Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of community of practice in sustaining teachers' participation in a blended (face-to-face and online) professional development course. Design/methodology/approach: A longitudinal multiple-case study methodology was used in researching groups of five teachers in Australia and four teachers…

This article focuses on supervising professors' and master's degree students' understanding and experiences of supervision practices in a Norwegian university, with focus on differences in text cultures and text norms between and within three academic disciplines. The interview study shows that each discipline is a heterogeneous discourse…

A study explored some of the ways that the members of a medical educational institution make sense out of the radical pedagogical innovation taking place in their school. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with members at "MWCOM" (a pseudonym), then data were analyzed according to three primary themes which revolve around how…

This article explores a reciprocal relationship between leadership capacity and collective efficacy in a pre-K-8 school in the Southern United States that continually advances as a professional learning community. Survey data from this mixed methodology study showed significant positive correlations among subgroup scales measuring leadership…

Schools are places where teachers evaluate students and where teachers alike are immersed in an ongoing evaluative discourse. Obligatory participants in this discourse throughout the length of their schooling, students internalize, reconstruct, and reproduce school's evaluative impulse. A study traced four tenth-grade students' descriptions,…

This article offers information about a district's school improvement efforts to reculture as a professional learning community, which we believe exemplifies the school and district levels of Fullan's (2004b, 2005) tri-level model. We use Fullan's eight elements of sustainability to organize the data gathered in interviews with school and district…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

This article reports on doctoral research which explored the meaning and role of information literacy among a specific group of workers--firefighters. An alternative concept of information literacy and a broader definition of information literate people are introduced. The article suggests that librarians are currently bound by an educational…

The study explores students' use of language in the process of making sense of genetics concepts. It aims to analyze primary and secondary discourses, and examine the relationship between social practices and discourses. Sixth-grade students were interviewed before and during four weeks instruction on genetics. General trends were detected…

A study examined how one group of marginalized women, the incarcerated, construct their sense of self. Using the notion of nonunitary subjectivity to analyze life history narratives, the study demonstrated how they create and sustain thematic coherence in their sense of self and how they manage contradiction, primarily through constructing a split…

This paper examines the concepts of discourse community and writing apprenticeship in the context of undergraduate education students' writing. Drawing on an integrated research methodology using marker feedback on student assignments and interview data, the paper addresses to what extent the concepts of discourse community and apprenticeship can…

This research aims to build upon current research in the area of teaching and learning at tertiary level and explore the nature of learning communities in tertiary science and engineering. This study uses a sociocultural approach to address the following question: "What are teachers' and learners' perceptions of the nature of the learning…

This article presented a rationale for building partnerships into professional doctoral programs in educational leadership and a description of Saint Louis University's use of partnerships in its redesigned Ed.D. program. Although the program has been implemented, it continues to be a work in progress because of the underlying assumption that the…

School-based professional development has been promoted by the government in England through its Continuing Professional Development Strategy (DfEE, 2001), however, the context and culture of the school in which the learning takes place is highly influential. Particularly important in teachers' professional development within secondary education…