This article describes an assignment piloted in spring of 2008 called the Rhetorical Analysis Project, which required students to analyze three different texts addressing a common issue, compose an argument about the representation of that issue as illustrated by those texts, and revise that argument to match a rhetorical model they chose from…

The belief in the central role of the teacher has a long and comparative history. This article aims to critically analyse the discourse of the centrality of the teacher by both historicising and problematising the ideas and practices associated with this discourse. First, the article describes the discourse as it was taken up during the…

This article examines mathematics teacher collegiality by focusing on both the ways in which teachers interacted as critical colleagues in a long-term professional development project and the evolving role of the teacher-educator-researcher as the facilitator of this project. The professional development collaboration comprised two phases: one…

The 10-year anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa in 2004 provoked much reflection and fuelled new policy debates on both the progress and failures of educational reform. While a myriad of achievements have been touted and are well-known to international audiences, a swelling critique from inside South Africa shows that…

In a satiric chapter of David Foster Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest," a mock media expert reports how American consumers of the near future recoil from a new communication device known as "videophony" and return to the voice-only telephone of the Bell Era. This article explores the said chapter in the framework of media theories reading the…

This thesis attempts to search for the clues related to British domestic exploitation of the peasant labors and overseas colonization of other countries after rereading the novel "Pride and Prejudice," with an aim to bring out Austen's intimacy with Imperialism. It will offer some insights into a better understanding of provincial world…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive critical analysis of six main arguments for religious accommodation, with a specific focus on fundamentalist religious groups and the accommodation of their practices within liberal democratic societies. This analysis reveals that the types of practices that these arguments aim to accommodate primarily…

This study concerns itself with the conflict in mathematics education--popularly known as "math wars"--in the United States. More specifically, it investigates the "terms of debate" in this conflict to develop insights into the varied, and sometimes conflicting, relationships between the perceived nature of mathematics and its…

I investigate the spoken dialogue of four Indian novels in English: Mulk Raj Anand's "Untouchable" (1935), Khushwant Singh's "Train to Pakistan" (1956), Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan's "The World of Nagaraj" (1990), and Rohinton Mistry's "Family Matters" (2002). Roger Fowler has said that literature, as a form of discourse, articulates ideology;…

This paper is designed to accompany an appearance by the author as a panelist during a session on science fiction and teaching methods at the I-CON 28 Science Fiction Convention held April 3-5, 2009, on Long Island (near New York City). The author describes how he employs social science fiction in an honors course at the university level to…

The purpose of this paper is to proffer a critical perspective about a specific brand of American schools within the larger charter school movement: the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP is currently receiving wholesale acclaim as a radical alternative to public schooling "that works." While KIPP schools ostensibly claim that college…

This commentary argues for a specific conception of research, what the author and others call "critical research." The author asserts that critical research can help educators to identify quality teaching in literacy classrooms even as it helps to refine (or even redefine) their notions of curricula, pedagogy, literacy, and achievement. Here, the…

Five Frameline short films by and about LGBT youth's coming-out narratives are reviewed by a professor and his (under)graduate university students studying visual culture and the socio/cinematic construction of (homo)sexualities. Respondents collectively found the group of films moving and well suited for viewing by middle- and high-school-age…

This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from the "National Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987", to current policy concerns with boys' educational underperformance. The paper's key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of…

The aim of this paper is to consider the trends and problems of Japanese educational science from the viewpoint of Tokugawa educational thought. Firstly, I reexamine the past main works of the studies on Tokugawa educational thought, and conduct a survey of the trends of these studies. Second, through critical analysis of these studies I try to…