The new "Weighted Student Formula Yearbook 2009" from the Reason Foundation provides a simple framework for touting the successes of states and urban school districts that grant greater fiscal autonomy to schools. The report defines the Weighted Student Formula (WSF) reform extremely broadly, presenting a variety of reforms under the WSF umbrella.…

When scholars write about their research in writing programs' archives, they often face the ethical question of whether to name the administrators who were involved in documents. The author identifies and provides examples of three basic orientations to this issue, which he calls overt-historical, covert-qualitative, and hybrid-institutional.…

With the advent of the process approach to teaching writing, the use of products or models in the composition classroom has declined, replaced by heuristic exploration of the rhetorical situation, with special emphasis on audience analysis. Some researchers have emphasized the difference between internal audiences and audiences external to the…

A text is the locus of many intersecting processes, the origins, character, and operative principles of which should be the main focus of its discussion in a writing class. These processes can be classified into the four major components of the communicative act: the writer, the reader, the social conditions of communication, and the historical…

This study investigated responses by fifteen- and sixteen-year-old students to poetry in three interview situations--affectively-oriented, cognitively-oriented, or nondirective--and the relationship of the responses to interview method, sex, and reading level. The responses were assigned to the five categories of Personal Association, Moral…

This article discusses how critical literacy can offer gifted students a way to research great leaders and their actions in times of crisis, enabling them to project the type of leadership that is called for in today's world. Reading activities, writing activities, and oral language activities are described. (Contains 1 reference.) (CR)

As the nation's newest broad-based merit aid program, the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship program's generous eligibility requirements may target the very students who are disproportionately left out of similar programs in other states. This article compares the scholarship eligibility rates of Tennessee students with three other states:…

This contribution reviews how four European countries--England, Germany, France and the Netherlands--use the concept of competence in the process of developing vocational education and training. Competence in England is set in the context of the National Vocational Qualifications; in Germany within action competence and the approach to learning…

China's People's University has demoted a dean after the well-known scholar criticized university officials and what he termed the "bureaucratization" of the nation's higher-education system. The incident started when Zhang Ming, dean of political science at People's University, posted comments on his popular personal blog in which he…

In the USA, many environmental educators have paid little attention to Western Christian and Jewish ecotheology, in spite of its being a potentially rich resource for environmental education. In part, this neglect can be attributed to popular misconceptions about the influence of religious beliefs on environmental values. This essay reviews the…

N. Stewart, G. D. A. Brown, and N. Chater presented a relative judgment model (RJM) of absolute identification, in which the current stimulus is judged relative to the preceding stimulus. S. Brown, A. A. J. Marley, and Y. Lacouture found that the RJM does not predict their finding of increased accuracy after large stimulus jumps, except at the…

This paper contends that art can critique a philosophical claim about the world. Artist imagination can envision how an idea can live and whether the idea is attractive to our living. Cormac McCarthy's novel, "Blood Meridian," narratively illustrates a certain idea of divine determinism and shows that, in terms of war and human cruelty, the idea…

This article presents a rhetorical analysis of a Mexican woman's oral narrative performance using a discourse studies and interactional sociolinguistics framework. The results of the analysis suggest that the discursive practice of the oral narrative and that of academic discourse share certain rhetorical features. These features are (a) the…

This guide directs the researcher to materials relating to Carol Gilligan's work in the fields of psychology and gender studies, the scholarly dialogue of her critics, and related authors and works. Its purpose is to present a single resource from which the study of Gilligan's work and influence can grow through varied types of research materials,…

Hollis Sigler was an artist, teacher, and activist. Her works seductively invite us to consider fantasies and challenge to confront the monsters. Sigler's narrative artwork after 1991 focused almost exclusively on issues relating to her and her family's history with breast cancer. It purposefully calls into question the capricious nature of life…