The educability of personal qualities has garnered attention for its potential to raise student achievement. This investigation asks how one such quality--grit--has become a commonsensical way to think about differences among students. As a history of the present, grit is approached as a cultural thesis that links individualism to narratives of…

Eleven teachers and 254 urban middle-school students comprised the sample of this study examining the social and moral development outcomes of the integration of social cognitive domain theory within regular classroom instruction. Participating teachers were trained to construct and implement history lessons that stimulated students' moral…

In this report, we argue that some of the most productive and edifying kinds of literature discussions among certain ages/grade levels may be best understood as "mangles of practice" (Pickering, 1995). Mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing…