Original, ethical and educational presents to be enjoyed by Children and grown-ups together.
Little stocking filler, perfect for posting £5
Chrissie Cress’ or Mingo Mungbean’s Story & Seed Pack.
I recommend either of these packs for a super speedy, indoor growing adventure.
The ultimate Starter Kit ; storybook and seeds of your chosen vegetable and funky windowsill propagator. The propagator is colourful, re-usable and made from recycled plastic in the UK.
This is a beautifully crafted tool for keen young gardeners or those with smaller hands. Made in Holland to last a life-time. Combine with Story & Seed Packs for the complete Secret Seed Society experience.
Our most popular gift, the first 4 Story & Seed Packs as a Boxset. All printed in the UK with vegetables inks. READ, GROW, COOK & EAT.
These tools will last a lifetime. A spade, mattock and rake with long handles will cover most of the gardening jobs. Great for raised beds. The tools will now arrive in the New Year, so we will send a Secret Seed Gift card to your lucky recipient for Xmas to let them know their tolls will arrive shortly.
SPECIAL OFFER FREE POSTAGE ON ALL XMAS ORDERS
Get in touch if you have any questions about our products or would like to have Secret Seed Society at your Xmas Fayre, we can offer you a retailer discount if you’d like to sell them for your fundraiser.
Best Amy & Shena xx
I love TED talks so I was well chuffed to get asked to talk about ‘My Adventures with Vegetables’
By Corey Robin
Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating discussion, mostly because of what it reveals about the conservative mind and its attitude toward sex.
By John A. Neuenschwander
Last fall the Oral History Association approved a new set of ethical guidelines. The goal of the task force that prepared the new General Principles for Oral History and Best Practices for Oral History was to provide a more condensed and usable set of guidelines. The leadership of the Association stressed that the new ethical guidelines would be reviewed periodically to determine if they needed to be amended and/or expanded. To that end President Michael Frisch recently invited oral historians to join in an online dialogue via the Social Network which can be found on the OHA website. There will also be a session on the new Principles and Best Practices at the annual meeting of the Association in Atlanta on Saturday, October 30th from 12:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. in Room CR 123.
The new Principles and Best Practices like ethic codes of most academic disciplines or fields are intended to help practitioners avoid unprofessional conduct and more indirectly the legal difficulties than can arise from serious ethical lapses. Some of the suggested practices and procedures in the new Principles and Best Practices are clearly law based while others are derived solely from ethical considerations. The focus of this is blog is not any specific section of the new code but rather on the absence of any guidelines on the legal standing of interviewers.
From a legal standpoint, there is clearly no seminal court case or specific section of the Copyright Act that designates an interviewer as a joint author. Despite the absence of any black letter law, there are a number of impressive sources that point to the very real possibility that interviewers are in fact joint authors. The most telling support for this position comes from the U.S. Copyright Office. According to their policy manual, Compendium II, “A work consisting of an interview often contains copyrightable authorship by the person interviewed and the interviewer. Each owns the expression the absence of an agreement to the contrary.” There is also at least one lower court decision and several copyright experts who support the position of the Copyright Office.
The point of all this is that the new guidelines should include some reference to the possible copyright interest of interviewers for both ethical and legal reasons. Perhaps the best was to do this would be to add a new Principle: Interviewers may also hold a copyright interest in the interviews that they conduct and should always be so informed by the program or archive for which they work or volunteer of their potential rights. Programs and archives who utilized interviewers who are not full-time employees must insure that such interviewers understand the extent of their rights to the interview before they are asked to sign a release. Interviewers should also receive appropriate acknowledgement for their work in all forms of citation and usage.
John A. Neuenschwander is professor emeritus of history at Carthage College and a municipal judge for the City of Kenosha, Wisconsin. He is the author of A Guide to Oral History and the Law and lectures nationwide on the legal aspects of oral history.
0 Comments on A Reflection on the OHA’s New Code of Ethics as of 1/1/1900
Elizabeth Ellis will be interviewed by Eric Wolf on the relationship between Storytelling and the Development of Ethical Behavior on the Art of Storytelling with Children on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 8pm EST.
