Today's ever-changing learning environment is characterized by the fast pace of technology that drives our society to move forward, and causes our knowledge to increase at an exponential rate. The need for in-depth research that is bound to generate new knowledge about curriculum and program development is becoming ever more relevant.…

In the field of secondary-level English as a Second Language (ESL), the ESL teacher (ESLT) works together with the Content-area teacher (CAT), building-level administrator and ESL coordinator to meet the learning needs of English Language Learners (ELLs). This ESL network depends on the collegial relationships of those comprising it. With this in…

Considering social justice to be founded on human rights, which, in turn, are grounded in freedom of thought, expression, and assembly, this essay reviews efforts by art educators to engage with public space as a form of social justice pedagogy. Public space, whether actual or virtual, is understood to be inherently devoted to contestation in the…

For English as a second language (ESL) teachers working with low-literate adolescents, the challenge is to provide instruction in basic literacy capabilities while also realising the benefits of interactive and dialogic pedagogies advocated for the students. In this article, we look at literacy pedagogy for refugees of African origin in Australian…

As educators who teach courses that examine social power, we often struggle with a specific form of resistance in the equity-oriented classroom: "That's just [the author]'s opinion." This "opinion discourse" emerges when students study scholarship that unsettles dominant knowledge claims and methods or when students are themselves asked to situate…

The purpose of this study is to examine how a school-based leadership team identifies and alters school conditions to foster the development of TLCs. Many educators, school leaders, and politicians have embraced teacher learning communities (TLCs) as a vehicle for school reform. Despite the considerable documentation of the capability for TLCs to…

In recent years, social identity has been recognized as a salient factor in second/foreign language learning, since literacy practice is not simply a matter of acquiring pre-given knowledge and sets of strategies, but involves a complex process of negotiating identities, cultures or even power relations. This study reports how a Taiwanese…

Henry A. Giroux is recognized as one of the fifty most significant thinkers on education in the 20th century. He is also considered a scholar of immense influence in a number of fields internationally, hardly an inconsequential accolade in a century noted for a glut of educational and social thinkers. Yet, its wide-ranging and ever-expanding…

The notion of teachers studying their own practice and working with students and community partners to address issues of inequality in schooling is the radical root of many forms of educational practitioner inquiry. But this emancipatory foundation of practitioner inquiry is currently under threat by efforts to limit the focus of this engaged form…

Traditional bilingual education programmes in regional linguistic minority contexts face major challenges within the recent paradigm of linguistic diversity against a background of increasing migration, mobility and trans-locality. Based on three case studies, the authors of this paper focus on how particular dual-medium models are applied in…

The central focus of this research has been to document immigrant and non-immigrant students' storytelling practices and cultural knowledge and identify how these might be adapted as "cultural data sets" for academic literary study in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, middle-grade classrooms. Such data sets, however, have limited use…

The authors of this article investigate how a performance module was integrated into a graduate course on children's literature to provide teachers with a space to re-enact and challenge the institutional tensions that were impacting their work as multicultural educators. Based on a combined ethnographic and systemic functional linguistics…

This article introduces the concept of "nation-state/colonial governmentality" as a framework for analyzing the ways current language ideologies marginalize the language practices of subaltern populations. Specifically, the article focuses on the innate limitations of re-appropriating nation-state/colonial governmentality in an attempt…

This dissertation examines the experiences of Kigali Institute of Education students using a framework of democratic education theories. In Rwanda, the discriminatory and non-critical education system is believed to have been one of the major causes for the civil strife that has characterized the country, beginning in its post independence to its…

Cultural competence is a fundamental tenet of social work education. Although cultural competence with diverse populations historically referred to individuals and groups from non-White racial origins, the term has evolved to encompass differences pertaining to sexuality, religion, ability, and others. Critics charge that the cultural competence…