Creative engagement is a vital component of the courses the author teaches. Along with a critical reading of the required texts and other related sources, she encourages students to share from their personal experiences as well as from their faith tradition, cultural heritage, family background, and even their favorite music, literature, poetry,…

Australia is a federation of six states and two territories. Each state and territory has its own legislature, which may not be of the same political persuasion as the Commonwealth (Federal) Government. Under the Australian Constitution primary control of school education is with the State and Territory Governments, with the Australian…

This narrative inquiry explores the lives of five ninth grade female adolescents enrolled in an alternative school for students who have been expelled from an urban school district. The population of female students in the school increased from 21 to 102 over five years. The same trend is evident nationally. This study uses theories that label…

When people read temporarily ambiguous sentences, there is often an increased prevalence of regressive eye-movements launched from the word that resolves the ambiguity. Traditionally, such regressions have been interpreted at least in part as reflecting readers' efforts to re-read and reconfigure earlier material, as exemplified by the Selective…

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21…

The author, a programme leader for a Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE), hears a complaint from her colleagues that undergraduate students require "spoon-feeding". Accepting structuralism's argument that language does things, not just describe them, the author examines "spoon-feeding" in more depth.…

This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when second- and fourth-semester college-level English-French learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such as "le secretaire du psychologue qui se promene"…

Synthesising Martha Nussbaum's study of the emotions and the capabilities approach to human development with Charles Taylor's claim that authentic identities ought to be constructed dialogically against "horizons of significance," the author identifies critical features of authenticity that are then applied to the context of adult educators,…

In this essay, Jeff Duncan-Andrade explores the concept of hope, which was central to the Obama campaign, as essential for nurturing urban youth. He first identifies three forms of "false hope"--hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred--pervasive in and peddled by many urban schools. Discussion of these false hopes then gives way to…

This article describes a metaphorical imaging activity used in World Educational Links (WEL), a graduate teacher certification program, to help future social justice educators explore their relationship with society and their sense of interconnectedness and empowerment to effect change. The author investigates possibilities inherent in the…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

Differential activation levels of the two hemispheres due to hemispheric specialization for various linguistic processes might determine hand choice for co-speech gestures. To test this hypothesis, we compared hand choices for gesturing in 20 healthy right-handed participants during explanation of metaphorical vs. non-metaphorical meanings, on the…

English uses the horizontal spatial metaphors to express time (e.g., the good days ahead of us). Chinese also uses the vertical metaphors (e.g., "the month above" to mean last month). Do Chinese speakers, then, think about time in a different way than English speakers? Boroditsky [Boroditsky, L. (2001). "Does language shape thought? Mandarin and…

This manuscript describes how counselors can facilitate self-awareness in clients and counselors-in-training through the use of metaphors. The use of metaphors and others symbols provide a creative, non-intrusive, and non-confrontational approach to counseling. Examples of stories and fables used during counseling sessions and instructional…

Two groups of rats were trained in a symbolic delayed matching-to-sample task with a 0-s delay to discriminate sample stimuli that consisted of sequences of tone bursts. For one group, sequences varied in number with total sequence duration controlled. For the other group, total sequence duration, sum of the tone durations, and sum of the gap…