Elizabeth Ellis Writes…
If I had a nickel for every time someone (attorney, state trooper, loan officer, IRS agent) has made fun of me because I told ‘em I am a storyteller, I could take us all out to dinner. At a nice place. With tablecloths. Because often the public perception of storytelling is that it is fluff and foolishness.
Well, we storytellers know better, and we have survived an entire movement of Back to the Basics and Almighty State Testing. What the left brain-ers don’t realize is there is another entire level of education far more basic to being human than the 3 R’s will ever be.
The most basic things about being human come from the right side of the brain, not the left. Chief among them is the ability to make ethical decisions. I am not talking about following the rules. Remember that the Nazis were great rule followers. Ethical decision-making requires the ability to imagine the effect of my behavior on your life. Without an active imagination, a child is an ethical cripple. The new study about the state of ethics of America’s youth just out from the Josephson Institute (http://josephsoninstitute.org/ for the full details of the survey) has many people in our culture asking themselves, “How did we get on this handcar? And where are we headed?
Hearing stories told leads to the development of empathy. And empathy is essential for all ethical decision making. I have been talking about this for more than thirty years. Recently other folks have begun to say the same thing. I am pleased by that, ’cause I’m not gonna live forever. Check out P.J. Manney’s article “Empathy in the Time of Technology” in the September, 2008 Journal of Evolution and Technology. (http://jetpress.org/v19/manney.htm if you want to read the entire article, especially the interesting part about the development of ‘mirror neurons’.)
Please join me for a discussion of how storytelling contributes to the development of ethical behavior on this Pod-cast, but also in your guilds and story circles and list serves. In a time of national financial hardship, it behooves us as tellers to be able to challenge people’s thinking about the importance of story and it’s role in right brain development. Storytelling is neither fluff nor foolishness. It is how we change the world “one listener at a time.”
Oh, and by the way, if you happen to be a attorney, state trooper, loan officer or IRS agent or some other form of left brain-er, it is the key to learning to “think outside the box”, which is imperative if America is to remain an economic power… (Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: How Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Riverhead Books, 2006.)…but, that’s another story.
A Short Biography
Designated an American Masterpiece Touring Artist by the NEA, Elizabeth Ellis grew up in the Appalachian Mountains. A children’s librarian at Dallas Public Library before becoming a professional storyteller, the “Divine Miss E” is a versatile, riveting teller of Appalachian and Texas tales and stories of heroic American women, though her personal stories are arguably her best. Invariably hilarious and poignant, she is a repeated favorite at the National Storytelling Festival. Selected a Listener’s Choice at the 30th Anniversary of the National Storytelling Festival, she is a recipient of the John Henry Faulk Award from the Texas Storytelling Association and the Circle of Excellence Award from the National Storytelling Network. She has mesmerized nearly a million children in her thirty-year career as a professional storyteller.
Elizabeth is also well known for her workshops, which offer training for beginning and seasoned storytellers. Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories, which she co-authored with Loren Niemi has been described by NAPRA ReView as a “great leap forward in the literature of how to put stories together with art and truth”. It received a Storytelling World Award.
Jay O’Callahan says, “Elizabeth Ellis’ voice sounds like chocolate tastes.” Her stories are just as addictive as chocolate. A mother and grandmother, she makes her home in Dallas. www.elizabethellis.com
Dr. Kristin Shrader-Frechette is the O’Neill Family Endowed Professor in the Department of Biological Science and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. In her most recent book, Taking Action Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health, she shows how campaign contributions, lobbyists and their control of media, advertisements, and PR can all conspire to manipulate scientific information, withhold data, cover-up pollution-related disease and death, and “capture” regulators. To circumvent this mis-information she urges citizens to become the change they seek. In the excerpt below Shrader-Frechette looks at public citizens can push for reforms.
