Considers how silence has positive as well as negative attributes, and composition teachers can help students understand and use its aesthetic, ethical, and political resources in their personal writing. Notes that approaching silence in these ways can establish new alignments among the expressivist, psychoanalytical, and social discourses that…

The discourse of the Learning Society has a vocationalist/managerialist thrust, is oriented toward the global economy, and is market driven. A counter-discourse that rejects emphasis on "performativity" could clash with postmodernist objections to master narratives. (SK)

Managers in English social services agencies (n=10) identified themes related to their use of humor in social care settings: asserting invulnerability; coping with reality; controlling anxiety; working with ambiguity, paradox, and incongruity; resisting the dominant order; and making sense of organizational absurdities. Implications for business…

Examines the rhetoric of Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia from the 1920s to about 1960 as an overt attempt to redefine science. Discusses the rhetorical dimensions of Lysenkoist discourse from the perspective of the rhetorical theories of Aristotle, Burke, Weaver, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Foucault. Reviews two historical commentaries on Lysenkoism. (SG)

Examines the concept of home economics through five theoretical discourses: community/grassroots economics, feminist economics, ecofeminism, everyday life, and health and well-being. Proposes a radical renewal of home economics that incorporates elements of all. (Contains 32 references.) (SK)

Examines images and the written text in the picture book, "The Day of Ahmed's Secret," by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland. Examines the book in greater detail by looking for issues of authenticity as well as social issues within the book's pictures and written texts. (SG)

Few concepts in the German tradition of human studies--the so-called "Geisteswissenschaften"--have had the capacity to birth such intense expectations and hopes as the concept of "Bildung". There is general agreement that the concept of "Bildung" includes both an objective and a subjective component. The first refers to "culture" in its broadest…

This article describes a study of the relation between learning style, as measured by the Kolb Learning Style Inventory, and online communication behavior, as measured by analysis of transcripts of computer-mediated conferencing (CMC) interaction using a previously developed tool. Analysis of over fifty-nine hundred sentences, generated by forty…

This paper describes a qualitative study about pedagogic practices in the family. The pedagogic code underlying family practices is characterized and related to specific social groups. Students' achievement is discussed in relation to family and school pedagogic practices. The analysis of family pedagogic practice was based on a model derived from…

The field of rhetoric has generated studies of definitional disputes and of the relationship between definition and power. Informed by the idea of collective definition created over time, these studies raise an important theoretical-practical question about definition and contestation that may be approached through a concept of authority.…

This paper investigates teachers use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning…

In this article we will address the issue of obtaining insight into the way in which teachers deal with the normative side of their profession. We outline the problem that forms the context of our question (the difference in the meaning of good teaching in the process-product model and in ethical models) and we discuss Oser's discourse approach as…

This essay examines Kenneth Burke's puzzling work on pure persuasion to suggest that pure persuasion has four characteristics, that it is: (1) primarily consummatory in purpose or becomes instrumental or resistant indirectly or secondarily; (2) a near relation of dramatic performance, ritual, and prayer; (3) creates and maintains identity; and (4)…

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a…

Speakers in conversation routinely engage in audience design. That is, they construct their utterances to be understood by particular addressees. Standard accounts of audience design have frequently appealed to the notion of common ground. On this view, speakers produce well-designed utterances by expressly considering the knowledge they take as…