Evaluation in higher education is an evolving social practice; that is, it involves what people, institutions and broader systems do and say, how they do and say it, what they value, the effects of these practices and values, and how meanings are ascribed. The textual products (verbal, written, visual and gestural) that inform and are produced by,…

This study investigates the phases of development of synchronous and asynchronous virtual communication produced in a community of inquiry (CoI) by analyzing the internal structure of each intervention in the forum and each chat session to determine the evolution of their social, cognitive and teaching character. It also analyzes the participating…

Objective: To examine the discursive strategies deployed by community colleges to sustain legitimacy in an evolving and contradictory institutional environment. Method: Using corpus linguistics software, I compared 1,009 mission statements from 2012-2013 with a reference corpus of 427 mission statements from 2004. Results: Keywords analysis,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether and how students enact "responsibility" and "generativity" through their comments in asynchronous online discussions. "Responsibility" referred to discourse markers indicating participants' sense that their contributions are required in order to uphold their…

Today's language classroom is undergoing an irreversible hyperbole and one of the most powerful drivers of this transformation is ICT. Digital classroom not only exposes the learners to grammatical language of linguistics, but rather the everyday life of the language in use (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011). The aim of this study was to explore the…

In this article the author shares conversations she has had with elementary students inquiring about her gender identity to make visible the daily-ness of conversations about sameness and difference and to surface her own struggles with, and pedagogical deliberations about, these conversations. The conversations are conceptualized as both the unit…

This study explores the narratives behind how academics in formal leadership positions perceive their roles as leaders and their leadership development. Fifteen leaders in their varying capacities as managers of research in their universities participated to illustrate the complexities and challenges associated with their roles. Using narrative…

Policy strategies to reward teachers for field-specific expertise have become internationally widespread and have been criticized for being manifestations of neoliberal globalization. In Scotland, there is political commitment to such strategies, including one to award recognition to teachers for expertise in sustainable development education…

The competence discourse issued by the Colombian Ministry of National Education defines an ontological duty, a set of logics for the education of subjectivity. Some interesting elements result from this analysis. The first level, or denotative level, manages a management or business cultural code. This code is closely related to the second level…

Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper exposes the neoliberal ideology of the knowledge-based economy embedded within university policies, specifically those that regulate faculty hiring, promotion, and remuneration in two national contexts: Turkey and Mexico. The paper follows four stages of CDA: (1) focus upon a social wrong in its…

This paper presents a preliminary study of three six year-old children's use of functional language when engaging collaboratively on a mathematics task. The analysis is presented as an illustration of young children's authority and agency in mathematics as evidenced in their discourse. Modality, as a function of language, was seen to indicate…

Theoretical ambiguities in curriculum studies result in conceptual mayhem. Accordingly, they hinder the development of the complicated conversation on curriculum as a verb. This article aims to contribute to reconceptualizing curriculum studies as a dynamic social practice that aspires to thinking and acting with intelligences and sensitivity so…

The so-called Greek Financial Crisis, which has been the object of close attention in the German media since the end of 2009, has caused a public debate on who should be held responsible for the decline of crisis-hit Greece, the common currency and the Eurozone. The media's enduring and controversial public discussion has lately been referred to…

The ways people have publicly discussed and written about media literacy in the past have great bearing on how citizens, educators and learners are able to think about and practice their own media literacy. Our concepts of media literacy have evolved over time in response to changing contexts of media studies and educational discourses as well as…

This paper argues that there are many ways of conceptualising lifelong learning and examines EU and Scottish lifelong learning policies in order to identify their underlying assumptions. Through an analysis of these policies, it is demonstrated that they draw on a number of inter-related fallacies that prioritise lifelong learning mainly in…