This paper reflects on two research projects undertaken a decade apart. The first, "Celebrating creativity collaboratively (CCC)," undertaken in 2009-10 (see Fitzgerald and Smith 2012), explored how a collaborative approach could inspire student teachers of English to become competent, confident teachers of creative writing. The second,…

In this article I examine the ways in which Black and Latina/o urban high school youth pressed me to reflexively examine my positionality and that of my research tools during a year-long ethnographic study documenting their communicative repertoires. I reflect on youth comments on my researcher tools, as well as myself, in order to wrestle with…

Within the UK Higher Education setting there is an emphasis on student satisfaction and experience surveys in combination with an increased interest in connecting teaching with research. As a result there is an unprecedented focus on engaging students on all levels within their university experience, from concerns related to governance, policy and…

Reflective practice has become a core component in higher education studies. In the health sciences, reflective tasks are required throughout the undergraduate programmes, yet many students struggle to find value in these tasks for their present and future professional practice. Benefits that can be derived from the process are undermined by this…

This collaborative project explores the affordances of a translation assignment in the context of a learner-centered pedagogy that places composition students' movement among languages and cultures as both a site for inquiry and subject of analysis. The translation assignment asks students to translate scholarly articles or culture stories from…

Educators can think of changes in the international literacy landscape as a powerful wave. In this report, the authors argue that given the changes affecting classrooms through information and communications technology, and increasing student diversity not only do they want to prepare for the wave, but they wish to harness its power. This…

In any language education program, there are both commonalities and divergences in the ways in which students negotiate and form their identities. While work on bilingual education has revealed important similarities that students come to share, fewer studies have focused on explaining variation. In this paper, we explore individual differences by…

This paper explores issues emerging from the question of how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in high-stakes online reflection in higher education. I examine in particular the notion of traces as both inscriptions and archives. Working online amplifies the destabilising and…

While much has been written about the transformative potential of adult education from the student perspective, little research has been done into the experiences of those who teach in such contexts. This paper draws on the reflections of three academics who work in an enabling program in regional Australia. We embarked on a process of critical…

As a new teacher educator of beginner teachers on the Graduate Teacher Programme in a large School of Education in a UK university, I have reflected on how I have been able to develop the effectiveness of modelling good professional practice to student-teachers. In this paper I will present ways in which I have made modelling more explicit, how…

University professional programs seek to develop students as reflective practitioners. The ability to critically reflect is often assumed to occur along the way. The explicit development of critical reflective skills among students is challenging. This study describes the utilization of online group discussion for critical reflection and provides…

Developing reflective teachers who will be committed to their professional mission and whose own development will represent a value is an important objective of the professional training of future teachers. This article deals with an evaluation of the module of instruction in teacher training that was directed at raising students' awareness of the…

Using the example of student-generated midterm exams produced during a university classroom exercise, this narrative account examines student-centered pedagogy from both the university faculty and student perspectives. The central question revolved around how to actively engage a community of diverse university students from different academic,…

In this paper it is argued that work on transformative learning has been predicated on assumptions about agency on the part of both teacher and student and suggests an idealised learning environment. While recognising the significance of transformational learning the paper explores what it describes as the shadow side of transformational work,…

Referring to the experiences of three Muslim refugee girls recently settled in Australia, this paper examines issues of schooling and empowerment. The paper draws on teacher and student interview data from a study that investigated inclusive approaches to addressing issues of cultural diversity in a secondary state high school in Queensland. The…