A myriad of personal and contextual factors are important in understanding how preservice teachers learn to teach and why they adopt or reject certain teaching practices. Activity theory was used a framework in understand preservice teachers' experiences teaching writing during a field experience at a juvenile detention facility. The purposes of…

The construct of time influences student learning in and out of school and consequently pervades educational discourse. Yet the integration of information and communication technologies into contemporary society is changing how people perceive and experience time. Traditional theoretical and methodological approaches to time research no longer…

In this article, the author tries to piece together the context in which she wrote "Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis" (Gavey, 1989). The article grew out of her attempts to find a different way of doing psychology, after 8 or 9 years of studying and wrestling with the discipline. It is partly a personal story, but also a story…

Science educators are confronted with the challenge to accommodate in their classes an increasing cultural and linguistic diversity that results from globalization. Challenged by the call to work towards valuing and keeping this diversity in the face of the canonical nature of school science discourse, we propose a new way of thinking about and…

Autobiographical reasoning is closely related to the development of normative ideas about life as measured by the cultural life script. The acquisition of a life script is an important prerequisite for autobiographical reasoning because children learn through the life script which events are expected to go into their life story, and when to expect…

Many teacher educators attempt to prompt teacher candidates, who are usually majority white, to examine themselves as culturally and historically located beings in order to prepare for multicultural and anti-racist teaching. But with white teacher candidates in colonialist societies, this work is difficult. Family history stories that white…

Assessment has become an important topic of debate and even reform in many Western countries. It is equally important in other regions of the world, although less subject to reform. Yet discussions of assessment across cultural boundaries are not frequent and in a globalizing world this can be problematic. The purposes of this article, therefore,…

Sociocultural theory is increasingly popular as a paradigm for research in education. A recent member in this family of theories is introduced--cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)--that shows much promise to complement and invigorate the field of educational change, a large, multi-faceted, and persistent problematic. In particular,…

The Protestant Reformation swept across Central Europe in the early-sixteenth century, leaving cities divided into Evangelical and Catholic camps as some instituted reforms and others remained loyal to the Roman Church. In offering a new explanation of the Reformation, we develop a theory that identifies ideologically mobilized students as bridge…

Since its inception at the turn of the last century, adult education English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction in the United States has been entwined with immigration processes and ideas of the nation. In spite of current uncertainty about the overhauling of federal immigration policy, increasingly anti-immigrant laws in states such as…

In this article, we have examined how historical events shape the research process, even when research is carefully planned and rigorously executed. Through an examination of our experiences conducting international data collection during a three-year SSHRC funded period in which the War on Terrorism and the War in Iraq began, we suggest that…