This paper considers the significance of the term 'skills' in recent policy documents concerning the future developments of post-16 education. This paper argues that the skills debate, as outlined in "Success For All" and "21st Century Skills", comprises two dominant discourses: it is considered necessary for youngsters to gain skills for their…

Purpose: This is a comment for all those writers who claim that organizations cannot learn. The author consistently rejects this notion. Rather the author contends that organizations can learn, in at least two different ways. Design/methodology/approach: The author reviews some of the common arguments against organizational learning, and tries to…

Human resource development is conceptualized here in terms of levels of action: representations, experience, relations, and communities. Functionality is taken as a hallmark of good human resource development in these. Yet reflecting on what works, and on innovations in human resource development, factors other than those associated with…

Computer-mediated communication in individuals with Asperger syndrome, Tourette syndrome and normal controls was explored with a program called Bubble Dialogue (Gray, Creighton, McMahon, & Cunninghamn (1991)) in which the users type text into speech bubbles. Two scenarios, based on Happe (1994) were adapted to investigate understanding of figure…

This study examined language and executive functions (EF) in high-functioning school-aged individuals with autism and individually matched controls. Relationships between executive, language, and social functioning were also examined. Participants with autism exhibited difficulty on measures of expressive grammar, figurative language, planning,…

Adolescents with language-based learning disabilities (LBLD) often interpret idioms literally. When idioms are provided in an enriched context, comprehension is compromised further because of the LBLD student's inability to assign multiple meanings to words, assemble and integrate information, and go beyond a local referent to derive a global,…

This study focuses on a multicultural ESL classroom with the purpose of exploring the creation of new individual and cultural identities and the formation of interculture. Through on-site observations and interviews with second-language learners and their teacher, the study presents findings about the dynamics, quandaries, complexity, and…

This paper explores how the three concepts of vision, metaphor, and fantasy serve educational research for a better understanding of teachers' minds regarding educational issues. Drawing upon data based on a review of the literature, the following has been found: a semantic comparison showed that the concepts were similar in their abilities to…

This article focuses on a critical reading of two texts by Derrida: "Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question" (1989) and "Memoirs of the Blind" (1993). In these two texts, Derrida explores some of the dominant tropes and metaphors of a language of spirit in two distinctively different, but interrelated, genealogies in the West: one in philosophy and…

Criticisms have recently been voiced of constructivism, the leading metaphor of human learning since the 1970s. Inspired by inconsistencies in interpretations of constructivism in current literature, we examine the underlying epistemological beliefs of popular constructivist theories and their criticisms. We find that popular constructivist claims…

A self-paced reading experiment investigated processing of sentences containing a noun-phrase that could temporarily be mistaken as the direct-object argument of a verb in a subordinate clause but actually constituted the syntactic subject of the main clause (often referred to as an "early" vs. "late closure" ambiguity). Subcategorization…

The purpose of this study was to discuss the dance technique class experiences of students in a university dance program. Working within a post-positivist methodological framework, I interviewed five university dancers. Using the lenses of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I compared and contrasted the women's stories with each other's and my own.…

It is suggested that educators look to an environment in which qualitative research can be learned in more flexible and creative ways--an online learning community known as the Research Park Online (RPO). This model, based upon Walt Disney's 1966 plan for his "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT) and university cooperative…

In a series of three papers, I examined the identity-development of three Chinese women teachers as they moved back and forth between Eastern and Western cultures and languages amid the rapidly changing events of the last four decades. I use a river metaphor to explore three phases in the cross-cultural lives of these women: in the first paper,…

The practice of science has been characterized as the systematic application of common sense. This view, frequently held by scientists themselves, holds that the same qualities that allow pre-industrial societies, pioneers, cast-aways, and common folk everywhere to cope with their environment and prosper also make for good scientists. However,…