The democratisation and commodification of education has witnessed an increase in postgraduate education as it is one of the main sources contributing to the advancement of knowledge, technology, and innovation. However, despite the significant rise in numbers, the returns at both the global and national levels have been low due to high attrition…

Textbooks do not only offer information on specific topics and delineate competence development but provide insights into a society's socio-cultural norms and values by means of representations. In particular, this refers to the diversity with which classrooms, groups of friends and families are depicted in textbooks. The contribution at hand…

Critical exploration of socio-political issues has been a topic strongly carried out in English classrooms in the last decades. This article is the result of a research study that shows what the use of political cartoons reveals about the promotion of critical reading in an EFL classroom at a private university in Colombia. The study was developed…

Learn how to integrate and evaluate primary and secondary sources by using the SOURCES framework. SOURCES is an acronym for an approach that educators can use with student in all grades and content areas: Scrutinize the fundamental source, Organize thoughts, Understand the context, Read between the lines, Corroborate and refute, Establish a…

Recognizing a need to promote critical reading among students at our STEM university, the authors implemented an active reading strategy called double-entry notes across four general education writing and humanities courses. We hypothesized that the tool would help engage students in the critical reading strategies they tended to lack. The tool…

A key aspect of teaching 'development' is understanding the conundrums and tensions between balance and imbalance with constructs of global (all humans, all societies, all populations) and planetary (all of Earth, including humans) spheres. This article deconstructs some key tenets of populist post-truth frameworks (termed as…

Educators have long known that the Paideia Seminar format, an approach for close reading and class discussion, promotes critical thinking skills in young people and improves writing. Terry Roberts, director of the National Paideia Center, shows--with examples of actual Seminar dialogues--that these types of seminars also inspire creative and…

Purpose: Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student's stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.…

Purpose: This paper describes and exemplifies a pedagogical heuristic for promoting critical literacy in science. Design/methodology/approach: One way to support critical literacy in science is through a linguistically informed pedagogical heuristic called 5Es -- Enquire, Engage, Examine, Exercise and Extend. Findings: This paper describes the…

While composition research recognizes the importance of the body and bodily knowledge, literacy instruction, especially as relayed in writing textbooks, often disembodies the material practice of reading. This move, in turn, contributes to normative assumptions about students' corporeal reading experiences. Drawing together scholarship on…

The content of research methods courses in tertiary education, as revealed by popular textbooks, tends to focus largely on procedural aspects of research investigations. Although following proper procedures is essential for reaching valid and reliable outcomes, there is another attribute of good quality research that is often missing from research…

With increased availability of information in modern societies, individuals are often faced with complex decisions regarding how to integrate and judge the veracity of available information. Generally, these issues have been approached using computational techniques to "detect" and "reduce" the spread of information across…

This paper examines the use of linguistic devices in a Chairman's Statement to foreground a positive self-image and background references to financial shortcomings in times of financial distress. Drawing on impression management theory and critical discourse analysis, we reveal the systematic use of language to portray an organization as a…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

People of all ages have difficulty interpreting the information they read online. The contemporary media environment grants the public access to an unprecedented amount of information, and virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a better understanding of that technology and students' utilization of such tools. It is widely…