…The first step, getting information about public-health threats, is both the easiest and the hardest… It is the easiest because it may require nothing beyond reading and thinking, something people can do daily. It is the hardest because…special interests sometimes distort available information. In addition, many citizens receive their information only from limited and perhaps biased sources. Often people fail to get opinions and evidence from the greatest variety of people and groups possible. Many citizens likewise have not made the lifestyle commitments necessary to remain informed about public health. Instead, they may 
spend too much time on activities like television. As a result, citizens may have a false complacency that allows unscrupulous groups to “whitewash” or “greenwash” their behavior. Whitewash of course, can arise from any agenda-driven groups-environmental organizations, churches, labor unions, corporations, and even government agencies. The greater the group’s economic or social power, the greater their potential threat to legitimate information-as the recent coverup of sexual predators in the Roman Catholic Church reveals…Because corporate groups donate about 80 percent of U.S. campaign contributions and spend about 100 times more dollars on scientific research than do environmental groups, their greater power and potential for abuse suggests that their behavior out to receive proportionate scrutiny from those seeking reliable information.
Cooperating with others is the second step… Cooperation is difficult because people frequently recognize its necessity only when they see some threat before them. Yet often no threat is obvious until after people have already cooperated and thus gained public-health information…One health related NGO is Bread For the World. Promoting food assistance and child immunization in developing nations, it offers “action kits” that show citizens how to support its food and public-health programs. It is a valuable source of both health information and cooperation. As this example suggests, however, cooperatively working with such an NGO is not merely a matter o paying annual dues or reading a book. It involves keeping informed, helping to educate others, and supporting ongoing group activities and meetings. It involves commitments of both time and money-organizing, leafleting, educating, canvassing, and other activities characteristic of deliberative democracy. Without cooperation through a variety of focused groups, like Bread For the World, it is difficult for citizens to obtain accurate information, to evaluate conflicting viewpoints, to succeed in alleviating societal problems, or to sustain and motivate their own efforts to do good. The reason? If the social model of gaining knowledge…is correct, cooperation and cognitive division of labor are necessary to make much information readily available. The U.S. founding fathers and mothers recognized this point and organized New England town meetings…Such cooperative ideals identify deliberative democracy not with structures or institutions but instead with processes of wide communication among various people and social sectors. These processes are necessary both to build democratic consensus and to debate and amend conflicting social proposals.
A third step…is evaluating health threats and alternative solutions to them. This likewise is something best achieved through open interaction with a variety of other people and points of view. Yet most citizens associate only with certain groups of people and typically hear only a few points of view. As a result, their evaluations of social problems are often incomplete. To understand public-health threats, people need to hear a diversity of opinions about them. they also need emotive, narrative, and scientific or factual understanding, as well as ongoing evaluation-vigilance and criticism…One way of exercising such vigilance, at least in scientific evaluation, is to look for the characteristic errors of private-interest science…Another way is to avoid acting on the basis of unevaluated opinions that have not survived the testing and analysis…This means that people..need to aim at evaluation that is open, transparent, empirical, accessible to all, and democrative…
Evaluation is particularly necessary if citizens who hope to reform life-threatening social institutions find themselves at odds with at least some members of those institutions. If they are eventually forced into whistle-blowing…or into civil disobedience…their actions will require special evaluation…
Most ethicists believe that whistleblowing is justified only if four conditions, analogous to those for civil disobediance, are met. (1) The policy seriously threatens the public. (2) It cannot be overturned within a reasonable period of time through normal, internal channels. (3) Whistleblowing is likely to be effective in overturning the policy. (4) The whistleblowing will not violate any higher ethical obligations. Failure to meet any of these conditions typically makes whistleblowing unethical. Often this means it is unfair to the accused or endangers the whistleblower.
Organized action, the fourth step… is a natural response to the three previous steps…because individuals acting alone often can do little to help correct public-health problems, concerted and well-organized collective action usually is necessary. That is why the 50,000-member American Public Health Association (APHA) encourages “work in coalition,” including “advocacy and litigation.” Through organizations like “public-interest law groups” APHA says citizens can help exercise their “maximum responsiblity” for public health. Explaining its activities on its website, the APHA says it “has been influencing policies and setting priorities in public health for over 125 years.” It claims to serve the public not only “through its scientific practice programs” but also through its “advocacy efforts.” Showing how such advocacy and organized action can help overcome citizens’ feelings of fustration and powerlessness….organized action must build on small wins and on personal transformation-working to become virtuous onself, to become the change one seeks. Because it is so easy for advocates and any special interests to fall into bias, however, it is important to evaluate all collective actions from alternative points of view. This includes evalutating different proposed beliefs and actions, including doing nothing. In fact, organized and enlightened responses to the responsibility arguement require ongoing and iterative evaluation of alternative perspectices and actions. This continuing evaluation is important to help make oganized action less self-serving and more affirming to those who have been disenfranchised. As philosophers Hilary Putnam and John Dewey recognized, evaluation also is necessary to keep collective policies and actions inclusive, participative, and objective.
