Previous research indicates severe disabilities in processing figurative language in people diagnosed on the autism spectrum disorders. However, this aspect of language comprehension in Asperger syndrome (AS) specifically has rarely been the subject of formal study. The present study aimed to examine the possibility that in addition to their…

This article reports an empirical study of an important but under-studied feature of learning practices with young children: the use of metaphors and other kinds of figurative language. The data consist of video-recordings of children (3-5 years old) and their teacher engaged in thematic work about soil. The analysis revealed that the teacher and…

In 1956, the Swedish Parliament decided to invest in a national nuclear energy program. The decision rested on the conviction that it would be in the interest of the nation to use the assets of natural uranium, the advanced reactor technology, and the expertise on nuclear physics that the country had at its disposal. Since the decision concerned…

This article presents the authors' comments on Crisp and Turner's (May-June 2009) research on "imagined intergroup contact" (p. 231). Its goals of reducing prejudice are laudable, especially with a motivation to "prepare people to engage outgroups with an open mind" (p. 231). The method is relatively simple, easy, and…

This article focuses on developing a progressive philosophy of praxis that challenges, what the author argues is, a post-racial resistance to teaching about racial injustice. Post-racial resistance to teaching can lead to forms of enlightened racism and sexism in the classroom. In this essay, the author develops and extends the use of the metaphor…

This article examines the discourses of theses titles as postgraduate students name and frame their research. It does this by analysing the discourse, nature and trends of title construction in Master's and Ph.D. research titles 1995-2004 in all universities in South Africa. The dominant discourses are analysed using Foucault's approach to…

How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements…

Taking a bird's-eye-view of the philosophical discourses that metaphorize creativity as "expression," "production," and "reconstruction," this article depicts their vital characteristics and distinct ways of portraying the relationships between creativity, educative experiences, and the epistemic cultures now…

A familiar discourse about higher education and social change today relates to higher education's socio-economic role within knowledge societies in a globalizing world. This paper addresses how issues of social justice feature in such discourses; whether social justice in higher education has been appropriated into a neo-liberal strategy for…

This study demonstrates the power of the cultural encounter metaphor in explaining learning and teaching difficulties, using as an example computer science education (CSE). CSE is envisioned as an encounter between veterans of two computer-oriented cultures, that of the teachers and that of the students. Forty questionnaires administered to CS…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

Throughout many ethnic communities, culture, place, and education have always been important to each other. There are countless creative strategies and approaches to education, inclusion, and personal development that can be derived from studying cultural spaces within any culture. In this article, the author looks specifically at the African…

This paper reports on an initial teacher education programme that has been designed to facilitate and support Maori student teachers in New Zealand. This paper highlights the ambiguity in New Zealand on the theoretical foundation of initial teacher education. Therefore a background on transformative praxis and how it has impacted on the education…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how work environment and psychological empowerment related to worker outcomes in public child welfare. These relationships were examined by testing a conceptual model in which psychological empowerment mediated the relationships between work environment variables (quality of supervision and role…

Drawing on in-depth interviews with the third year students at a New Zealand university, we explore the ways in which students speak about studying mathematics, their relationship with the subject and how this has developed over time. These interviews were conducted as part of a project looking at undergraduate mathematics from the perspective of…