Teacher researchers in a Professional Development School context identify two important shifts in traditional school cultures in order for teacher inquiry to thrive as a means for teacher development: a shift to community and a shift to uncertainty. PDS teachers in this study spoke about their need for supportive learning communities where they…

One of the current education "buzz phrases" speaks to the creation of professional learning communities to build the capacity of staff. Learning organizations are described as "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where…

The previous report in this series discussed how collaborative tools can be used in the development of formal and non-formal online communities. The current report describes the specific development of an online community advocacy group.

Distributed leadership in schools is not exclusive to professional learning communities; it is distributed in all schools, for good purposes and for bad, by design and by emergence. In this article, we describe a normative view of distributed leadership that tends to be a leadership of advocacy, and we offer a descriptive perspective that argues…

Research supports the need for schools to operate as professional learning communities fueled by a supportive accurate understanding of collaborative relationships among school stakeholders. These relationships are necessary to build trust and foster discourse focused on improved teaching and learning practices and increased student achievement.…

This article presents a two-round discussion that centered around the question: "How well has UNESCO framed its own proposed role in meeting Education for All objectives as well as the roles of other UN organizations, national governments, and civil society actors?" The participants reviewed the most recent draft of UNESCO's "Global Action Plan"…

At Syracuse University (New York), Writing 205 offers students an introduction to the principles of rhetoric and the concept of disciplinary discourse. The study of landscape and place serves as a conduit for students to explore design, intention, and audience--a rhetoric of place--in order to develop a comprehension which is then easily…

This paper describes a disruptive model of interpretation which explores positions in discursive practices embedded in visual culture as a means of understanding self and difference. The model understands interpretation as a Foucauldian technique of the self, and its use may give art teachers and students strategies for understanding the social…

Through reading and reflecting on the words of Atwell, Rief, Moffett, and Graves, Maltese began to think like a teacher-researcher, and questioned her writing workshop practices. Once she began to consider audience as a motivating factor, writing became more meaningful for her students, encompassing a wide range of possibilities. Working from a…

Today, academic assistance efforts are frequently geared to all students, not just the underprepared, with study skills offered in various formats. In this article, the authors describe a learning community model with the theme, "Strategic Thinking and Learning" (STL). Results of data analysis indicate that participants of the STL…

One of the key means by which knowledge is disseminated in the academic discourse community is the spoken presentation of papers at an academic conference. In contrast to the written research article, the spoken presentation remains relatively under-researched from a linguistic perspective, limiting the knowledge available for explicating this…

In death-averse American society, the field of thanatology is often socially and academically isolating. The purpose of this article is to describe the experiences of a group of death scholars and share insights gained as members of an interdisciplinary team. They discuss the ways in which they have created a special "safe" space for death study…

Foucault's notion of "regimes of truth" (MacNaughton 2005, 30) provides an understanding of how some discourses operate and network together to reinforce a particular powerful view of the world. These can be in oral or written forms. Early childhood education practices are drawn on the discourse of a document developed by the National Association…

It is often assumed that online collaborative learning is inclusive of diversity. In this exploratory paper, I challenge this notion by developing a theory which proposes that inclusion occurs through congruence between learners' social identities and the identities implicitly supported through the interactions in a particular community. To build…

Intergroup dialogue (IGD) is an educational endeavor that brings together students from two or more social identity groups to build relationships across cultural and power differences, to raise consciousness of inequalities, to explore the similarities and differences in experiences across identity groups, and to strengthen individual and…