The first term of any preservice teacher education program can be challenging for students in many ways, and learning to read and write in a scholarly way is one potential challenge. This article chronicles events in my secondary education literacy course when I asked students to write in a descriptive, analytical, and reflective way about the…

This article explores the rhetorical work done by discourses of professional development in education. In particular it outlines the ways in which the rhetoric of technical expertise, competence and reflective practice are deployed to mobilise professional practices and identities in particular ways and position certain practices and dispositions…

Reflective practice, a popular item in current second-language teacher education and development programs, can help bridge the gap between a teacher's beliefs and classroom practices. This article outlines a case study, highlighting how one teacher of academic writing initiated the exploration of her teaching and how she used classroom…

Classrooms around the world are becoming more multilingual and teachers in all subject areas are faced with new challenges in enabling learners' academic language development without losing focus on content. These challenges require new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between language and content as well as new pedagogies that…

Looking for relevant material for the Adolescent Psychology course she teaches, the author's attention was drawn to a book by Thomas Cottle, "Mind Fields: Adolescent Consciousness in a Culture of Distraction" (2001). Robert Frost's quotation, "Grant me intention, purpose, and design--That's near enough for me to the Divine," in the frontispiece…

This paper considers the value of reflexive pedagogical approaches in the teaching of academic communication and writing. We focus on a course developed for pre-degree foundation students at a London higher education institution. Drawing on the students' learning journals, we examine their reflections of the approaches practised on the course.…