Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and…

Ethnocentric concepts, theories and practices in education, predominantly embedded in western philosophy and values, tend to ignore the growing multicultural nature of educational institutions. This article draws attention to the knowledge gap in mainstream literature regarding diverse perspectives of educational leadership--an issue which is…

This paper reports the results of a small-scale (n = 9) interview study of the "ways of knowing" of academics in a Design School at a South African polytechnic. The focus of the study was on exploring the perceptions of these academics about discipline-specific knowledge in their fields. The paper presents an analysis of the responses,…

This paper backgrounds and illustrates an approach to researching didactic knowledge. Underlying the approach are some of the frameworks developed from the student learning research. Based on these frameworks the experience of learning about a particular phenomenon is theorised as having educationally critical aspects. Without addressing these…

Law often appears to be in a limbo between the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Movements within legal scholarship itself, the law and economics movement and the law and literature movement, represent efforts to portray law as a social science or as a humanity. But if one looks at what lawyers do, one finds that law is more like…

Developmental psychologists have been interested in the cognitive ability of perspective-taking for a number of years due to the apparent link between perspective-taking deficits and Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Most of the research in this area has employed the concepts and techniques of the approach commonly referred to as "Theory of Mind." The…

This paper examines the creation of new knowledge bases in higher education in light of the ideas of Alvin Toffler, whose trilogy "Future Shock" (1970), "The Third Wave" (1980), and "Powershift" (1990) focus on the processes, directions, and control of change, respectively. It discusses the increasingly important role…

This paper describes how visual media technologies have been used to support research into the way technical diagrams are represented in people's minds. Two groups of subjects participated in this research, individuals with either a high or a low level of expertise in meteorology, specifically professional meteorologists and non-meteorologists.…

For a long time educational administration has been enamored with the idea that studies about leadership should lead to contextually free generalizations. Despite decades of empirical studies modeled after the social sciences' most rigorous disciplines, very little is known about leadership. Previous views of leadership attempted to generalize…

At issue in this study was the extent to which large numbers of classroom teachers were able to implement research-based materials with a minimum of inservice education. Also at issue was whether students of these teachers were able to develop the rich mental images for fractions similar to the ones students from previous Rational Number Project…

The Enneagram is a model of human consciousness. It describes each of the nine strategies that people adopt to understand the world and others. This guidebook is intended to be used with the video of the same name, which describes the nine perspectives on learning. The book provides a Type-related context to the comments made by the students on…

A study examined the effects of an intensive, 7-week, introductory workshop-type experience using recommended techniques to promote adult growth for a group of 29 aspiring educational administration students. The study specifically examined whether the process and experience of the academy (workshop) produced a change in cognitive-developmental…

Examination of the development of the standards documents of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) points to constructivism as the central view of learning that underlies the reform movement in mathematics education. Constructivism is a theory of how learning occurs. It assumes that knowledge is not passively received, but rather…

Cognitive structures concerned with processing information about gender have been called gender schemas. Research about gender schematicity often has involved self-reporting measures of traits. These measures consisted of empirically chosen adjectives that were desirable for both sexes, but judged more typical of females or males. The current…

This volume presents ten papers by authors from diverse academic disciplines that challenge the acceptance of dominant patterns of knowledge in the present educational and social climate and suggest that our creativity, our capacity to comprehend complex phenomena, and the future well-being of out society depend on our willingness to embrace new…