This paper seeks to engage the field of educational leadership in a methodological conversation. It outlines a methodological position taken by the author (a focus on leadership practice using Bourdieu) in a currently funded project and seeks discussion with the wider field. The paper is structured to provide the reader with background to the…

For about two decades only marginal relevance was attributed to action research as a research strategy by large sections of the German social science community. The growing international debate on key concepts such as community participation, community-based participatory research and participatory action research were largely ignored. In this…

Meaningful learning requires deep engagement with ideas. Deep engagement is supported by the critical thinking skill of argumentation. Learning to argue represents an important way of thinking that facilitates conceptual change and is essential for problem solving. In order to appropriately apply argumentation practices to learning, we first…

An educational challenge that many university EFL students face is the production of written academic arguments as part of their required essays. Although the importance of argumentative writing in education is uncontested, and research shows that EFL students find difficulties in producing such texts, it is not adequately dealt with for the L1…

In a quasi-experimental study (N = 60), grade 7/8 teachers students were taught to write arguments in content-area subjects. After instruction, students drew on document portfolios to write on a new topic: "Do the continents drift?" In a MANCOVA, students who participated in argument instruction scored significantly higher than a control…

The Psychopathy Checklist and Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL/PCL-R) were used to predict institutional aggression and community violence in two groups of forensic patients. Results showed that Facet 4 (Antisocial) of the PCL/PCL-R or one of its parcels consistently achieved incremental validity relative to the first three facets, whereas the…

This study examined the learning opportunities provided to students through the use of complex geological data supporting scientific inquiry. Through analysis of argumentative discourse in a high school Earth science classroom, uses of US Geological Survey (USGS) data were contrasted with uses of geoscience textbook data. To examine these…

Young children's persuasion tactics, and how these reflected attunement to others' mental states, were explored in archived longitudinal samples of transcribed at-home conversations of four children, three to five years old. Over 87,000 utterances were examined to identify conversation "chunks" involving persuasion; 1,307 chunks were then coded…

This article explores the factors that may cause teachers to defer to the textbook as the ultimate authority on curriculum and pedagogy, drawing on Bakhtin's notion of authoritative and personally persuasive discourse. We found that although teachers deferred to the textbook as the "authority" of what should be taught, they did not fully implement…

This article explains how communities of practice have been developed as part of FrameWorks' field-building efforts. Strategic Framing Study Circles, as they are known, have been conducted with four statewide coalitions, one group of national organizations, and an emerging regional coalition. The goal of each community of practice is to build…

The struggle against violent extremism is the most significant national-security challenge of the 21st century. It is the challenge that makes all the threats Americans face that much more dangerous. The ungoverned spaces, urban slums, and impoverished regions of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, along with the poorly integrated immigrant…

Just over 10 years ago, "Educational Review" published an article "Reconceiving argument" by Richard Andrews. In the article, Andrews traced some of the changes in the conception of argument that had taken place within educational contexts (primarily within the UK) over the previous few years. An important aim of the authors'…

Experts in cognitive domains differ from non-experts in how they represent problems and knowledge, and in their epistemic understandings of tasks in their domain of expertise. This study investigates whether task-specific epistemic understanding also underlies the representation of knowledge on an everyday reasoning task on which the competent…

In this paper we describe a simple software system that allows students to practise their critical thinking skills by constructing argument maps of natural language arguments. As the students construct their maps of an argument, the system provides automatic, real time feedback on their progress. We outline the background and theoretical framework…

Early in the fall of 2007, one of the author's students asked whether she could pass around a petition during class protesting the "moment of silence." The Illinois legislature had recently passed a law requiring all schools to observe a moment of silence at the start of each school day. A number of students who heard the conversation…