In 2007, against a tragically ironic backdrop of National Poetry Month, April indeed was "the cruellest month" (Eliot 1922, I.1). The media spotlight during that time repositioned from Iraq and Afghanistan to Blacksburg, Virginia, where a stateside guerilla incursion at Virginia Tech would mark the single worst episode of school shooting…

This study examined the development of language in low-SES rural Appalachian children from kindergarten through middle childhood. Findings showed that the children's language skills improved significantly between kindergarten and middle childhood, with all middle childhood language means within the average range. However, all areas of language…

This inquiry explores the collaborative relationship between Mary, a teacher at a junior high, and Stefinee, a teacher educator at a nearby university. Through the use of emblematic narratives that emerged through the process of reliving and retelling experiences from a shared professional knowledge landscape, we make assertions about our…

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is an example of what the author calls a narrative of failure. A narrative of failure is a term for a narrative that both fails in the enactment of its own telling and that takes failure or failing as one of its subjects. This paper discusses how, as a form for telling a teaching story, narratives…

This dissertation explores the robust confluence of syntactic and cultural factors involved in the structure and content of chengyu. It unpacks a number of structural tendencies in the data sample, and illuminates selected underlying cultural themes. The presence of syntactic and semantic parallelism within chengyu, as an expression of the…

This article investigates hydrological lexicon in Jahai, a Mon-Khmer language of the Malay Peninsula. Setting out from an analysis of the structural and semantic properties as well as the indigenous vs. borrowed origin of lexicon related to drainage, it teases out a set of distinct lexical systems for reference to and description of hydrological…

Describing digital technologies as tool, tutor, environment or resource in pedagogical contexts is common, and this paper examines the metaphorical nature of these descriptions and their implications for digitally-based teaching and learning practices. To compare the metaphors, the paper first develops a model of pedagogy derived from Activity…

Ecology is the study of interactions between organisms and their environment, and the academic library could be considered to be an ecosystem, i.e., a "biological organization" in which multiple species must interact, both with one another and with their environment. The metaphor of the library as ecosystem is flexible enough to be applied not…

This paper attempts to describe the relationship between the embodied practice of fieldwork and the written articulation of this experience. Starting from Valerie Hey's conceptualization of "rapport" as form of "intersubjective synergy", a moment of recognition of similarity within difference--similar in structure to Laclau and Moufffe's…

This paper proposes Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2000) as a tool for identifying the various discourses that can be found in the provision of open educational resources. The argument will be built upon the concept of a "flat world", a powerful metaphor used by Friedman in his famous book "The World is Flat" (2005). The discussion will…

The present study investigated variables that moderated the relationship between role ambiguity and self-efficacy. Results of a field study found support for the moderating role of learning goal orientation, such that the relationship between role ambiguity and self-efficacy was weaker when learning goal orientation was high. In addition, we found…

Research suggests that understanding new images of mathematics is very challenging and can contribute to teacher resistance. An explicit exploration of personal views of mathematics may be necessary for pedagogical change. One possible way for exploring these images is through mathematical metaphors. As metaphors focus on similarities, they can be…

With its roots in ancient rhetoric and medieval liturgy, the term "trope" now refers to a figure of speech that organizes a set of complex ideas into a kind of linguistic shorthand. A trope is thus a phrase or image that conveys more than its literal meaning. In this article, two tropes are pertinent: the "pastoral" and the "fortunate fall." The…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

Virtual spaces allow abstract representations of reality that not only encourage student self-directed learning but also reinforce core content of the learning objective through visual metaphors not reproducible in the physical world. One of the advantages of such a space is the ability to escape the restrictions of the physical classroom, yet…