In this paper two models are proposed for analysing transitions in education. Firstly, transitions are the processes that follow ruptures perceived by people. They include learning, identity change, and meaning making processes. Secondly, processes of change are observed through a semiotic prism, articulating self-other-object-sense of the object…

Metaphor and metonymy are two ways people make meaning; two ways they perform transformations between thought and language and within both thought and language. In St. Augustine's language these two processes could be pictured as vertical or horizontal movements either from the world of signs to "reality" or within the world of signs itself. In…

Web 2.0 technologies empower learners to create personalized and community-based collaborative environments. Social networking technology affords learners to weave their human networks through active connections to understand what we know and we want to know. Social acts that bring out identities, awareness, relationships, connections, and…

This article argues that fictional writing has the potential to make a distinctive contribution to educational scholarship but brings challenges to conventional ways in which educational research is judged. It focuses on the discipline required by fictional writing and on the interplay between reader and text. It is argued that the rigour and…

Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. This essay draws on the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that rhetoricians have been reluctant to theorize love for two reasons: first, it is already implied in the widely accepted concept of identification; and second, any explicit…

In this paper we examine the transferability of the Jigsaw and Fishbowl collaborative learning techniques to the Second Life platform. Our aim is to assess the applicability of Second Life for collaborative learning by developing virtual tools and metaphors and exploiting the representational richness of this novel medium. In order to enhance the…

The landscape of higher education--the growing variety of higher education institutions, the cultural environment, the competitive ecosystem--is changing rapidly and disruptively. The higher education landscape is metaphorically crossed with fault lines, those fissures in the landscape creating potential areas of dramatic change, and is as…

This dissertation draws on textual reader response theory and humanities-based Disability Studies theories to explores the ways in which preservice teachers participating in a course called "Issues of Diversity in Children's and Adolescent Literature" and their instructor, who is also the researcher, made sense of representations of disability in…

This article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's "habitus" concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis of culture as embodied cognitive structures linking individuals…

This essay offers Neil Postman's thermostatic metaphor as a model for critical teaching. In this model, the role of the composition teacher is that of a thermostat that responds to a changing ideological environment by offering counterbalance. Such a stance is an anti-stance since it requires the teachers to enact philosophies and pedagogies,…

The paper reports on a study of emergent adult instructed L2 German writing ability in a college-level program that developed an explicit curriculum-based approach to supporting L2 writing. It uses systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as its theoretical framework and traces writing development through a central construct in the theory, the…

This paper examines the idea of embedding Indigenous perspectives drawing upon a metaphor for designing an environment that nurtures Indigenous cultural identity and relationships. This paper constitutes a teacher's personal story of emerging understandings of Indigenous Standpoint Theory and pedagogy, which began with embedding Indigenous…

One aspect of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) involves examining how metaphors in texts, particularly hard news texts (reports of very recent conflicts, crimes, etc.), imply certain values. The usual theoretical basis for such analysis is Lakoff and Johnson (1980). My article shows problems with transplanting Lakoff and Johnson's discourse-level…

The authors introduce the integral model of the self-system and, using that model, describe the dynamics of healthy growth and the development of psychogenic pathology. Self-identification is described as "sliding" in nature, and stage theories for self-related lines are outlined to help clinicians understand the characteristics of each stage the…

This article is based on a research project carried out by the author between 1997 and 2001. The article or story has two main characters: the pacifier and the concept of childhood. The idea is to use the pacifier optically, as a text and a context where the pacifier is a starting point for interpretations and reflections about modern Norwegian…