With the increasing focus on issues pertaining, for example, to race, class, and gender, social science studies have increasingly relied on postmodern theory. Postmodern critiques have enlarged in scope and increasingly confronted traditional social scientists with challenges: epistemic, methodological, and moral. This paper asserts that while…

In the spaces where the teaching of first-year writing occurs in the North American university and community college, Composition Studies is still a relatively young discipline, and remains focused on process, thesis sentence, argument, and propositional, and linear logic as primary goals. The rhetorical practices that underlie the discipline of…

The relevance of postmodernism for formulating educational policy is discussed, emphasizing the postmodern critique of computerization. Postmodernists suggest that the computer in education may not be as productive as was originally thought because it will bring to fruition the theories of modernism that separate truth from context. (JL)

This document defines the most important characteristic of postmodernism as an ontological shift from an essentialist view of one fixed reality to an anti-essentialist view where reality resists closure and consists of multiple diverse truths positioned amid continuous conflict. Five knowledge communities, based on postmodernist notions, and their…

Human resource development in organizations can be used as a coercive tool that reinforces existing power structures. The emerging postmodern organization must consider individual wisdom, values, and knowledge; recognize differences; remove inequalities; and create opportunities for all voices to be heard. (SK)

Considers how in "Post-Something" times, misquotation has become a reading practice, or at least a strategy within certain practices of reading. Suggests that Post-Modernism needs a canon, a continuity of culture, in order to be Post-Anything. Describes how in making his own canon, the author posits certain genre qualities that appeal to…

Detailed discourse analysis is presented for two articles that suggest that postmodernism has little to offer comparative education and should be resisted. The two texts, focusing on postmodernism as the antithesis of comparative education and on the "lost promise" of postmodernism, demonstrate the use of language to convey messages that limit or…

Discusses the publication of "Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies" in the journal "College Composition and Communication." Notes that the Guidelines were developed as a reaction to the present situation wherein (1) student writing increasingly is the subject of English teachers' publications…

States that how discourse plays a central role in social relations/power dynamics is better understood because of M. Foucault's insights on power--central to Foucault's theory concerning the power-knowledge-discourse dialectic is that for every force there is resistance. Offers a new genealogy, which better suggests how resistance might appear in…

Argues for a less rigid conception of leisure. Describes how leisure has been socially constructed and how the concept is changing in postmodern consumer culture. Suggests that adult education discourse neglects consumer culture and leisure, thus ignoring part of adults' everyday existence. (SK)

Includes a response to an article written previously on what a postmodernist perspective might do for second language acquisition research and a comment by the author of the original article reacting to the response. (Author/VWL)

Explores a new epistemology for the scholarship of community engagement, asserting that it requires both the rethinking of the nature and purposes of scholarship that Boyer initiated, and assumptions about truth and ground rules for determining it that are consistent with the emerging paradigms of the postmodern era. (EV)

Addresses selected effects of postmodernism on spirituality and contains a discussion of implications for promoting change in counseling. Because aspects of postmodern spirituality can prevent change, spiritual transformation may need to occur in the life of the client. Spiritual transformation is conceptualized as a process of helping the client…

Explores the relation of word and image on the level of both theory and practice in Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." Establishes two dissonant strands in Tufte's work, a positivist strand and a postmodernist strand. (RS)

Considers educational technology in the context of the political and ethical nature of schooling, including the official discourse of schooling, social justice, and community; the contradictions and uncertainties of schooling based on postmodernism and modernist thinking; and a sociocultural perspective of schooling. (Contains 11 references.) (LRW)