In this two-part report, the authors share a pair of unique and interconnected case studies of digital learning change work in support of the advancement of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals: (1) "Developing an International Leadership Institute on Global Coalition Building and Digital Learning Change Work," discusses the…

This article applies the neuroscientific concept of embodied simulation--the process of understanding language through visual, motor, and spatial modalities of the body--to rhetorical grammar and sentence-style pedagogies. Embodied simulation invigorates rhetorical grammar instruction by attuning writers to the felt effects of written language,…

Picture a group of classroom teachers gathered around a table late one afternoon discussing the results of the statewide writing assessment, the returned scored papers scattered across the table top. This article details research exploring which rhetorical elements are associated with statewide assessment scores and considers the role and…

In the third of a series of "how-to" essays on conducting qualitative data analysis, Ron Chenail examines the dynamic tensions within the process of qualitative data analysis that qualitative researchers must manage in order to produce credible and creative results. These tensions include (a) the qualities of the data and the qualitative data…

Knoblauch and Brannon might suggest I pry loose the grip that ancient rhetorical tradition has on my modern classroom, but I'm not convinced I can so easily abandon the ancient rhetoricians. Learning to embrace the different, more creative, and less frequently acknowledged elements of this tradition may be the way for me to go instead. The ancient…

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…

Throughout his administration, FDR engaged in a complex set of arguments that worked together to defend democracy in general as a viable form of government; American democracy as the highest expression of democratic government; the primacy of the federal government as the most efficient and effective locus of democratic power; and the executive…

The process of education reform takes place in a highly politicized environment. Language plays an important part in the characterization of the reform, and the words used connect the reform to higher ideals, usually extensive to the local environment but signifying some opportunity for progress. The language is frequently decoupled from the…

This essay derives from a course called ‘"The Rhetoric of Native America,’" which is a historical-critical survey of Native American primary texts. The course examines the rhetoric employed by Natives to enact social change and to build community in the face of exigencies. The main goal of exploring a native text (particularly, Simon…

"Trope" comes from a Greek word meaning "turn." In the rhetorical sense, a trope refers to a "turn" in the way that words are being used to communicate something more than--or different from--a literal or straightforward message. Tropes are part of "deep structure" meanings and include such rhetorical devices as allegories, allusions, euphemisms,…

Learning and teaching are faced with radically new challenges in today's rapidly changing world and its deeply transformed communicational environment. We are living in an era of images. Contemporary visual technology--film, video, interactive digital media--is promoting but also demanding a new approach to education: the age of visual learning…

Hobbs [Hobbs, J.R., 1979. "Coherence and coreference." "Cognitive Science" 3, 67-90] claims that the interpretation of inter-sentential anaphors "falls out" as a "by-product" of using a particular coherence relation to integrate two discourse units. The article argues that this is only partly true. Taking the reader's perspective, I suggest that…

Physics educators and researchers can be concerned with how students attain cognitive coherence: specifically, how students understand and intra-connect the whole of their knowledge of the "field of physics". Starting instead with the metaphor "city of physics", the implication of applying architectural concepts for the human acquisition of mental…

The logic of political economy depends on a domestic metaphor, using the "oikos" or household as a model for the "polis." Historically, this metaphor has imagined citizens as the children of a paternal state. However during the 2008 housing crisis, this metaphor was turned upside down, depicting citizens as the parents of infantile state…

Metaphors that posit writing as linear, essayistic, and the province of a single author no longer fit the dynamic, newly spatialized practices of composition occurring on and via the Web. Using "folksonomy," or multi-user tagging, as an example of one of these practices, this article argues for a new metaphor for writing that encapsulates how…