The authors of this essay discuss the impact of corpus collection and analysis on the writing program at The City College of New York, CUNY, the digital literacies encouraged by the corpus collection process, and how corpus studies can be used to support genre awareness and build communities of practice in basic writing classrooms and among…

This article seeks to promote the generation of a discourse of the postmodern community work professional. A shared discourse will lead, we propose to shared capital. We argue that there is a tension between the modern and postmodern for those of us engaged in the profession of community learning and development (CL&D). We need to value…

The idea of transformative and troublesome "threshold concepts" has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the "concept of thresholds" in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted…

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have been growing in popularity with educational researchers, instructors, and learners in online environments. Online discussions are as important in MOOCs as in other online courses. Online discussions that occur in MOOCs are influenced by additional factors resulting from their volatile and voluntary…

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a…

Scientists' science differs remarkably from school science. In order to be taught to students, science is recontextualized from scientific research communities to science classrooms. This paper examines scientific discourse in scientific research communities, and discusses its transformation from an internally-persuasive and authoritative…

In this article we suggest that online environments can function as alternate "organizations" for pre-service and beginning teachers who may find themselves struggling in schools. Building on prior work on framing and reframing in organizations and schools, the authors present a new frame of analysis specifically geared for web-based…

This chapter is framed by the three questions related to learning in Practice Theory posed by Johannes Wagner (2008): (1) What is learned?; (2) Who is learning?; and (3) Who is participating in the learning? These questions are addressed in two learning theories: Language Socialization and Situated Learning theory. In Language Socialization, the…

Drawing on material collected amongst Danish and Australian humanities and social science academics, the article illustrates and problematises a particular and recurring discursive practice amongst academics: "the conduct of concern". Conceptualising the conduct of concern as an exclusionary and de-legitimising discursive practice, the…

At the national level, debate about school reform typically has been characterized by clashing paradigms offering unicausal explanations and universal prescriptions. At the street level, where parents and practitioners wrestle on a day-to-day basis with questions of what to do, the terms of discussion more typically are concrete, rooted in local…

High school teacher James C. Mayer explains how a student-run symposium can promote "risk-taking and participation" and help students practice effective persuasion skills before demonstrating them in writing. The symposium places students in roles that encourage responsibility and ownership for discussion and learning, shifting the classroom…

A case study of an adolescent girl provides a framework to understand what factors contribute to the development of a strong writer within an instant messaging world. The study shows instant messaging is one of a larger repertoire of practices. Facility in school-based writing was developed through a school culture that supported writing in the…

"The Routledge Applied Linguistics Reader" is an essential collection of readings for students of Applied Linguistics. Divided into five sections: Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Identity and Power and Language Use in Professional Contexts, the "Reader" takes a broad…

With an eye towards a potential scientific ethics curriculum, this paper examines four contrasting discourses regarding the ethics of using human subjects in science. The first two represent official statements regarding ethics. These include the U.S.'s National Science Education Standards, that identify ethics with a professional code, and the…

As its title suggests, this is an account of "the Second E-Forum on Competency-based Approaches" and summarises the opinions and experiences expressed by the participants. The forum was based on a discussion paper prepared by the Canadian Observatory of Educational Reforms and a series of questions raised by Philippe Jonnaert were used to…