In 2002 a new Ontario college charter signaled a new era for higher education in Ontario. The charter was presumed to usher in a new way of doing higher education, one that provided greater freedom for Ontario colleges and presumably greater access for communities to higher education. Coupled with the Post-Secondary Choice and Excellence Act of…

Counselling can be seen as a context or process for meaning-making where clients and counsellors actively interpret and construct meaning. We examine meaning-making in counselling through the lenses of three research methods: (a) discourse analysis, (b) hermeneutic-phenomenology, and (c) autoethnography. Specifically, we relate the process and…

Background/Context: As of 2006, "social justice" is frequently appearing as the centerpiece of numerous educational settings and spaces, such as article and book titles, teacher activist organizations, teacher education policy documents and mission statements, and scholarly conferences. Unfortunately, the organizations and individuals employing…

It has been claimed in recent years that, on the one hand, metaphor occurs in UK university lectures in ways that are likely to confuse ESL learners (Littlemore 2001, 2003) and on the other hand that US lecturers use it in highly structured ways, particularly involving linked clusters, to help organize the lecture and indicate the opinions of the…

The idiosyncrasy of national academic discourses in educational sciences and the flow of ideas between them is a topic that has inspired recent research, even though it has not been treated very exhaustively. This study presents some results of an investigation into German influences on the Spanish academic discourse in educational sciences…

The underachievement of boys has been a focus of intense concern in Australia for over 15 years. Historical analyses suggest that male students' poor performance has traditionally been attributed to factors external to boys themselves (methods, teachers, texts), deflecting attention from the relationship between masculinity construction and…

When children come together to play dramatically they are involved in the creation of an improvised text. This text emerges spontaneously via the moment-by-moment contributions of individual players who must operate in a highly collaborative way in order to achieve cohesion. This paper reports on a research project involving several groups of 11-…

The shift from a centralized to a decentralized school system can be seen as a solution to an uncertain problem. Through analysing the displacements in the concept of equivalence within Sweden's decentralized school system, this study illustrates how the meaning of the concept of equivalence shifts over time, from a more collective target…

The Advanced Certificate of Education (ACE) specialisation in mathematics (for the FET) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal includes a module on professional practice in mathematics education. As part of this module students complete an action research project on their own teaching. This article describes both the progression of one action research…

Using reflective journals to promote learning has been a common practice in the teaching profession. How learners present reflections in what are judged to be high-quality reflective writing remains under-researched. This paper explores the discourse features of teaching practicum reflective reports written by six pre-service student teachers of…

The purpose of this study was to examine 32 mothers' sensitivity to social contingency during face-to-face interaction with their two- to four-month-old infants in a closed circuit TV set-up. Prosodic qualities and vocal sounds in mother's infant-directed (ID) speech during sequences of live interaction were compared to sequences where expressive…

In this article, the author discusses the views put forward at the most recent meeting of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a conservative organization devoted to the reformation of academe. Themes included assessment and accountability and the need for an increased focus on undergraduate teaching, and a general distrust of the…

As part of developmental research for an inquiry-oriented differential equations course, this study investigates the change in students' beliefs about mathematics. The discourse analysis has identified two different types of perspective modes--i.e., discourse of the third-person perspective and discourse of the first-person perspective--in the…

R.S. Peters's 1966 book "Ethics and Education" is one of the most significant works in twentieth-century philosophy of education. At least in the United States, however, it is now rarely read or discussed. In this essay, Bryan Warnick looks at the virtues and vices of "Ethics and Education," examining some major criticisms of the book in light of…

Zora Neale Hurston, in "TEWWG," deconstructs the image of two important literary tropes that were deeply embedded in the African American literary tradition: the dispirited black female and the tragic mulatto. Both of these characters, Nanny as the dispirited black female and Janie as the tragic mulatto, are haunted by their traumatic histories.…