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Full-Text Articles in Education

Family Portraits: Past And Present Representations Of Parents In Special Education Text Books, Dianne L. Ferguson, Philip M. Ferguson, Joanne Kim, Corrine Li Jun 2015

Family Portraits: Past And Present Representations Of Parents In Special Education Text Books, Dianne L. Ferguson, Philip M. Ferguson, Joanne Kim, Corrine Li

Philip M. Ferguson

This paper analyses the descriptions of families of children with disabilities as contained in introductory special education texts over the last 50 years. These text books are typically used in pre-service teacher education courses as surveys of the education of ‘exceptional children’. The textbooks reflect the mainstream professional assumptions of the era about topics such as disability, special education, inclusion, and family/school linkages. However, they also shape the assumptions of the next generation of educators about these same topics. The paper summarises the results of a qualitative document analysis of a sample of these textbooks from two different eras. The …


Truth, Rhetoric, And Critical Thinking, Lajos L. Brons Oct 2013

Truth, Rhetoric, And Critical Thinking, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

Despite the extraordinary amount of attention critical thinking has received in the last few decades, the teaching and fostering of critical thinking in higher education is largely failing, and critical thinking has become an empty buzzword. However, given its importance as an aim of education, it needs to be “refilled”, but that is possible only after identifying the causes of the current failure, i.e. the obstacles to fostering critical thinking. Three such obstacles are identified in this paper, two actual and one hypothetical: (1) the lack of clarity and agreement about what critical thinking is, (2) current teaching practice, and …


The Intersection Of Judicial Attitudes And Litigant Selection Theories: Explaining U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making, Jeff L. Yates, Elizabeth Coggins Jan 2009

The Intersection Of Judicial Attitudes And Litigant Selection Theories: Explaining U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making, Jeff L. Yates, Elizabeth Coggins

Jeff L Yates

Two prominent theories of legal decision making provide seemingly contradictory explanations for judicial outcomes. In political science, the Attitudinal Model suggests that judicial outcomes are driven by judges' sincere policy preferences -- judges bring their ideological inclinations to the decision making process and their case outcome choices largely reflect these policy preferences. In contrast, in the law and economics literature, Priest and Klein's well-known Selection Hypothesis posits that court outcomes are largely driven by the litigants' strategic choices in the selection of cases for formal dispute or adjudication -- forward thinking litigants settle cases where potential judicial outcomes are readily …


Populism, Democracy And Social Citizenship: Discourses On ‘Illegal Migration’ Or Beyond The ‘Fortress’ Versus ‘Cosmopolitanism’ Debate, Nicos Trimikliniotis Dec 2006

Populism, Democracy And Social Citizenship: Discourses On ‘Illegal Migration’ Or Beyond The ‘Fortress’ Versus ‘Cosmopolitanism’ Debate, Nicos Trimikliniotis

Nicos Trimikliniotis

This paper aims to connect articulations of ‘racism’ and ‘populism’ within discursive uses of ‘illegal immigration’ in the context of European-wide processes, which frame migrants as the ‘other’: such view have in fact become hegemonic over the recent years. The aim is to connect discourses of ‘illegal’ immigration to social phenomena, such as racist populism in democratic process and debates regarding social citizenship. The examination of the construction processes of exclusionary citizenship, both at European and at national level, via the discourses of undocumented migrant labour is a process that tends to racialise liberal democracy across Europe. Moreover, this process …


Icons As Ideology: A Media Construction, Judith (Judie) Cross Dec 2005

Icons As Ideology: A Media Construction, Judith (Judie) Cross

Judith (Judie) L Cross

Despite mass-produce images being predominantly two dimensional, readers usually perceive them three dimensionally. The direction, position and movement of visual elements, such as gaze, within image texts cue this perception, signifying particular relations within space-time. Readers often interpret these relations subconsciously, or at least without serious reflection on how particular image relations affect modality and meaning. Kress and van Leeuwen (1990, 1996) have initiated many readers of images into the significance of four directions in physical space, but the following paper focuses on the significance of the other two: background/foreground or in/out. I analyse a specific genre of visual text, …


Behind The Rhetoric, Rowan Cahill Dec 2000

Behind The Rhetoric, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

A contemporary critical account of changes taking place in the NSW state education system in the late 1990s-2001 under the leadership of Dr. Ken Boston, Director-General of Education and Training in NSW. The author argues that Boston's 'devolution' rhetoric masks a determined conservative and Rightist push to politically and ideologically centralise the education system and in the process emasculate teacher initiative, imagination, and enterprise.