In this interview, Andy Hargreaves posits that teachers need a high level of creativity and flexibility to be effective in their work, and they must understand their larger social mission. Yet standardization is working against those very qualities. Real professional learning communities, more than just teams of teachers solving problems, can help…

Government support for the production and consumption of educational software is now a key element of New Labour's education technology drive. At present much attention is being directed towards marketing "digital learning" to an educational sector traditionally wary of technological innovation. In an effort to understand the social…

This article draws on the first two years of a longitudinal study of young people's pathway and career-related experiences and perspectives. It argues for a richer conceptualisation of young people's transition to study, training and employment than what simple school-to-labour market models allow. We present four clusters of young people's…

In his influential book "Dialogues with Children" (1984), Gareth Matthews presents strong evidence that children as young as six can and should engage in philosophical discourse. His findings form the basis of this article, a theoretical and practical guide for parents and teachers seeking respectful and creative ways to encourage…

There is a conceptual world surrounding writing in schools, and we are conditioned to a particular language about composition and literacy. This study seeks to interrogate the terms composition and literacy at the level of the classroom: to ask what is meant when it is invoked and what it means to the teachers who teach it. The central question of…

From the late 1860s through the mid-1870s, woman suffrage activists developed an ingenious legal argument, claiming that the U.S. Constitution already enfranchised women citizens. The argument, first articulated by St. Louis activists Virginia and Francis Minor, precipitated rhetorical performances by movement activists on public platforms and in…

The competing global forces of homogenizing commercialism and absolutist sectarianism continue to engender a regime of fear and have all but eclipsed what John Dewey called the democratic "habit of amicable cooperation." The values of cooperation are increasingly seen as "unrealistic" and even taken as signs of weakness in the…

From 1912 to 1975 the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta provided an impressive range of programmes and services to people across the Canadian province of Alberta. The four Directors of Extension at the University of Alberta during this period became leading figures in the history of adult education in Canada. They positioned…

This study argues for the need to collect data on the interaction of imaginative processes and moral and ethical qualities of narrative. It locates the curricular context of experiential narratives and provides a narrative illustration of key terms from a moral theory. It reports on research in which experiential narratives were told to grades…

We report a study of repairs in communication between workers and visiting outsiders (students, researchers or teachers). We show how cultural models such as metaphors and mathematical models facilitated explanations and repair work in inquiry and pedagogical dialogues. We extend previous theorisations of metaphor by Black; Lakoff and Johnson;…

This paper will investigate the ontological and existential learning experience of a group of laterlife computer learners in Sydney, Australia. The research, undertaken as a PhD project, focused on the interpretation and understanding of the learning experience from the perspective of the learners. Hence, a qualitative method was used because it…

This research examined the ways politically active secondary teachers, involved either in formal politics or in social movements, practiced citizenship education in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. The author's aim was to explore the complex ways and multiple spaces in which these teachers' roles as both citizens and citizenship…

The Soviet regime defined rurality as a collective-farm or "kolkhoz"-based society. Since the late 1980s such a state-imposed definition of rurality was rapidly unraveling under the tensions and conflicts produced by "perestroika" and post-socialist reforms. In the new politics of the rural, the role that the news media was…

This paper explores the question of interpreting complex texts, particularly scripts and multimedia presentations. The paper first reviews the literature on natural discourse, noting that although interpreting spoken natural language seems rather straightforward, many scholars have discussed what is required to make sense of discourse. The paper…

This paper examines and compares the formation processes and structures of three types of integrative knowledge that in general represent natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. These three types can be observed, respectively, in the philosophies of Michael Polanyi, Jurgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur. These types of integrative knowledge…