This article illustrates how global corporate education initiatives, though profit-motivated, sometimes function both as an instrument of foreign policy and as a manifestation of a broader imperial project. According to neoconservative scholars, as well as their critics, the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the implementation of pre-made…

This article describes the author's concerns, as a brand new teacher, about competence and failure which manifested themselves in a focus on the body. It discusses the effects of diversity among teachers and students. While the author's fears corresponded to the situation, given that she would be subject to the specific and often intense gaze of…

This essay reexamines pedagogical practice and its normative assessment in the American university system by employing an approach derived from Michel Foucault's knowledge/power nexus. While a systematically applied curriculum such as Gerald Graff's "teaching the conflicts" has the potential to democratize higher education, it may be ineffective…

In her well known keynote address at the Responsibilities for Literacies Conference, Mary Louise Pratt defined "contact zones" as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power." Pratt's view of a contact zone hints at the fact, but does not make explicit, that…

In this article, the author discusses various conceptions about the teacher's body. He states that the teacher's body is not just a pile of organs and meat in a skin corset. As part of the performance metaphor--commonly read as part of education-as-spectacle--it translates institutional systems and institutional ideas into a social order, and at…

The prevalence of institutional racism in the United States presents an urgent and complicated challenge. Little agreement exists among scholars regarding the existence and implications of racism, or the position educators might take in addressing it. In the context of public and scholarly retreats from the significance of and responsibility for…

In 1996, Stuart Hall gave a famous lecture entitled "Race: The Floating Signifier." In that lecture, Hall argued against an ontology of race that linked racial identification to any other human characteristic. Undertaking a broad survey of the history of the concept of race, Hall highlighted how the meaning of the signifiers of racial identity…

Serious consideration of disability in the major social theories is a relatively new development. Feminism, critical race, and queer studies have rigorously grappled with issues of embodiment and social justice. These perspectives greatly enhance pedagogy and learning. However, the embodied experience of disability has not been a traditional topic…

In this article, the author profiles Jacques Derrida, whose teaching activity made an invaluable and indelible contribution to the intellectual life of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The question of pedagogy is central for Derrida, not only in terms of teaching people to read and write differently, but as a means for appreciating the…

Feminist historians have argued that the body needs to be historicized, noting that the body, rather than simply a static, biological, or material reality, is a site of inscription and intervention for notions of nation, race, class, sexuality, ability, and gender within particular historical contexts. Some feminist scholars have made particular…

Despite official government srt (in various jurisdictions around the world) for providing students with opportunities to construct their own knowledge within the context of formal schooling, school science systems continue to place greatest priority on teaching and learning of "products" of science (e.g., laws and theories), while compromising…

This paper describes a type of motivation for studying that has not been accorded sufficient psychological consideration--namely, motivation based on belief in the worthiness of the subject matter. This sort of motivation is distinguished from both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It is exemplified by the motivation for studying at the Yeshiva,…

The paper argues that 100 years of empirical research into teaching has failed to provide a usable account of best practice. This is partly because of conceptual and other logical problems that cannot in practice be resolved, as has been argued before. However, it is further argued that the real reason that no useful rules of good teaching can be…

Participation has become very popular as a new strategy and approach in research, in policy, in private and public affairs. As an alternative to top-down approaches participation promises to empower people, to acknowledge and to build competence and (local) knowledge, to recognise and to be responsive to people's different and differentiated needs…

This study examined 3 graduate-level online courses that utilized problem-based learning (PBL), considering each course as a case. Beyond describing how PBL was implemented in each case, this study identified what worked (strengths) and did not work (weaknesses) in the PBL and explored how the PBL could be improved (improvements) by collecting…