In an era where educational "success" has been too connected to standardized tests and the development of narrowly focused skills in preparation for particular jobs, college graduates need to be prepared to respond creatively to the complexities of the modern world. America's colleges and universities must be redesigned to enhance…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

Multimodal learning refers to teaching strategies that involve multiple sensory systems simultaneously. Teachers can create materials for students with different learning styles (auditory, visual, kinesthetic reading, and writing). Multimodal learning keeps students engaged, encourages them to apply what they learn in real-life situations,…

This study employed a metaphor analysis approach to investigate instructor language as it relates to the positioning of agency within a college developmental reading course context. Agency, or the socioculturally mediated potential to act, is a crucial part of self-regulated, self-efficacious learning and contributes to identity formation and…

Contemporary approaches to pre-service teacher education and in-service teachers' professional development increasingly reflect the general paradigm swing in education, advocating for dialogic co-construction of understandings of teaching and learning rather than monologic telling of how to be a teacher or how to improve teaching practice.…

At present, quality earth science education in grade school is rare, increasing the importance of post-secondary courses. Observations of post-secondary geoscience indicate students often maintain errant ideas about the earth, even after direct instruction. This qualitative case study documents model-building activities of students as they…

This article offers a rigorous and researched look at how consumer rhetorics form first-year college students' understandings about life at the university. Examined in the context of consumer culture, students' narratives about university life illustrate how they marshal, appropriate, and deploy consumerist metaphors and to what ends. Using…

This paper reports on the metaphors that 36 third-year university mathematics education students have about mathematics. These metaphors were investigated through a questionnaire with five open-ended items. An inductive analysis of the students' metaphors for mathematics indicated that students had well developed and complex metaphors about…

Problem Statement: Student teachers' beliefs and conceptions affect not only what and how they learn in teacher education programs, but also their future professional development in their teaching careers. Examining and understanding student teachers' beliefs and conceptions is therefore crucial to improving their professional preparation and…

Instructional metaphors scaffold learning better when accompanied by an elaboration. Applying structure mapping theory, we developed and used an elaborated instructional metaphor (text and illustrations) for introductory chemistry concepts. In two studies (N[subscript 1] = 44, N[subscript 2] = 57), college students with little chemistry background…

The author, a programme leader for a Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE), hears a complaint from her colleagues that undergraduate students require "spoon-feeding". Accepting structuralism's argument that language does things, not just describe them, the author examines "spoon-feeding" in more depth.…

"Melioration" is borrowing and using an idea from another field not closely associated with your field of expertise. Using the borrowed concept to address a challenge in your field potentially provides new avenues of action and insight. I borrow the concept of boundary objects from science fields and use it to examine assignments in the college…

This article explores the use of ironic performance in education, particularly around issues of human rights. I examine my own efforts to engage audiences with the history of domestic espionage and sabotage by the intelligence agencies of the United States. This is a history well known to some marginalized counterpublics (see Fraser, 1997), but…