Current Norwegian curricular guidelines oblige schools to educate citizens with a critical perspective on society. From a discourse theoretical perspective, this obligation implies that various school subjects, and in particular social studies, offer discourses on social issues that allow for different points of view and critical evaluation.…

This article describes a self-study pursuant to a clash between a lecturer and a student concerning the teaching of literature in a politically fraught context. The learning group is composed of Arab and Jewish teachers at a college in northern Israel. The work read by the group expresses a Palestinian perspective. The incident, discussed with…

This article examines the comment culture that accompanies documentary films on YouTube as a site of (geo) political education. It considers how viewers try to teach each other about the proper "place" of critique in response to the global, national, and local rhetoric featured in one environmental documentary film. YouTube viewers use…

The English teaching profession, spurred on by media and federal politics, has tended to construct aesthetic reading and political reading within a dichotomous conceptual framework (Morgan, 1997; Devine, 2004; Donnelly, 2007). The article argues that this need not be so, and that the two apparently opposed modes of reading can be performed not…

Academic corruption is a commonplace matter about which all people are clearly aware. However, people often overlook many hidden or latent manifestations of academic corruption. This article discusses eight of these manifestations: indiscriminate use of the academic team spirit, the proliferation of "word games," deliberate attacks on…

Examines, rhetorically, the formal dynamics and internal action of an eighteenth-century political text by Edmund Burke, the "Letter to William Elliott, Esq." (1795). (SR)

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of its satellite regimes, Poland, among other nations, has been engaged in a process of wholesale national reinvention. An analysis of this reinvention is instructive for scholars of language because it is largely a rhetorical process. It is aimed at supplying a new set of collectively…

Analysis of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's philosophy and rhetoric during a particular campaign for social change will show that his strategies for social change, commonly referred to as "Satyagraha," are rooted in a unique rhetorical perspective. Gandhi repeatedly warned against the use of violent speech and acts, and he has prescribed…

Although for the 15 years preceding his election as President of the United States Ronald Reagan muted his anti-Soviet rhetoric in order to achieve political power, since his election he has returned to anti-Sovietism in an effort to redirect American foreign policy against the Soviets. At the same time, however, he employs a rhetorical strategy…

Examines Korean president Roh Tae-woo's 1988 Inaugural Address. Focuses on audience expectations on this occasion, which include the influence of Confucianism and of Western political ideas, recent Korean political history, and the speech as an inaugural delivered at the end of an unusual and challenging campaign. (SR)

The symbolic presence of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) has been and continues to be the pivot point in all summitry rhetoric between the American President and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. To examine some of the rhetorical choices made by Gorbachev to dramatize his vision of why Ronald Reagan refuses to…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the rhetoric of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; (2) the rhetorical strategies employed in the political speaking of George C. Wallace in the 1968 United States presidential…

The autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu" is a complicated text--the conditions of its production, the complexity of its subject matter, and the wide range of possible responses among North American readers create challenges for composition students and instructors. A week of taped interviews with Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Indian…

Discusses the ways in which feminist approaches in geography have developed over the last two decades. Critically assesses the notion of a specifically feminist method and discusses the implication of the deconstruction of "woman" for feminist research and politics. Includes a tabular comparison of conventional and feminist research…

This theoretical discussion explores pedagogical assumptions of political education in West Germany. Three major methodological orientations are discussed: the normative-ontological, empirical-analytical, and dialectical-historical. The author recounts the aims, methods, and basic presuppositions of each of these approaches. Topics discussed…