In interdisciplinary education, metaphors often provide the epistemological clarity that is lacking in our definitions and theories of interdisciplinarity. The problem is that ineffective and unsubstantiated metaphors proliferate. We lack a root metaphor or shared world view of interdisciplinarity. Is it time that we move away from thinking in…

Post-structuralism, a theory of signs for written texts, would seem an obvious resource for a field like Composition Studies that has "writing" at its center. Yet the post-structuralist turn in Composition Studies is hamstrung by the deep division between camps in the field that are committed to political critique on the one hand or to…

Since the emergence of postmodern social theory, history has been haunted by predictions of its imminent end. Postmodernism has been accused of making historical research and writing untenable, encouraging the proliferation of revisionist histories, providing fertile ground for historical denial, and promoting the adoption of a mournful view of…

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in…

This essay contributes to the construction of a critically informed toolbox of diverse concepts for education policy analysis. Focusing on the context(s) of practice of the policy cycle, the article outlines an interpretative framework to grasp policy enactment across different localities, the influences bearing upon those enactments as well as…

This article presents the author's critique on Paul G. Woodford's positions with regard to music education and the notion of liberal democracy. The author seeks to broaden the contextual/historical scholarship around John Dewey and makes it clear that liberalism is a contested concept, as is democracy. He calls for contemporary responses to…

This important, timely, and thought-provoking reader is a collection of original chapters by authors from five different countries, each of whom explores a facet of transformative leadership. Transformative leadership is fundamentally a critical approach to leadership that goes well beyond the tenets of most current leadership theories to focus on…

Postmodernism has many inferences that can be applied to the theory and practice of higher educational administration. Today, in higher education administrators are continuously focused on strategies that will ensure the future of minority educational institutions. As a result postmodernism is an important factor in the future of higher…

In its "adolescent" phase of development, comparative education engaged with a wide variety of social theories. The next period of comparative education scholarship is likely to be characterized by a focus on global trends, rigorous blending of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and commitment to pursuing more general insights about how…

This article is intended to aggressively stimulate provocative ideas about educational practices. In a time when the status quo is easier and more cost effective to maintain in public schools, Dr. Fenwick English attacks these views with a postmodern challenge. It is time for school leaders to consider more than one solution to the problems they…

Employing Calvin O. Schrag's response to postmodernismtransversal rationality engaged through praxial critiquethe constructive side of postmodern theories can be highlighted in higher education while at the same time answering the pundits who see little to no constructive side to postmodern theories. Using praxial critique through media literacy…

Examines transitions from critical to postcritical and postmodern to premodern that underlie Philip Wexler's writing on social and educational theory, discussing critical social psychology and examining social and spiritual transformation in the postmodern world. For Wexler's envisioned transformation to occur, it must be accompanied by ongoing…

This paper explores the impact of John Dewey on the field of educational psychology. Dewey raised issues and ideas, such as the role of context and the reapproximation of knowledge, that would come to haunt education and psychology for the next century. And yet soon after the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey abandoned psychology and redefined…

Addresses the assumption that ritual performances are not as important in modern, secular, bureaucratic schools as they were in communal, sacred, tribal societies, reviving a concept forged in structuralism and redefining it as a performative text, thus taking advantage of certain poststructural insights while maintaining much of the power of its…

Examines the concept of popular culture in social and educational theory in the context of developing nations, particularly Latin America. Using a poststructuralist literary theory, the article elaborates a notion of the popular that offers a new conceptualization by incorporating a sense of competing identities and ideologies that form it. (SM)