This article examines the ideological dimensions of the career portfolio. This genre, an increasingly common part of high school and post-secondary school curricula, invites students to collect items from multiple domains and to reflect upon what these items say about who they are and where they are going. Through a critical analysis of the…

The Coalition Government's education policies are ripe for criticism and equally ripe for controlled but principled derision. In the letters pages of the "Times Educational Supplement" and, to a lesser extent, "Education Guardian," Colin Richards has subjected them to a barrage of criticism, some couched as sardonic humour.…

This article provides a critical review of the way that the International Baccalaureate (IB) promotes international education and international mindedness through the IB Learner Profile. While discussing theories of values and attitudes, and the teaching of values and theories of value acquisition, the paucity of such topics in IB texts is noted.…

Similar to many courses in communication, oral communication is central to the learning goals in the discipline of design. Design critiques, the primary communication activity in design classrooms, occur in every studio course multiple times. One key feature of the critique, as an oral genre, is the amount of time and emphasis placed on feedback.…

This paper discusses how major breakthroughs in generating, analysing and disseminating action research about problem-based learning were made through the medium of poetry. I used poetry in three ways: as data, as an interpretive device and as a reflective medium. Poetry helped me to disseminate my research in provocative, memorable and…

We investigated how 3-7-year-olds weigh and coordinate information about specific mental states with social norms in the domain of contextually conventional rules. With increasing age, participants increasingly took into account an actor's mental state to predict that actor's behavior. In a criticism judgment task, 7-year-olds could assign…

My aim in this paper is to analyse Spanish non-sexist language reform from a language-planning perspective. Supportive of the intent of the official policy, I will first criticize it for its failure to analyze the conditions in which it is to be implemented and for the lack of provision for its implementation. I will also show the tensions between…

Although the study of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) politics appears to be widely accepted within political science, a recent survey of political scientists reported some skepticism about its legitimacy and scholarly worth (Novkov and Barclay 2010). This article examines potential concerns about LGBT studies and draws attention to the…

The policy of re-adoption for UK-citizen parents of intercountry adopted children is designed to protect children and safeguard their best interests, but in fact may breach a variety of rights and international Conventions, and when applied to specific cases can lead to more harm than good. In this review, I want to argue that the policy of…

Ethnolinguistic vitality theory asserts that Status, Demographic, Institutional Support and Control factors make up the vitality of ethnolinguistic groups. An assessment of a group's strengths and weaknesses in each of these dimensions provides a rough classification of ethnolinguistic groups into those having low, medium, or high vitality. Low…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dominant positions in the debates on globalization in American social studies education. Specifically, the paper illustrates that, first, globalization is conceived of as more of an unprecedented new age and less of a historical development. Second, it is conceived of as more of a natural process and…

Diaspora is a cultural situation in which a group of people have a dual cultural alliance, dual cultural allegiance--to a cultural or cultures in the place where they are and to a culture or cultures in another place to which they are related by etiological memory, other strategies to read the past like shared values, shared religion, and so on.…

The essay distils from Badiou's writing a pedagogy based on his theories of knowledge and truth, as brought to bear on poetry and the arts. By following Badiou's implicit ontology of learning, which presupposes a dynamic and passionate engagement with a concrete situation, the essay argues that Badiou's view of modernity, in particular,…

The authors note that although the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (4th ed., text rev.; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) provides a useful tool for assessment and treatment planning, there has been debate over the lack of attention to issues of diversity. The elements of this debate are presented, along with…

Historians typically tell stories about the past, but how are we to understand the epistemic status of those narratives? This problem is particularly pressing for history education, which seeks guidance not only on the question of which narrative to teach but also more fundamentally on the question of the goals of instruction in history. This…