Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an educational program founded by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp in the 1970s to improve judgment in children by sharpening their critical, creative, and caring thinking skills. As children's engagement in philosophical dialogue is an essential component of the program, the teacher has a facilitative, rather than an…

Using a case example of an innovative sanitation solution in a slum setting, this study explores the usefulness of the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique in a program planning and evaluation context. Using a qualitative image-based method to map people's mental models of ill-structured problems such as sanitation can aid program planners and…

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 study leads the reader on a learning journey with the heroic metaphors derived from heroic myths of today's pop culture to the views shared by aspiring administrators. Viewing the students' leadership vision of self as hero provided insight to guiding students in their personal leadership journey. By naming and describing self as hero, future…

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…

On the third floor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in Washington, D.C., inside a glass case, lie thousands of shoes. Old and mismatched, moldering after sixty years, they are what remains of countless Jews who were told to disrobe and who were subsequently murdered at Majdanek, Poland, during the final years of the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a metaphorical interface on germane cognitive load in Web-based instruction. Based on cognitive load theory, germane cognitive load is a cognitive investment for schema construction and automation. A new instrument developed in a previous study was used to measure students' mental activities…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability of an individual to make inferences about what others may be thinking or feeling and to predict what they may do in a given situation based on those inferences. Discussions of ToM focus almost exclusively on inferred cognitive structures and processes and shed little light on the actual behaviors…

For tens of thousands of years, teachers have used stories to promote learning. Today's teachers can do the same. In particular, we can employ Joseph Campbell's "monomyth"--with its stages of separation, initiation, and return--as a model for structuring learning experiences. Within the monomyth, one tempting role for teachers is the sage, but we…

This article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's "habitus" concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis of culture as embodied cognitive structures linking individuals…

The instructional metaphor is an important bridge to understanding, particularly when students are undertaking tasks that are conceptually difficult and outside their previous experience. It is suggested that the limitations of the implicit metaphor of the procedural control languages are the main cause of the problems experienced with delivering…

This synthesis paper discusses the research exploring analogical reasoning, the role of analogies in the engineering design process, and educational applications for analogical reasoning. Researchers have discovered that analogical reasoning is often a fundamental cognitive tool in design problem solving. Regarding the possible role of analogical…

"Theologizing with children" has arisen from influences of philosophizing with children, from research in the Piagetian tradition and also from the interest of the Evangelical Church in Germany to "change to the child's perspective". It searches for the theological quality of children's remarks which are considered to be a…

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor (1980, 1999) provides a basis for describing everyday cognitive structures using linguistic models and thus, making it possible to uncover both individual and collective patterns of thought and action. Lakoff and Johnson have not, however, developed a workable system for carrying out qualitative…

Ordinary language behavior in ASL reveals parallel cognitive structures that are both similar to and different from spoken-language behavior. This article focuses on the metaphorical similarities between English and ASL that are found in the metaphors "Mind is a container," and "Ideas are objects." Also examined are differences in metaphor…