In Shakespeare's "As You Like It," Jaques offers the image of the world--or society--as a stage on which "one man in his time plays many parts." The question is: how does he (or she) know how to play those parts? Jaques seems to be suggesting that individuals are the creation of society, and the parts they play are written in…

In this paper the archeology of social justice is described as discourses of practices concerning Swedish ways of dealing with gender equality in compulsory school. The paper begins with some recent developments in Sweden that are important for the theme; it continues with the rhetoric in some relevant acts, government bills, and national…

This article investigates the multimodal discourses taking place in a primary school computer supported collaborative literacy environment, in which face-to-face talk in pairs is combined with computer-mediated communication. Following a socially mediated model of education, we have taken into account the collaborative process of the participants…

Some learning scientists are beginning to investigate social and cultural aspects of learning by examining the interactions between a learner and the environment as well as with other people in the learning environment. This article proposes conversational analysis (CA) as a tool to analyze interactions between learners and instructors in…

A study examined from a feminist poststructuralist perspective the discourses available in a classroom using a critical pedagogy, based on a belief that teaches need to make it possible for their students to question the social world constructed in texts. The teacher of an Australian junior primary classroom (with students age five to eight) took…

A study analyzed the multiple purposes of songs in which children in early childhood classrooms sing and move their bodies to the lyrics, the discourses the songs mobilize, and the gendered positions the songs accomplish. Subjects, 28 students entering their first year in a suburban primary school in a large regional center in southern Victoria,…