There is a tradition of Public Linguistics--linguistics in aid of civic issues--in American linguistics that was strongly present at the beginning of the linguistics discipline and that continues to the present. Unfortunately, language has emerged as a political issue in American public life. The unity of America is not threatened by language, but…

Explains the evolution controversy in Tennessee and the Scopes trial which broke anti-evolution law in 1925. Points out that science education still carries the same conflict 75 years after the Scopes trial. (Author/YDS)

Notes that by exploring Depression-era teens' letter writing, language arts teachers can enjoy more fruitful uses of nonfiction with their students. Discusses how reading, analyzing, and responding to the letters could help minimize the widening gap between the 1930s and the twenty-first century. Concludes that researching everyday Americans'…

Describes the life of John Dewey. Discusses his views on democracy, his concerns about churches, and his views on citizenship. Notes that Dewey believed that all schools needed to examine the problems shared by all members of society and to attack social inequities. (SG)

Focuses on the debates over the MacKinnon-Dworkin Anti-Pornography Ordinance to explore one instance of definitional argument: the attempt to effect a redefinition. Argues that advocates for a definitional shift created the possibility for a "terministic catharsis" by simultaneously locating pornography in multiple locations on the pentad,…

This interview with a 103-year-old mathematician and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranges over intellectual and political life in the 20th century, including European education, McCarthyism, and ethnomathematics. (SK)

Re-examines "implied third-party endorsement" as an explanation of publicity's effectiveness. Argues that any effect involves inferences by audience members who use biased processing that favors news and disfavors advertising. Suggests that the presentation of information as news is not necessarily perceived by audiences as an…

Part II of this historiographical study examines British education policy in Africa, and in the many crown colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories around the globe. Up until 1920, the British government took far less interest than in India, in the development of schooling in Africa and the rest of the colonial empire, and education was…

While McKenzie mentions in passing her concern about anthropocentrism and human oppression of the natural world, she is mostly silent about the role of "nature" in post-post approaches to environmental education research. If one takes feminist poststructuralist ideas about voice and representation seriously, surely the place of "nature" in…

Developing literature on late twentieth century U.S. immigration rhetoric has failed to attend adequately to the character of sovereignty claims in contemporary immigration politics. This essay demonstrates the centrality of sovereignty discourse by examining texts created by the state, specifically public affairs videos produced and distributed…

The story of the Abbe de l'Epee's "methodical signs" is best known as a key moment in Deaf history. However, at the time of the French Revolution this story served a larger political function. The example of de l'Epee's deaf students, and their seemingly miraculous command of ideas learned through gestural signs, helped the French…

This article argues that New Labour's third term education policies are riddled with internal contradictions. The author explores key tension points and suggests that fractures might be opened up where the government is most vulnerable to critical scrutiny and interventions by grassroots resistance.

This article offers some guidance for those first entering the volatile, exciting, and (at times) exasperating field of gifted child education. It provides common denominators that underlie this field of study that typically surface at some point in this career. The following are among the sections included in this brief article: (1) Gifted child…

Presented at its launch in 1998 as the quintessential "third way" welfare policy, the English education action zones (EAZ) experiment was one of a number of area-based initiatives in the UK designed to tackle social exclusion in disadvantaged localities. The policy was premised upon the idea that different bodies--public, private, voluntary, and…

In this article, I argue that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can complement and extend existing critical and radical writing pedagogies; CDA provides the theoretical and methodological context that can articulate explicitly the relationship between language practices and politics. I use CDA to analyze texts that circulated on the campus of…