In this essay, Jeff Duncan-Andrade explores the concept of hope, which was central to the Obama campaign, as essential for nurturing urban youth. He first identifies three forms of "false hope"--hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred--pervasive in and peddled by many urban schools. Discussion of these false hopes then gives way to…

This article describes a metaphorical imaging activity used in World Educational Links (WEL), a graduate teacher certification program, to help future social justice educators explore their relationship with society and their sense of interconnectedness and empowerment to effect change. The author investigates possibilities inherent in the…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of how children and adults kinesthetically recontextualize standardized, official health messages into personally meaningful, context-specific health knowledge. The in-depth interview research uses grounded theory methodology to analyze transcripts and a sociology of childhood framework to…

This paper deals with the features and design of explanations in public physics lectures. It presents the findings from a comparative study of three exemplary public physics lectures, given by practicing physicists who are acknowledged as excellent public lecturers. The study uses three different perspectives: the lecture, the lecturer, and the…

How can teachers teach digital citizenship when the digital landscape is changing so rapidly? How can teachers teach proper online social interactions when the students are outside their classroom and thus outside their control? Will encouraging students to engage in global collaborative environments land teachers in hot water? These are the…

Drawing upon five years of experience with an interdisciplinary initiative, colleagues in biology, literary studies, and physics offer a framework by which to understand the nature and value of interdisciplinary work. Effective interdisciplinary exchange depends on a dynamic and mutual interplay that challenges normally unexamined disciplinary…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

In conventional drama, circularity is a positive thing, a return to the beginning, a symbol of the cyclical, generative nature of life. Part of John Guare's intent in his post-Absurdist play, "The House of Blue Leaves," is to help establish a new theatrical aesthetic by violating theatrical convention. For Guare, circularity is not a…

A tongue-in-check response claimed to be from the prime minister of England to Thomas Jefferson regarding the "Declaration of Independence." Claims that the declaration fails to meet recently adopted specifications for proposals to the Crown and lacks a line-item budget, citations from recent literature, and measurable goals. (MLF)

Using Sfard's distinction between acquisition and participation metaphors as an organizing principle, the twelve school-based projects within the TLRP programme were overwhelmingly judged by the Learning Outcomes Thematic Group as belonging to the acquisition metaphor. In essence, this article advances the initial analyses in two directions: (1)…

As public policies increasingly hold schools responsible for preventing school failure, experiences of other organizations that must operate with high reliability may be helpful. This article builds on previous studies of high reliability organizations to inquire how their strategies might inform efforts to improve reliability in loosely coupled…

Grounded in a communication in the disciplines (CID) theoretical framework, this study was the first phase of a multiphased project exploring oral genres in the academic discipline of design. The purpose of this study was to provide a baseline understanding of how faculty perceive and assign meaning to the oral genres that students performed in…

This paper, part of an ongoing study on the analysis of hyperboles in a British TV series, reports findings drawing upon a 90,000 word corpus. The findings are compared to the ones from CANCODE (McCarthy and Carter 2004), a five-million word corpus of spontaneous speech, in order to identify similarities between the two. The analysis showed that…

This article is a report on a study of the use of heuristics, shortcuts, and rules of thumb by middle-line managers in institutions of higher education in the United States and the United Kingdom. Using a nonprobability convenience sample, the coinvestigators interviewed 13 middle-line managers over 5 months from eight institutions. The results…