In this article the author uses Levi-Strauss' (1966) metaphor of Bricolage to examine how teachers, not policymakers, make sense of their "problems of practice" in three United States high schools. The article also examines how teachers address these problems of practice. It concludes by underscoring the disconnect between teachers' and…

This article is a follow up to an earlier publication that developed the rationale for using conversation as a metaphor to teach research writing. We presented this proposed teaching approach at several conferences, including WILU in May 2005 at Guelph, Canada. The discussions with participants in these presentations validated the tenets of the…

The aim of this study was to examine a form of sarcasm that has hardly been considered to date, sarcastic requests, at an earlier period of development than addressed in past developmental research. This article looked specifically at the role of intonation and context in sarcastic-request understanding by native French-speaking children ages 3 to…

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., '[un chat grincheux],'…

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of…

Teaching computer applications can be a very tedious and time-consuming task. The purpose of this article is to present a systematic approach to help guide teachers in teaching computer applications. The metaphor used in developing and organizing instructional content is a jigsaw puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle consists of small pieces that fit together…

In this article, the author compares the functions of a graduate adult education program and a greenhouse. A graduate adult education program is a place where, like in a greenhouse, exciting new hybrids can be developed--working with people outside the school of education, in different disciplines and beyond the university's walls, sharing what…

This article takes the "public intellectual" trope as a theoretical case study, and traces how it has been used in the elite public sphere of the contemporary United States since its coining in 1987. The analysis challenges the notion that the "public intellectual" is primarily about broad democratic publics. It documents instead how the trope is…

Teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates can be difficult under the best of circumstances. The densely figurative language can be very difficult to sift through for students unfamiliar with anything but naturalistic speech. When this is further compounded by the students' resistance to reading anything longer than several paragraphs, teachers find…

Experiential metaphor has been used in marriage and family therapy for many years. One example of metaphor application involves the use of ropes and felt board to identify and explore relationships in families. In this case, the mother of a son who was socially isolated is treated by a marriage and family therapy intern, using ropes and felt board…

This study examines the impact of different metaphors on the process of hypertext construction. Two groups of 20 college students with no experience in hypertext construction received introductory explanations on the text format "hypertext" based on either a book or a space metaphor. Then they had to construct hypertexts by linking prepared nodes…

Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an "ironic tone of voice". Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in…

This article argues for the adoption of complicated approaches by management educators. The argument rests on the position that if uncertainty and ambiguity are inherent to management, particularly in view of the profound changes that have occurred during recent years in the competitive environments of organizations, there is the need to develop…

The causes for which maternity has been invoked are as divergent as they are ubiquitous, yet the popularity of maternal politics among activists is not matched by an equally enthusiastic or unified assessment from scholars. On the contrary, scholars vigorously debate maternal appeals' strategic efficacy as well as their implications for gender…

This paper presents the metaphor of engineering and the social sciences located on either side of a chasm and connected by the bridge of information geography. Information geography is not an integral part of engineering and is a new field within geography, a social science discipline. The specialty of information geography is one of the newest in…