We explored relations between students' trade; epistemic beliefs, metacognitive monitoring and recall performance in the context of learning physics through metaphor. Eighty-three university undergraduate students completed questionnaires designed to measure their epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge about Newtonian physics. Students were…

In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive "production" of…

In the present study children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome (N=13) and a matched control group of typically developing children and adolescents were presented with 26 vignettes of daily life situations, including irony, metaphors, contrary emotions, jealousy, social blunders, and understanding intentions. The participants in the AS group…

This paper examines the way Higher Education (HE) students use metaphors to make tangible the lived and living experience of learning. The article provides a contemporary development of the ethnographic paradigm by offering a new model termed "proximal ethnography" to capture the sense of inside-out-inside research, of being what one has…

There is a wide consensus that during their year abroad higher education (HE) language students should improve their language skills in contact with native speakers in the host community. Research shows, however, that many students find it difficult, if not impossible, to make meaningful contact to locals, and some consider the lack of it as a…

While the metaphor of students bringing linguistic, cultural, and community resources to classrooms abounds in mathematics education research with non dominant students, teachers seem not to benefit from such metaphoric language as most of them struggle to figure out how such resources can be used during mathematics instruction. This paper urges a…

William H. Kilpatrick is worldwide known as "Mr. Project Method." But the origin of his celebrated paper of 1918 has never been explored. The discovery of a hitherto unknown letter reveals that Kilpatrick was an educational entrepreneur who, without regard for language and tradition, adopted the term "project" and used it in a provocative new way…

Much contemporary educational research draws upon Bourdieuian concepts such as field and the metaphor of the game for its inspiration. Yet his theory of practice remains an under-explored concept in educational leadership. Perhaps this is because the preceding concepts are better equipped to perform the required conceptual labour compared to…

For more than a century, the debate over evolution and creationism has affected academia at nearly every level. Although it distracts from core issues in many academic contexts, the debate can sometimes be pedagogically useful. It can be used pedagogically to examine how scientific predictions are made, how evidence is applied, and how it is…

Neurological studies of the recently discovered mirror neuron system have allowed insights into the important connections between empathy, objects of art and material culture, and human understanding. Such insights reinforce an original connection between aesthetics and empathy, or "Einfuhlung", dating from 1873. Mirror neurons, empathy, and…

A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is proposed: Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal. This prediction is tested against data from syntactic reduction. A single multilevel…

In this paper the authors explore the heuristic potential in the image of the teacher-as-stranger and use it as a frame for reflecting on teacher change and growth. Drawing on the sociological figure of the stranger, they conduct a qualitative study of a sample of teachers who are not only strangers in a metaphorical sense, but who, because they…

Situated within the critical pedagogic scholarship that deals with the issue of "teacher immediacy", this study proposes an understanding of the practice of pedagogy through the metaphor of "companionship". A friendly individual but not a friend, the instructor is seen here as someone who can connect to college-age students without any visible…

I explore the impact of ambiguous referral to the unit on understanding of decimal and fraction operations during episodes in two different mathematics courses for pre-service teachers (PSTs). In one classroom, the instructor introduces a rectangular area diagram to help the PSTs visualize decimal multiplication. A transcript from this classroom…

Online role plays, as they are designed for use in higher education in Australia and internationally, are active and authentic learning activities (Wills, Leigh & Ip, 2011). In online role plays, students take a character role in developing a story that serves as a metaphor for real-life experience in order to develop a potentially wide range…