The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) aimed to take a socially critical and transformative approach to ESD through all forms of education. Unfortunately, it mainly focused on formal education and overlooked the informal education that is embedded in the community development process of tackling unsustainable problems…

Courses: Persuasion; Persuasive Speaking. Objectives: Students will demonstrate the ability to apply persuasive concepts in constructing persuasive messages creatively, and students will present and analyze their persuasive messages.

Abstract of a thesis is the brief and accurate representation of the thesis, with the important function of persuading readers to read on the thesis. So how the writer constructs the abstract and wins readers' recognition is our main focus. On the basis of Burke's Identification Theory, this paper analyzed 10 abstracts from "Nature" from…

The full text of the speech given by President Barack Hussein Obama in Chicago after he won a second term in office as US President has been broken into its minimal communicative speech acts. This strategy has been used to analyse and understand how the whole speech is consistent with the cooperative maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation and…

Poetry is about the experience of meaning as well as the meaning of experience. To read a poem is to feel one's way into the inner workings of its language, rather than to peer through that speech to an extractable truth. Most students of literature today have difficulty in grasping the performative or rhetorical dimensions of the texts with which…

This essay takes a look at what I call anti-progressivism in education or, more particularly, criticism of progressive education that was so vocal and visceral that it earns a label, at least initially, of anti-progressivism. After a brief introduction discussing the terms in general, I look at three instances of anti-progressivism in the 1950s…

The current societal pressures regarding religious liberty and institutional sustainability for Christian higher education in America call for rhetorical leadership from presidents of Christian colleges and universities. This study provides a biblically rooted and theoretically sound, multifaceted approach using sociorhetorical criticism and…

Over the last couple of years, White nationalist groups have been at the forefront of American political life, especially with the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The historical roots of White nationalist movements run deep in the United States and are most closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In this article the authors explore…

The relationship between health (H) and physical education (PE) has long been the subject of debate. Recently, however, the obesity crisis has raised this relationship to a new level of attention. At the risk of simplifying things, there are two "positions" that seem to characterize the discourse regarding this new relationship. One…

Responding to the increasing sophistication in the arts of deception in the public realm, the authors turn to Goodlad's ideal of democratic citizenship nurtured through human conversation in the classroom and development of critical skills to evaluate the accuracy of arguments.

In "We Need to Teach for Ethical Conduct," Dr. Robert Sternberg argued that students act unethically because they are unable to transfer principles of ethics into practice. While I agree that this is partially the case, it is also the case that unethical behavior is a result of the prevailing educational-philosophy: radical…

The ability to understand a speaker's or author's worldview better, whether an openly espoused ideology or one veiled and deeply hidden, should help students hone their critical thinking skills. This article describes an activity which attempts to do just that by applying new data visualization methods to a rhetorical artifact and examining the…

The "cis"-regulatory hypothesis is one of the most important claims of evolutionary developmental biology. In this paper I examine the theoretical argument for "cis"-regulatory evolution and its role within evolutionary theorizing. I show that, although the argument has some weaknesses, it acts as a useful example for the importance of current…

In light of the current mainstream contention that the United States has entered a post-racial epoch with the election of the first African American president, this work posits that post-racial rhetoric obfuscates the continued racialized experiences of Black families regardless of class status.

When directed to ignore evidence of a witness's previous bad character because of a violation of the rules of evidence, are jurors' beliefs still affected? The intuition is that they will be because in everyday argumentation, fallacies, like the ad hominem, are effective argumentative strategies. An ad hominem argument (against the person)…