 1971: 70)

Commenting on how art materialises, Heidegger (1971) writes, ’the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process
for the work to emerge’ (39).

as dichtung moves into poesie, poetry is named by Heidegger as a style of thinking that opens up and originates its own ontologies.

Heidegger writes ’(t)he basic disposition of wonder displaces man into the realm where the most usual, yet still as such unthought (beings), are established in their most proper unusualness’ (1994: 147).