The study of policy in comparative education has been approached using methods associated with the principal social science disciplines that have informed the field since its inception. In particular, the disciplines of history, political science, sociology, and anthropology have had a significant influence on determining the acceptable methods…

This paper explores a labelling feature designed to support higher-level online dialogue. It investigates whether students use labels less often during a structured online dialogue than during an unstructured one, and looks at students' reactions to labelling and to both types of tasks. Participants are from three successive course offerings of a…

This paper investigates spoken directive language use in office hour consultation contexts by international teaching assistants (ITAs) in training, individually and in comparison with practicing academic professionals. The purpose is to inform instruction in advanced spoken English for academic purposes, to contribute to intercultural pragmatics…

Scientific communities have established social mechanisms for proposing explanations, questioning evidence, and validating claims. Opportunities like these are often not a given in science classrooms (Vellom, Anderson, & Palincsar, 1993) even though the National Science Education Standards (NSES, 1996) state that a scientifically literate person…

This paper describes a tool for thinking and developing consciousness about the epistemology contained and revealed in our discourse about psychology and complexity theory. It is concerned with knowledge, with how we can know and with how we can sensibly speak about knowing. The model is not intended to express any values in itself and it sets no…

This dissertation critically examines mental illness discourses through the intersecting disciplinary lenses of art education and disability studies. Research from multiple disciplines is compared and theorized to uncover the ways in which discourses, or language systems, have oppressively constructed and represented "mental illness." To establish…

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense,…

This article draws on Bakhtin and other cultural studies theorists to understand the role of the grotesque as a libratory moment in biology education. Four examples of texts and moments are analyzed: Sylvia Branzei's "Grossology" series of children's books about the grotesque, observations of a pig heart dissection, a standard high school…

The "Floodgate Street area" was a notorious slum district in the city of Birmingham in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article presents a case study, drawing on the rich archival sources available for this area, to examine the language that local authority and voluntary workers used to describe the local area, and…

This paper examines narrative methodologies as one approach to exploring issues of gender, education and social justice and, particularly, insights into "undoing gender". It furthermore examines the possibilities of exploring gender and its multiple intersections in a range of global and policy contexts through the use of personal…

Research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the second language (L2) classroom has revealed the potential for technology to promote learner interaction and opportunities for negotiation of meaning as well as to provide opportunities for language access outside the classroom environment. Despite this potential, social, linguistic, and…

Risk is positioned as a distinguishing feature of outdoor adventure education (OAE) pedagogy. Risk defines much of what happens in OAE, from participants "taking" risks to instructors "managing" risks. The taken-for-granted centrality of risk continues to have currency due to the thrill and allure of adventurous outdoor activities. This paper…

Purpose: The Hong Kong government recently reformed pre-primary education with the introduction of a voucher scheme. At the time this policy caused considerable opposition from across Hong Kong Society. This paper seeks to use Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis to explore a key policy text and seeks to assess to what extent such an…

Humorous communication is extremely complex in both its forms and functions (e.g. Norrick, 1993; 2003). Much of the previous work that has put forth suggestions for incorporating humor into the language classroom (e.g. Trachtenberg, 1979; Deneire, 1995; Schmitz, 2002) has not examined these complexities in the detail necessary for the target…

The field of transnational contestation conceptualized as global civil society (GCS) is gaining academic interest as a political "counter-force" against the exigencies of globalization. However, social actors within GCS occupy unequal positions of power in relation to each other. This article examines how the discourses of transnational action…