This is the second of four essays discussing Wu's "Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation: Chinese pedagogic discourse in a cross-cultural perspective" (JCS, 43(5), 569-590). The essay is interesting against the background of recent debates, both inside and outside China, about the relationship between the Chinese and Western…

This paper offers a critique of the "democratic state of education" proposed by Amy Gutmann in her influential book "Democratic Education". In the democratic state of education, educational authority is shared among the state, parents and educational professionals; and educational objectives are geared toward equipping future citizens to…

This study examines students' experiences using letter writing designed as a socio-cultural-based tool for critical friend work to promote dialogue and critique of their self-study teacher research projects. It seeks to understand their diverse experiences to inform future practice and contribute to the knowledge base of critical friend work in…

Even 150 years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," public school teachers still find themselves dealing with student resistance to learning about biological evolution. Some teachers deal with this pressure by undermining, deemphasizing, or even omitting the topic in their science curriculum. Others face the…

This paper explores the relationship between New Critical close reading techniques and studies of literary engagement by building on the work of Sumara, Rosenblatt and Todorov. New Critical techniques responded to the allusive density and terseness of modernist poetry and fiction. In the half-century since, the situated approaches favoured by…

William H. Kilpatrick is worldwide known as "Mr. Project Method." But the origin of his celebrated paper of 1918 has never been explored. The discovery of a hitherto unknown letter reveals that Kilpatrick was an educational entrepreneur who, without regard for language and tradition, adopted the term "project" and used it in a provocative new way…

"Popular culture" and "culture studies" have become mainstays of the humanities in higher education. Like most other humanities courses, popular culture courses today mainly serve the usual politically correct program of the existing dominant class in the academy. Nevertheless, such courses can also be a powerful tool for instructors who wish to…

When talk of philosophy of pedagogy comes up today, it is common to hear the names of Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, or Paulo Freire, but the name of Paul Goodman, who campaigned vigorously for pedagogical reform much of his life, is seldom mentioned. In spite of neglect of his work, Goodman had much to say on pedagogical practice that…

In this article, the author offers cautionary advice to help avoid some tempting morasses to unwittingly fall into as well as some more solid ground to stroll along when composing institutional prose. Ultimately, drawing on concepts from the fields of business, linguistics, social psychology, and professional writing, the author wishes to…

J. Skeem and D. J. Cooke (2010) asserted that Hare and Neumann consider criminality to be an essential component of the psychopathy construct. The assertion, presented in the guise of a debate on the nature of psychopathy, is neither accurate nor consistent with the clinical and empirical literature on psychopathy to which Hare and Neumann have…

Ghassib's (2010) paper is an interesting historical and philosophical discussion on the topic of knowledge production and a productivist industrial model in science. As I see it from the point of view of education, a weakness of the paper relates to the lack of discussion of the notion of creativity in science. The title includes the word…

The position adopted in this paper is inspired by Edgar Morin's paradigm of complexity and his critique of scientific and philosophical forms of reductionism. This paper is based on research focusing on the diversity of conceptions of critique developed in academic discourses. It aims to challenge the fragmentation and the reduction framing the…

This decade's literature on families with children and adolescents can be broadly organized around the implications for youth of family statuses (e.g., family structure) and family processes (e.g., parenting). These overlapping bodies of research built on past work by emphasizing the dynamic nature of family life and the intersection of families…

This paper presents the author's critique on Xiaoming Xi's article, "How do we go about investigating test fairness?," which lays out a broad framework for studying fairness as comparable validity across groups within the population of interest. Xi proposes to develop a fairness argument that would identify and evaluate potential fairness-based…

Johanne Paradis' Keynote Article can be read as a concise critical review of the research that focuses on the sometimes strained relationship between bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI). In my comments I will add some thoughts based on our own research on the learning of Dutch as a second language (L2) by children with SLI.