Inspiring students to become teachers and community leaders is a goal of Douglas Taylor School's leadership team. A feeling of continuity and connection are important to the school, which opened in the 19th century. Housed in a beautiful old school building in Chicago's South Side, Douglas Taylor School contains grades preK-8. To maintain the…

The increasing use of computers to enable or replace face-to-face tutorial discussion groups in higher education is creating a new form of academic writing. This small-scale study of 43 students and three tutors identifies ways in which students present their opinions in a forum which allows greater time for reflection, but also creates a…

This paper considers the bottom-up vision of the learning society. Unlike the top-down approach, the bottom-up approach does not start by specifying the purposes of learning which should direct the development of the learning society, but from observing interactions among learning individuals as agents. While in the relevant literature and…

This article argues that of the various approaches taken in state education internationally, the inclusion of a discrete academic subject dealing with religious traditions and spiritual or secular alternatives is the most effective way of addressing religious plurality in education. It examines the increasing presence of religion in public…

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the "epistemic public(s)" constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that…

With an eye towards a potential scientific ethics curriculum, this paper examines four contrasting discourses regarding the ethics of using human subjects in science. The first two represent official statements regarding ethics. These include the U.S.'s National Science Education Standards, that identify ethics with a professional code, and the…

In this study we examine how university plagiarism policies interact with international graduate students' academic writing in English as they develop identities as authors and students. The study is informed by the sociocultural theoretical perspective [Vygotsky, L. (1978). "Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes." Cambridge,…

What the author has learned, wandering around in the mists and fogs of the lowlands along the Potomac, is that nothing happens in Congress until there is a will, a consensus, and not just in the leadership, but in the rank and file of both parties that an issue needs to be addressed in a particular way. The problem needs to be explicated until it…

Storytime programs for young children are ritual events in the everyday life of the public library. This article analyzes data from two such programs to identify and analyze the work carried out by program leaders, their adult and child participants, and other social actors in other settings (e.g., library CEOs) in order to enable the program to…

This article compares French and English academic article abstracts from the language sciences in an attempt to understand how and why language choice might affect this part-genre--both in actual use and according to authors' linguistic and rhetorical perceptions. Two corpora are used: Corpus A consists of abstracts from a French linguistics…

In the present era of accountability, there is a real and justifiable temptation to use collaboration to focus strictly upon instrumental goals that have an immediate impact on classroom practices. However, without some time and reflection devoted to why teachers do what they do, a sustainable culture of collaboration is unlikely to emerge. Based…

This study investigated the nature of interaction among teachers that occurred around the National Board certification (NBC) process and how that collegial interaction influenced teachers' professional development. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 14 teachers who were either considering NBC, in the process, or had been awarded NBC.…

The social epistemic that the Mennonite-Anabaptists have been cultivating as their hermeneutic method for 470 years focuses on local congregations as discourse communities of faith, promoting egalitarian lay participation equal to that of members with formal ministries. "The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective" features a…

Marking the tenth anniversary of the journal, this book reprints 10 articles originally published in "Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory" and pairs each article with a short comment by its author. The book notes that the journal is devoted to exploring and expanding the field of rhetoric and composition by publishing articles…

This paper explores a new youth movement, spoken word, and the role it plays in identity development for many disenfranchised youth. Often addressing issues of identity, politics, gender, and power relations, young performance poets are carving out a critical public and educative space where they can speak "who they are." There is a…