This article describes an activity using Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" as a supplemental text in an undergraduate group communication course. This book will help stimulate conversation and promote easy avenues for classroom discussion. In addition to weekly quizzes over each chapter to help facilitate rich classroom discussions, the…

This critical instrumental case study examines a transformative world language learning approach to a unit on culture in an introductory Japanese class in a public high school. Couched in recent post-9/11 language "policy" debates, which strikingly lack mention of religion, spirituality, or environmental issues of climate change and…

Our article describing the characteristics of gifted students with a specific learning disability (SLD) in written language was criticized for emphasizing an ability achievement discrepancy as an indication of a written language disability and for not ruling out alternative explanations for the observed difficulties. The three primary alternative…

Brown and Levinson's ([1978] Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987) politeness theory has been criticized as being ethnocentric by displaying a Western preoccupation with autonomy and individualism. Many non-western societies, it is argued, are better understood by appealing to cultural discernment or group…

The article focuses on tracking financial delegation (introduced nationally in January 2010) as part of the broader process of education restructuring and decentralisation in post-communist Romania. The aim is to critically pinpoint some of the challenges specific to the Romanian context, such as the multitude of policies and legislation (due to…

Freire wrote that reading one's world is a necessary precursor to writing it, or conscienzation. The present dissertation, expanding on Kellner's concept of multiple literacies (1998; 2002a; 2005b; 2006a; 2008), explores what it means to read and write one's world in the context of globalization. Given the arrival of a new imaginary, with its…

Peer assessment is utilized extensively in digital learning, and many studies have examined the positive influences of online peer assessment on learning (eg, Tseng & Tsai, 2007). However, other studies indicate that this type of activity has negative influences. For example, students may question the fairness of an assessment or disagree with…

This article presents a qualitative, comparative study of metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of undergraduate students working in two different disciplines. The groups of students were: 1) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in China through the medium of English; 2) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in the UK through the…

Art critics and scholars have acknowledged the breakdown of their explanations and narratives of contemporary art in the face of what they consider the incoherent era of "pluralism" or "postmodernism" that began in the late twentieth century. This failure is in fact a result of their inability to understand the nature of the development of…

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a newer psychotherapy that has generated much clinical and research interest in recent years. However, the approach has begun to receive strong criticism from proponents of traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Hofmann and Asmundson (2008) recently compared and contrasted ACT and traditional…

Based on an oral history interview, this essay examines the work of Yolanda M. Lopez, one of the most significant Chicana artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It posits that her work portrays feminist intersectionality and oppositional consciousness, predating the Chicana feminist literature on these paradigms. Documenting her…

Comments on an article by J. J. Arnett regarding the assertion that American psychology focuses too narrowly on Americans while neglecting the other 95% of the world's population. The authors agree with Arnett's call for greater attention to this issue. However, they fundamentally disagree with his position on issues related to generalizability…

This article presents the author's response to Mary Lou Rasmussen's critical analysis of a piece the author completed in its original form more than a decade ago. She opens this response with the words which Shakespeare gives to Hamlet. There were many reasons why she settled on Hamlet's soliloquy. First, his words stand as a fitting response…

Should teachers sacrifice class time for professional development? Two authors present their arguments to this question. The first author contends that teachers should definitely use class time for professional development. Technology is changing and growing all the time, and it is their job to prepare students for the world they will inherit.…

As documented by multiple NEA studies ("Reading at Risk," 2004; "To Read or Not to Read," 2007), reading has become devalued in American life, on sale in the clearance bin along with notions of greatness, classic works and ideas, and Western civilization itself. Trying to teach fine literature, writes the author, has become the struggle of how to…