Our ways of living together, communicating, and learning shape social life and our responses to problems such as economic injustice, racism, or climate change. That insight led John Dewey to identify democracy and its engine, democratic education, as the best means for assembling the knowledge necessary to address complex challenges and to ensure…

This paper explores the central metaphors of curriculum as 'text' and 'discourse' that are adopted as the organizing metaphors for William Pinar's 2006 book "Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses." Using the works of Michel Foucault, the paper explores relationships…

This literature review examined approximately 10000 titles in five representative journals in education. It is conducted at two levels. Section A identified the preferred terms and metaphors to describe teachers at different expertise levels. Results indicated a great inconsistency in terms of terminology as well as definition of the same terms or…

It is generally difficult to define abstract concepts for students. However, perceptions related to abstract concepts or facts can be revealed using metaphors because people frequently express their emotions, ideas and perceptions by means of metaphors. Through metaphors, students can express what they want to say more effectively with fewer…

Platonic "paideia" is a mainstream concept in traditional philosophy and humanistic circles generally. It is closely connected with social progress brought about by the dynamics of enlightenment and self-fulfillment, symbolized by the allegory of the cave. The main contention of this paper is that the philosophical grammar of this simile…

The article analyses the term discourse and discourse analysis with reference to Foucault and other critics. Foucault used the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating power, and emphasizing the construction of current truths. The article argues that discourse analysis, as employed by Foucault, concentrated on analysing power…

School history textbooks provide an important source of information for learners of history. Textbook narratives of a nation's past often present a limited frame of reference, which impedes the aim of teaching history from multiple perspectives. This article examines the representation of the Dutch Revolt in two Dutch and two Flemish history…

Gert Biesta astutely criticizes the politics of learning through which learning has been popularized and exalted. He offers a valuable critical diagnostics of this politics, but, I argue, his conclusions about 'going beyond learning' incriminate learning wholesale. Through a close reading of one of Biesta's related articles, I show that he…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

This study aims to identify environmental perceptions of primary school fourth grade students. The population of this study, which is designed as a descriptive survey model, consists of 97 male and 142 female 239 fourth grade students who are attending public primary schools in Kocaeli Province in the second term of 2018-2019 academic year. Data…

This paper reviews how the construct of oral fluency in a second language (L2) has been defined and researched over the last twenty-five years. The emerging picture is somewhat kaleidoscopic, as domains of cognitive, social, individual and linguistic influences on L2 speech have been opened up for study. L2 fluency research presents a wealth of…

This study aimed to determine the children's skills of comprehending similes. The participants of the research consisted of 120 children that were aged 5-6 and enrolled in preschool education institutions. The data were collected with a 16-item success test. The items in the test were orally administered to the participants during the interviews.…

Fable-based learning, folklore-based learning, and narrative pedagogy are terms used to represent the use of storytelling for learning complex topics. These learning tools build on narrative theory via our understanding of the role of metaphor and metaphorical reasoning in the learning process. Narrative theory postulates that humans are natural…

In this study, 227 pre-service teachers majoring in special education at two normal universities in eastern China were studied using a questionnaire survey. The survey sought to understand pre-service teachers' beliefs about students and teachers' role in special education, using a metaphor approach. The results are as follows: First, in terms of…

Inequitable access to learning opportunities has intersectional consequences for Black students in general and gifted education. Equally important, "all" students (regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic class, and grade-level), more often than not, lack invaluable opportunities to learn about the innumerable contributions…