This study aims to translate tenets of social constructivism into practice via a scaffolded modality of learning. It is hypothesized that hermeneutical nature of passage interpretation could create "affordances", Van Lier's (2000) term, or "interactional opportunities" which are psycholinguistically and developmentally valuable…

Background: Research into school bullying has a long tradition but a rather narrow scope. Many prevention programmes have been designed, but despite extensive investigation, most studies suggest that bullying is not decreasing. There is something paradoxical in this phenomenon. In order to have any real impact on some phenomena, thorough…

This article argues that "transition" offers a limited and outmoded conceptual frame for understanding young people's engagement with work and learning. It draws on two studies of young people to provide insights into the study and work experiences of older and school-aged youth. Our analysis suggests that rather than focussing narrowly…

This paper addresses the general significance of the collection. It briefly and broadly traces the relation of the project's theoretical concerns to its purposes and its positioned nature. These concerns and this positioning are connected with tendencies in contemporary thought in social science theory and in research philosophy. The project's…

Speech act theory-based, second language pragmatics testing (SLPT) poses problems for validation due to a lack of correspondence with empirical conversational data. Since conversation analysis (CA) provides a richer and more accurate account of language behavior, it may be preferred as a basis for SLPT development. However, applying CA methodology…

Children's religious education is traditionally oriented to initiate children into a religious tradition. The idea--that the child must first receive input and then, when growing up, can start thinking critically--is based on images of children as "not-yet-adults" who should be socialised and protected. Here I will develop an ethical reflection on…

This dissertation investigates how teaching in a hands-on science center contributes to re/shaping one's teaching identity. Situated at the New York Hall of Science (NYHS) in Queens, New York, my research approach is to conduct a critical ethnography where the focus is on improving the teaching and learning of science for all involved. In…

This study selected 28 illustrative examples of the visual culture in comparative education used since the 1960s. Journals examined are the "Comparative Education Review"; "Comparative Education"; "Compare"; and others. From visual analysis of these sources, four scopic regimes or visual subcultures are identified.…

The dialectic of pitting reality against the perception of reality has been a proclivity of philosophers since the days of Plato and Greek civilization. Most philosophers today regard the availability of a pure reality to be impossible. The world is as it appears to be: thinkers have no access to perfect truth. Accordingly, the matter of…

A multiparadigm perspective of educational administration is offered in this paper, which offers a conceptualization of administration as a heuristic device for considering multiple views of education. The first section describes the work of Sirotnik and Oakes (1986) whose "critical inquiry" multipardigm approach comprises three paradigms:…

Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes a philosophical hermeneutics that sheds light on the ways in which scholars have envisioned the history of teaching writing. Offering an alternative to a linear model of history, in which events are viewed as links in a chain, Gadamer's hermeneutics regards a text as a locus or web through which other texts are…

This hermeneutic, or interpretive, inquiry questions the historical cultural roots of the assumption that giftedness is defined in terms of essential properties that identify a select few children. It proposes, instead, a gifted way of life that is constituted by possibilities and is open to all persons. The hermeneutic paradigm of textual…

American literature has served not only to help establish, define, and reinforce the American Myth, but has been used to question, to challenge, and to redefine it as well. The dialogic relationship between the literature and the myth thus can become the starting point for a course that encourages closer examination of the process of…

A personal understanding of the concepts of scholarship, knowledge, and research is presented. The basic task of scholarship is to study reality with a view to finding out what it is like, the relations of different parts to each other, and the applications to which the findings can lead. The scholarly search must be a rational procedure.…

Discusses a dimension of hermeneutics in science that has to do with the production of the experimental object, or with act rather than text hermeneutics. Examines the hermeneutics of experimentation and differing perspectives of technique. (LZ)