This article addresses the relationship among theories related to classroom language and literacy events by first examining the researcher's theoretical perspective on discourse and sociocultural theories of learning development. The analytical heuristic for a microethnographic approach using a variety of theoretical tools is discussed and…

Background/Context: For decades, teacher educators and professional developers have been using video recordings of actual classroom practice to help teachers reflect on their teaching (e.g., van Es & Sherin, 2002, 2008) and to help preservice teachers come into contact with practice (Lampert & Ball, 1998). However, the use of video records of…

This dissertation examines the lived experiences of white middle school teachers in predominantly white rural communities as they discuss race and race issues with students. Using methods of descriptive phenomenology, interviews were conducted with teachers to explore what it was like for them to talk about race in classrooms comprised of only…

As more courses in teacher education are offered online, it is imperative that we thoughtfully consider how we structure learning activities. This study turned a critical gaze on a common element of online courses--asynchronous discussion. The authors compared two models of discursive interaction--discussion boards versus blogs--to better…

Mathematics teacher educators are confronted with numerous challenges and complexities as they work to inspire prospective teachers to embrace inquiry-based pedagogies. The research study described in this paper asks what a teacher educator and faculty advisor can learn from prospective secondary mathematics teachers as they construct (and are…

This paper reports on a year-long research study: four teachers of English, their Year 8 (13-14 year old) classes (110 students) in urban, secondary schools and a university teacher educator investigated the contexts for students to develop dialogic, exploratory talk in small groups. Assuming a Vygotskyan perspective, the study adapted a pedagogic…

Bilingual programmes in which an L2 is used as the medium of instruction are becoming popular in different parts of the world, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is one variant of such programmes. Recent research on CLIL has gradually shifted from product-oriented (i.e. evaluating the effectiveness of CLIL in terms of language and…

This study investigated the effects that critical literacy instruction had on comprehension in a seventh grade reading class. Numerous studies have examined critical literacy instruction in the classroom, as well as effective methods of comprehension instruction; however, few studies have combined these two lines of inquiry. Therefore, the purpose…

This group of commentaries on teaching human rights in Turkey includes: (1) Reflection on Turkish Human Rights Lesson from Turkey (Alper Kesten)--A lesson on human rights in Turkey is analyzed for its representativity and methodology within the Turkish teaching culture from the viewpoint of a Turkish researcher; (2) Commentary on a Turkish Lesson…

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in distance learning in higher education. Given this, it is extremely important to understand faculty attitudes about distance education, not only because they can vary widely, but also because it is the faculty, through their design and implementation of online courses, that will shape the…

During the last decade, researchers of foreign language pedagogy have become increasingly interested in the "language-literature divide" (Donato and Brooks 2004). The purpose of the current study is to contribute to this growing body of research by investigating the extent to which whole class discussions in three third-year…

This quasi-experimental, mixed methods study examined the transfer of a well-established pedagogical strategy, Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL), to an online workshop environment (cPLTL) in a general chemistry course at a research university in the Midwest. The null hypothesis guiding the study was that no substantive differences would emerge between…

This paper examines whether the Swedish steering documents for English-language education are ethnically biased, that is, whether Swedish culture and language or "Swedishness" are used as norms when teaching and assessing students. To examine whether such bias exists, the central curricula and syllabi from 1994 and 2000, as well as local…

The purpose of this study was to investigate instructor participation in asynchronous discussions through an in-depth content analysis of instructors' postings and comments through the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework (Garrison et. al, 2001). We developed an analytical tool based on this framework in order to better understand what instructors…

The following is a qualitative case study presenting three vignettes exploring the use of language play while microblogging during an academically sanctioned task. Ten students and one teacher used "Twitter" in an intensive, English as a second language advanced grammar course to practice writing sentences with complex grammatical…