This article--mainly referring to the situation in Germany--consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix "neuro-" is ubiquitous today and therefore…

Feedback on performance is a feature of professional training. Much feedback is delivered in post-observation conferences where a "trainer" will discuss the "trainee's" performance with him/her. What transpires in these conferences, however, is "hidden from view" (Heritage and Sefi 1992: 362) and the norms of interaction are largely unexamined in…

Research on intercultural couplehood often relies on cultures and "solid identities" to explain the couples' experiences. By looking at the media construction of an intercultural couple on Chinese television, we are interested in how they are presented and co-constructed through different perspectives, especially if and how (cultural)…

This article is devoted to some of the educational quandaries stemming from the fact that mathematics is a discourse that creates its own objects. More specifically, we ask how the participants of classroom learning-teaching processes cope with the seemingly paradoxical situation in which they are supposed to talk about objects, of the existence…

The view of learning as a particular type of the activity of communicating with others and with oneself has already been shown to unify the once separate lines of study devoted to cognitive and to social aspects of learning. This approach is now extended so as to include the study of affect. In this article, emotional expressions are treated as an…

In line with recent calls for a historicising of discourse analysis, this paper provides an account of language-in-education policies in Luxembourg since the creation of the Luxembourgish state in the early nineteenth century. We briefly expound the Luxembourgish language situation and educational system, and critically discuss the contemporary…

In this article, we have traced some of the dominant cultural narratives shaping current understandings of youth crime and suicide. We have aimed to show some of the ways that our received understandings of what the problem is and what should be done about it are social constructions that privilege a certain kind of scientific explanation. By…

Writing in 1927, five leading scholars and administrators of the Australian schooling systems published a book entitled "Education in Australia: a comparative study of the educational systems of the six Australian states". These authors wrote of Australian education in a time of great optimism, and one of the key areas of reform they…

This study examined the verbal prompts a tutor used to promote reflection and young students' responses to these prompts. Seven children (ages 8-12) participated in 260 min of one-on-one tutoring to learn scientific concepts related to gear movement; the tutor spontaneously provided these students with 763 prompts for reflection. Prompts reliably…

Although PhD supervision has been recognised as an educative process and a complex pedagogy for decades, there is little research into on-site pedagogic processes. Informed by social constructionism and a Foucauldian approach, this qualitative case study explores how learning opportunities were created by analysing both a supervisor's verbal…

Science education research has recommended cooperative inquiry based science in the primary science context for more than two decades but after more than 20 years, student achievement in science has not substantially improved. This study, through direct observation and analysis, investigated content-related student interactions in an authentic…

In this article, we examine the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as an example of a unique node within larger policy networks composed of new policy entrepreneurs (e.g., venture philanthropists, think tanks, private "edubusinesses" and their lobbyists, advocacy organizations, and social entrepreneurs). These new policy…

This paper describes an engineering outreach programme designed to increase the interest of under-represented youth in engineering and to disseminate pre-engineering design challenge materials to K-12 educators and volunteers. Given university students' critical role as facilitators of the outreach programme, researchers conducted a two-year…

This article attempts to shed some light on the possible learning benefits for language acquisition and intercultural development of authentic social interaction with expert peers through computer mediated communication (CMC) tools. The environments used in this study are video communication and the 3D virtual world "Second Life." For…

Diversity is valued and promoted in contemporary public discourse, but on the other hand, there is a strong tendency to homogenize differences in society. The tension between diversity and homogeneity is palpable on U.S. college campuses as the number of international students has been ever-increasing. A more nuanced approach is needed to grapple…