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…

For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's "Black Manifesto" as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through…

Teaching rhetorical production in a digital age calls for us to rethink our discipline's current distaste for writing mechanics. Yet, the digital mechanics of writing are much broader than grammatical concerns. They include production tools that allow for the invention and circulation of audio, visual, and Multigenre writing. (Contains 3 figures…

Ghosts haunt the school curriculum. Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" provides a starting point for thinking about these curriculum ghosts. In the Preface, he states that he has "endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea". In this article, the author seeks to raise the ghost of an idea, and to…

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel's work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel's arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several…

This paper explores the similarities and differences between complexity science's and cultural-historical activity theory's understandings of human learning. Notable similarities include their emphasis on the importance of social systems or collectives in understanding human knowledge and practices, as well as their characterization of systems'…