This article presents reflections of a ranting and raving "South Park" junkie. The church the author goes to is Unitarian Universalist (UU). UUism is the religion for people who don't believe in religion but somehow feel the need to regularly assemble in a religious tradition and affirm their nontraditional religiosity. From what the author can…

This paper discusses ways in which examiners position themselves in relation to doctoral students' knowledge. The epistemological thesis of Habermas is utilized and its well-established connections with the world of formal learning re-stated. Against this conceptual framework, the examiner reports are appraised with a view to identifying the ways…

This paper, written in the twenty-first anniversary year of the journal "Educational Psychology in Practice", attempts to uncover those distinctive aspects of the discipline and the practice of applied psychology in general and educational psychology in particular. After considering some of the reasons for attempting this task at this point in…

Clinical psychology has focused primarily on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disease, and only recently has scientific attention turned to understanding and cultivating positive mental health. The Buddhist tradition, on the other hand, has focused for over 2,500 years on cultivating exceptional states of mental well-being as well as…

We provide here a brief historical analysis of a movement in progress from a belief-based "mystery" model to an evidence-based "mastery" model of giftedness and talent development. We have observed that educators concerned about exceptionally capable learners are moving from a categorical notion of "the typical gifted child" with somewhat…

Michael (1975) reviewed efforts to classify reinforcing events in terms of whether stimuli are added (positive reinforcement) or removed (negative reinforcement). He concluded that distinctions in these terms are confusing and ambiguous. Of necessity, adding a stimulus requires its previous absence and removing a stimulus its previous presence.…

Using a multiple-paper format, this dissertation includes three papers. By providing critiques of instrumental rationality, objectification, and psychologism in instructional technology," this study aims to provide a tentative formulation of a "critical instructional technology that is sensitive to power and ethics. The first article starts by…

The Department of Administrative and Policy Studies (APS), University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), completed six research reports about its Conceptual Mapping Project. The reports reproduced here originally appeared in the "Occasional Paper Series" of the APS. They are presented in order of the chronological appearance as follows: (1)…

This book develops and presents a theory of the curriculum and pedagogy for common, general education. Part 1 inquires into how people can know values and obligations and how this knowledge should affect education. In an analysis of the moral crisis, the book seeks a resolution by examining the great ethical theories of modern times. Each theory…

Drawing on writings by recent post-modernist thinkers and semioticians, this paper focuses on a combination of hermeneutic and semiotic viewpoints and applies them to defining the nature of interpretation in an educational setting (e.g., text interpretation), the interpreter, and the essence of the act of comprehension and interpretation. The main…

It may be argued that what is considered to be knowledge is intimately related to the manner in which such knowledge is communicated. Thus some social scientists and scientists argue that science itself is a form of communication, and the scientific method it closely bound to the method of interpretation. An important vein of thinking in the…

There is an emerging body of published research inquiring into distance education, yet the student experience is under-­represented. Berge and Mrozowski (2001) examined ten years (1990­-99) of dissertations and journal articles from four distance education journals. They reported that of 1,419 publications, 890 depicted research studies. They…

The "Transylvanian School," a group mainly composed of clergy of the Transylvanian Uniate Church, was chiefly responsible for originating and fostering the myth of the Roman origins of the Romanian people, elaborating it in works of history, in schoolbooks, and in grammars and dictionaries. The major figure of the group, Gheorge Sincai,…

Although multicultural education is misunderstood by many and feared by some, it has been embraced by educators throughout the world as a necessary approach to preparing the next generation for the complexities of the 21st century. A study explored the work of three Catholic secondary religion teachers, who use multicultural strategies in their…

Examines two prominent positions in the epistemological foundations of psychology--Piaget's causal explanatory claims and Vygotsky's interpretive understanding; contends that they need to be placed in their wider philosophical contexts. Argues that the danger of causally explaining cultural practices through which human beings construct and…