The authors' research is concerned with the use of visual imagery as data to examine schools and schooling. In attempting to develop knowledge further by incorporating the visual in educational research, they draw on a hybrid mix of disciplines including sociology, ethnography, history and the humanities. Many scholars and historians writing about…

Students need to know how to find and use information, yet only 31 percent of information searches succeed. Google and Wikipedia are not the only providers of answers, although they are often students' first stops for information. Everyone knows how to open a browser, but can teachers assume they know how to search effectively for information? In…

In his book, "Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding," Gerald L. Bruns interprets the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. One principle of hermeneutics is that understanding always proceeds from an initializing moment of confusion, strangeness, darkness, or concealment. Concealment's…

Scholars in the field of communication theory and research have ignored and problematized the relationship between sign and meaning. This paper discusses the relationship in order to catalogue the different positions taken and to investigate the work that gets done from these positions. In the "brute sense data" or physicalist position, the…

Research on teachers and teacher thinking finds itself subject to tensions between two prevailing factions. The first sees promise of progress in the rejection of frequently conservative, idiosyncratic teachers' thoughts; the second embraces those thoughts as expressions of a sacred, lived truth. Detecting conflicting mythologies at the core of…

A visually literate person's lexicon for interpreting visual statements, without regard to medium, could include an eclectic array of possibilities. Some definitions and demonstrations of the various approaches are presented. The premodern, or connoisseur's approach, is characterized by a central concern with the assessment of quality, and such…

This paper presents findings of a critical ethnography that examined the relationship between gender and the definition of power, and its use in the politicized role of the superintendent. Based on Stewart Clegg's (1988) conceptualization of power relationships as "circuits of power," the ethnography was conducted in a larger metropolitan area…

Additive conjoint measurement models for educational research are construed as practical applications of the hermeneutic theory of scientific instrumentation. It is argued that the model of the text is no less paradigmatic for quantitative method in the natural and social sciences than it is for qualitative, ethnographic methods. It is also…

In much current literary and rhetorical theory, analysis of text assumes greater authority than the text and its creator. Through a reexamination of the ancient Greeks' notion of "ethos" (the residue of the writer or speaker in the text), the writer, reader, and text can be reunited, particularly in light of the theory of meanings…

Asking how what an individual knows shapes the ways in which he or she reads, this book starts from the premise that any productive theory of narrative must take into account the presuppositions the reader brings to the text. The book explores how prior knowledge of literary conventions influences the processes of interpretation and evaluation. It…

Generates a framework for considering the influence of cultural values and assumptions on counseling theory and practice by combining philosophical hermeneutics with interpretive social science perspectives. Suggests that moral visions operate as disguised ideology in counseling, shaping case conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment decisions.…

Presents how Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics can be used to analyze readers' responses to an American literature text. Readers are Brazilian college students reading a text by the American author, Amy Tan. (Author/VWL)

Considers Richard Ohmann's argument that composition texts which instruct students to emphasize concrete details over abstract concepts encourage conformity with the dominant order. Suggests that Ohmann failed to consider the effects of teachers' and students' viewpoints. Cites methods that encourage students to use detail as a device of broader…

An overview of multiculturalism and physical education reviews its interpretive perspective, the role of critical social theory in this movement, multiculturalism as a critique of the past and the charge that those in power control education, as a documentation of current practices and a reflection of current social change, and as a source for…

This paper extends discussion of Cushing's contribution to Bohm's deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which raises the question of whether self-understanding is at issue in physical science as it is in social science. Addresses ideas by Bevilacqua and Giannetto about the use of historical texts and the primacy of experiment. (LZ)