Florida family court mediation programs have typically been assessed with quantitative analysis. To understand the complexity of the experience of being a family mediator, it was necessary to explore how mediators practiced through qualitative research. Metaphors have been considered to be representations of mediators' mental models regarding…

First Nations tricksters, Coyote and Raven, work to indigenize Environmental Education but run up against mainstream languages, technologies, and educational practices. They try to do an end-run around the cognitive backfield, then portage through marginal spaces, but find that working between Indigenous languages and mainstream ones can work best…

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand and negative things with the side corresponding to their nondominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study using linguistic stimuli, and whether…

Conceptual congruency effects are biases induced by an irrelevant conceptual dimension of a task (e.g., location in vertical space) on the processing of another, relevant dimension (e.g., judging words' emotional evaluation). Such effects are a central empirical pillar for recent views about how the mind/brain represents concepts. In the present…

Previous research has shown that words presented on metaphor congruent locations (e.g., positive words "up" on the screen and negative words "down" on the screen) are categorized faster than words presented on metaphor incongruent locations (e.g., positive words "down" and negative words "up"). These…

This qualitative study explored the use of metaphor within a somatic context as a means to bridge the divide between technique and expression in two undergraduate advanced intermediate ballet classes. Data included surveys, classroom observations, student journal responses and student work, as well as surveys and journal responses, one year after…

This study compared younger (M = 53 months) and older (M = 90 months) children's use of linguistic referential devices to make a positive identification. Children were shown a 4-minute video that concluded with a wrongful act. They were interviewed 24 hours later and asked to identify the perpetrator of the wrongful act with open-ended and…

Among different types of metaphors, lexical metaphors are special in that they have been highly lexicalized and often suggested to be processed like non-metaphorical words. The present study examined two types of Chinese metaphorical words which are conceptualized through body parts. One has both a metaphorical meaning and a literal meaning…

Metaphors play a powerful role in arguments about education. It is common to say schools are broken, and that the school system is failing. Here I take the metaphor seriously and briefly review an historical episode where airplanes failed seemingly for no reason at the dawn of the jet age. The responses to these failures at first with public…

Creativity has emerged in the focus of neurocognitive research in the past decade. However, a heterogeneous pattern of brain areas has been implicated as underpinning the neural correlates of creativity. One explanation for these divergent findings lies in the fact that creativity is not usually investigated in terms of its many underlying…

We draw on the analytic resources of cultural historical activity theory and the work of (Basil) Bernstein and Knorr Cetina to examine evidence from a study of inter-professional practices in children's services in three English local authorities (local government systems). The study traced the horizontal (e.g. cross service) and vertical (e.g.…

This paper argues for the importance of ethnography in the conduct of educational research and the ways in which it can threaten, in a good sense, the certainties and dominance of performativity. The paper uses the poetry of Emily Dickinson to signal the importance of indirection in the conduct of ethnographic work and, more specifically, the ways…

The purpose of this article is to examine how and to what extent schools' responses to accountability policies in the United States influence the ability of new teachers of color to draw on their own and their students' cultural resources to engage in culturally responsive teaching. A 5-year study of 17 new teachers of color reveals that these…

This article is set in the context of multicultural 21st-century Australia, whose diversity is marked by religious plurality as well as varied ethnic groupings. The article reports on a study of professional learning in three Australian faith-based schools (Christian, Jewish and Muslim) that investigated the role such schools might play in the…

This study investigates how figurative language is processed by learners of a second language (L2). With an experiment testing L2 comprehension of figurative expressions in three categories, each combining shared and unshared first language (L1) and L2 lexical representations and conceptual representations in a different way, the study…