Ample research has explored language attitudes and speaker evaluations, yet it has not attended to direct incidences of language criticism. This article presents evidence demonstrating that a majority of those surveyed in Hawai'i have experienced language criticism. Coded data suggest that criticism takes place during employment, educational,…

Ontario's new Character Development Initiative is analyzed to determine whether it can be characterized as political spectacle. Examination of official policy texts, media reports, speeches, web pages, webcasts, and events at the Character Development Symposium suggests that the Initiative contains many elements of political spectacle; however,…

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of recent education and curriculum policies in Portugal, focusing on the relationship between globalization, international agencies, and the curriculum. It aims to highlight not only changes in the organization of schools, but also the setting of a agenda structured at a global level for education in which…

Young people create differentiated models of belonging. Their strategies reflect contexualized competences--the capacity to understand and negotiate the influence of national frameworks in specific situations. Theories that understand belonging as processual and intersectional offer useful frameworks with which to analyse this. This article uses…

This not quite "final" ending of this special issue of "Environmental Education Research" traces a series of hopeful, if somewhat difficult and at times challenging, openings for researching experiences of environment and place through children's literature. In the first instance, we draw inspiration from the contributors who…

Historical nonfiction is effective in teaching rhetoric for two main reasons. First, historical texts communicate through a real-world lens that students can understand and find familiar. Students study history and are exposed to current events through the news, school, and each other. Second, since history affects people's lives so broadly, its…

This article offers an analysis of the dimensions of consensus on education using Diane Ravitch's statement: "The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why they educate." The interesting problem is to determine which consensus on educational issues varies, whose consensus it is, and how and why it varies. The author…

As teachers, the time they get to talk with peers, their friends, is an important time because there is never enough of it. Why not allow students the opportunity to chat with friends--the same courtesy the author appreciated in meetings with peers? Through talk, students can improve their conversational skills, which in turn would help their…

University and secondary school educators recognize many high school students will undertake a post-secondary education but find themselves unprepared for the academic demands once they arrive on campus. Although many high school students appear to possess basic abilities in retrieving information, particularly when searching the Internet, they…

Introduction: This paper examines the persistent problematic issue of engaging business students in teaching computer programming. Studies continue to document challenges in teaching computer programming and various methods have been proposed with varying degrees of success. From an educator's perspective, the concern is how to engage students to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to conduct a critical analysis of the origins and implementation of problem-based learning in educational administration as a window into the limitations of this approach and more generally administrator preparation. Design/methodology/approach: The author reviewed the published work of the originator from…

This article develops an expanded, collaborative and structured view of the process of critiquing observed lesson fragments and shows how this process can be used as a model for developing students' understanding and thinking about teaching and learning processes. The authors introduce Carter's (2007) notion of a meta-genre, "[a] way of doing…

This article describes a project that studied 15 preservice teachers' perceptions of and reactions to responding to children's and young adult literature using a Ning blog. These perceptions and reactions provided insight into various practical aspects of using a social networking blog to facilitate literature response in a teacher education…

Three of the most emotionally charged terms in this era are "race," "racism," and "White privilege." Definitions for these terms vary by individual experiences, beliefs, opinions, and perceptions. K-20 students are rarely exposed to a detailed coverage and critical analysis of the part of U.S. history that includes genocide, territorial…

Formalism, an amalgamation of literary critical methods originating in the 1920's, which emphasize close textual analysis of the literary work itself, is declining as the predominant critical approach due to its self-imposed limitations. New perspectives, attempting to counter the fragmentation of formalism and demonstrating an awareness of the…