Explores potential links between school board member and superintendent turnover. Qualitative and quantitative data from 176 school districts in a Northwest state support use of Dissatisfaction Theory as a useful tool in describing the political sequence of events in local school governance and establish the necessity of distinguishing between…

Based on recent theoretical insights into the conceptual role of metaphors, this paper investigates figurative discourse in the current conceptualisation of the European Union (EU) in Polish. The metaphorical expressions found in the data present a cline of conventionality, and many of them display processes analysed by Lakoff and Turner (1989),…

Since the summer of 1989, ''peaceful revolutions'' started to bring down the communist rule in the states of the Soviet sphere of influence. These revolutions led to a complete transformation of the political, ideological and economic systems. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was re-structured into Laender which became constituent states of…

Here Francis Beckett, formerly Education Correspondent of the New Statesman and long-time member of the Labour Party "Comprehensive Futures" group set up to further the cause of non-selective schools for all children reflects on the prospects for radical state education in New Labour's third term. He argues that with Andrew Adonis made a…

This essay stages a theoretically driven critique of Lawrence Kasdan's film "The Big Chill" as a productive example of a constitutive contradiction animating the liberal political imaginary. In particular, it argues that liberalism relies irreducibly on an under-examined conception of friendship to supply its model of citizenship as a distinctive,…

Public memorial services held in New York City on September 11, 2002, marked the most important U.S. civic commemoration of the present era. Numerous popular and academic critics excoriated speakers on that day for commemorating the occasion with commemorative declamations instead of offering original speeches. This essay contends that assessing…

Mentoring has been proposed as a means to enhance the career success of women faculty in the academic environment. This phenomenological study was undertaken to understand and describe the essential nature and meaning of the experience of being mentored for women faculty. In-depth conversational interviews were conducted with nine women faculty…

As primary contributors to the marketplace of ideas, colleges and universities have historically been the locus of contention for the worldviews of the left and right. Debate has become more heated in recent years, fueled by the war in Iraq and the renewed prominence of moral issues such as reproductive rights and same-sex marriage. In this…

What should be learned? How should it be organized for teaching? These seemingly simple questions are deceivingly political. Curriculum theorists are preoccupied with the politics of the first question at the expense of the realpolitik of the second. Instructional designers are preoccupied with the realpolitik of the second question at the expense…

Educators and other cultural workers need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources--cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological--to exercise powerful and diverse forms of hegemony. In this…

Economic and cultural globalisation has resulted in particular political ideologies in policy and practice that have created a certain essentialism--a tightened modernist "will to certainty"--which is reinscribed in curricular practices in New Zealand teacher education. At a time when the naming and framing of educational practice in…

Through executive orders, legislative initiatives, referenda, or constitutional amendments, a number of states have proposed measures to require school districts to spend at least 65 percent of their operational budgets on "in-class instruction." The current national average for such expenditures, using accounting categories from the…

The subject of this article is the report, "Ontario: A Leader in Learning" (Rae, 2005), presented to the government of Ontario by its principal author and key public face of the document, Bob Rae. The presentation is divided into four main parts: (1) the authors attempt to summarize the political philosophy of Bob Rae, the former Member…

This article provides a biographical sketch of the Russian composer and educator D. B. Kabalevsky, a discussion of his philosophy of music and education, and an overview of his music for children. Kabalevsky's philosophy of education and music encompassed a wide range of ideas that were developed over his life-time. Central to his philosophy is…

The strength of nationalism in East Asia has in recent years attracted a great deal of attention, both among the scholarly community and in the media. However, with the notable exception of Japan, little attention has been devoted to the subject of history education. As a result, the ways in which history education across the region both…