ShareThis
by Tim Egan
Houghton Mifflin 2007
I don't remember the last time I reviewed a beginning reader, if at all. I know I passed on Mo Williams' recent Pig and Elephant series because (prepare to throw rocks and tomatoes) I just wasn't bowled over by them. They weren't bad, they just didn't go anywhere for me.
But the other day I noticed this title and, I don't know, something about it caught me.
.jpeg?picon=3496)
Play to hear this interview that was recorded as a conference call on October 19th at 8 PM ET - 2008. SWC #068 Dylan Pritchett - What Makes a Great Storyteller?
Very few storytellers currently make it easy for potential clients to listen to their material. Many storytellers choose to hide the treasure of their professional work behind a wall of profit and self-interest. Unluckily for them profit and self-interest can be better served by bringing down the wall. How do you expect potential clients to be sold on your ability to be an amazing storyteller if they have never heard you tell a story? How many potential presenters or school administrators are not hiring storytellers just because they had one bad experience and need more evidence to overcome their prejudice? How do you expect people to buy your online CD’s without being able to test the waters?
As a movement we are offering what the world wants to hear. Currently America is filled with cynical, disconnected and apathetic people who are dying for authentic relationships. What is good storytelling? - authentic, real and emotional. We as storytellers can do a better job of making our material available to the average American audience. We could do a better job of selling the value of our movement to the average American and we can do a better job of helping Americans to find themselves. In a culture that is filled with pop icons we have authentic tellers with ability and quality that matches any of the Hollywood studios.
Every storyteller in the country could have a list of audio files of their stories available for easy download. A list of files is called an rss feed; if they are all audio or video files they are called an rss feed for a podcast. You might be asking what is a podcast. Podcasting is a way to receive audio files over the Internet via what is called an RSS feed. Many content providers offer podcast feeds at no cost. These feeds deliver audio broadcasts to your desktop. You can listen to these files on your computer or load them on your MP3 player and take them with you. The term podcast, like broadcast, can refer either to the series content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also called podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. We live in an on demand society where people want what they want when they want it - NOW, not at the next storytelling festival, conference or workshop. You have a responsibility to the storytelling movement to record as much of your material as possible and to make that material available to as wide an audience as possible.
If you are a presenter or an organizer of storytelling events - after the show is over hand them an audio CD of the event for tellers to take home. They have a personal computer they can use to copy that disk and sell at their next venue or just trade with other tellers. You can use your website or a blog to drive listeners to your very own storytelling extravaganza. All you need is a list of recorded stories (your storytelling CD’s or performance tapes) and an rss feed. Both Switchpod and Lypsen hosting sites include an rss feed as a part of their
service. You could be podcasting for $5 a month if you have about twenty minutes of material already recorded.
If I have you interested in creating a complex podcasting project then you might want to sign up for my free e-course - Artist or arts organization’s centered podcasting and new media at… http://www.storytelling withchildren.com/podcast
Eric James Wolf is known around the world to children as Brother Wolf. He is the host if the “Art of Storytelling with Children” podcast, a hour long show recorded in a conference call environment once a week. He also writes weekly in a blog (The Dyslexic Storyteller). All of this can be viewed at http://www.ericwolf.org
Elizabeth Ellis will be interviewed by Eric Wolf on the relationship between Storytelling and the Development of Ethical Behavior on the Art of Storytelling with Children on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 8pm EST. Elizabeth Ellis Writes… If I had a nickel for every time someone (attorney, state trooper, loan officer, IRS agent) [...]