The author seeks to revitalize the interests of social educators in the value of using critical, postmodern discourses for rich comprehension of and productive scholarly research in our field. These discourses (a) challenge existing understanding within social education and the knowledge and knower they help produce; and (b) imagine more complex,…

Writing, as an advanced model of output, not only conveys the subject but also realizes the communication between readers and writers. Metadiscourse can help writers arrange and organize the discourse to influence readers' understanding of the text and their attitude towards its content. Taking writing samples of College English Test Band 4…

In epistemologies of both scientific and common sense thinking "objectification" characterizes the formation of knowledge and concepts, yet in each case its meaning is different. In the former, objectification in acquiring knowledge refers to the individual's rationalistic reification of an object or of another person and to disengagement or…

How do culturally, politically, and economically different actors define education in the UNESCO 1974 "Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms?" This exploration of the document aims to increase understanding of the work of…

Research has addressed what instructional conditions may inhibit or promote scientific argumentation. Little research, however, has paid attention to interpersonal factors that influence collaborative argumentation. The present study examines the ways interpersonal factors affected group dynamics, which influence the features of collaborative…

Critically reflective dialogues (CRD) are important for knowledge sharing and creating meaning in communities. CRD includes different aspects: being open about mistakes, critical opinion sharing, asking for and giving feedback, experimentation, challenging groupthink and research utilisation. In this article we explore whether CRD aspects change…

On May 31, 1897, William James, one of America's most influential philosophers and psychologists, delivered the first civic oration of his career. The principal orator at the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, James did what commemorative speakers are not supposed to do. He chose to be confrontational and divisive in a…

As two teachers/researchers committed to the values of social justice in the classroom, we are deeply disturbed by the explicit and implicit ways that our education system, operating through neoliberalism, reproduces the inequalities of larger society. To problematize and deterritorialize dominant neoliberal notions of schooling, education,…

Teacher language and students' on-task behavior were examined in language arts lessons with and without classroom drama in two self-contained third grade classrooms for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Language arts lessons that integrated classroom drama were associated with significantly higher…

The purpose of the present study is to find out the features of English business letters. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics is used as the theoretical framework, mainly, interpersonal fucntion. The English business letter (EBL) is an important written text used for international business communication and it has its own features of text.…

Purpose: Several paradoxes have been presented in the literature as inherent in supervision of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to explore these paradoxes and offer the concept of praxis as a way of effectively engaging with complex and paradoxical dimensions of supervision, rather than denying or avoiding them.…

As a response to "Le Fils," a film directed by the Dardenne brothers, we explore the idea of speaking as an invitation and juxtapose it against ideas of speaking as a transactional, calculative, calibrated, activity. Speaking tends to be understood as a relatively straightforward matter: as a means of communication structured by such values as the…

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some…

This paper attempted to illustrate how a coherence instruction could be accomplished by a teacher's discourse moves. The ultimate goal of this study was to provide mathematics teachers and educational researchers an insightful view of instructional coherence which needs more attention to achieve high quality of mathematics teaching. A Chinese…

Much research has examined how different patterns of social interaction shape language learners' interactional roles (e.g., collaborative, dominant, passive) in peer-to-peer conversations. However, little or no research has investigated the co-construction of such roles in multiparty, online task-based dialogues within the framework of discursive…