The aim of this paper is to understand how ideas about teaching and learning to teach are structured and regulated in the student teaching component in university teacher education, and how these ideas are linked to the constructed identities of the student--and the collaborating teacher. I use critical discourse analysis to unpack the everyday…

This study reports two stages of research into the discourses of poetry education in the United States from the early 20th to the early 21st centuries. The first is an original study that traces the history of discourses about teaching poetry, and the second is a coda or concluding analysis that raises questions about how history functions as a…

Policy borrowing and policy travelling are words that are often used to mean the same process to different policy practitioners across the globe. Nevertheless, these ideas are also riddled with both ethical as well as political undertones, such that interchanging them becomes problematic. In reflecting on and responding to some of these debates,…

Discussion of children's play in international and diverse communities requires careful consideration of social, cultural and political contexts impacting children's lives, as well as recognition of the complexities revealed when these variables are identified and analysed. Using diverse conceptual frameworks represented in the research…

This paper builds on recent scholarship on the gendered nature of educational work to argue that while conceptualisations of the principalship are underpinned by scholarship and policy assumptions that construct the work of the principal as a male domain, women have responded to opportunities presented by changing historical, political and social…

In this article the author offers an example of a student-staff partnership program based in a higher education context in the United States. This program positions undergraduate students as pedagogical consultants to academic staff. The goal of the program is to counter traditional hierarchies and imbalanced power relations and foster a shift in…

This article discusses why researchers and educators might choose to seek children's perspectives. It also highlights some of the key considerations when seeing children as having the right to contribute to decisions that affect them. The article draws on findings from a study that used pedagogically oriented methods for researching three- and…

This article presents findings from 12 months of ethnographic observations of nonformal adult education classes offered by an internationally funded nonprofit, referred to in this article as Comunidades de Poder (CDP). The primary objective of this article is to examine the various contextual factors that influenced CDP teachers' instruction and…

In understanding the divergences and commonalities in the representations of geography across different national settings, the case of Singapore is examined through the notion of politicisation of school curricula to meet the needs of "significant power groups". In particular, the development of school geography in Singapore and its…

Participatory research in education provides an opportunity for university-based researchers to collaborate with teachers to develop understandings and to overcome the school-university and research-practice divides. Several studies illuminate the challenges inherent in conducting participatory research within the institutional context of schools,…

The new Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications (MRTEQ) document outlined by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) envisages a particular type of teacher. These teachers need to be, amongst other things, reflective, committed, critical practitioners with sound content knowledge (DHET 2011). It is with this in…

Lack of accountability and transparency in governance was among the challenges that influenced Jamaica's corruption rating of 3.3, resulting in an 87th ranking out of 183 countries in 2011. Although the monitoring of internal control business structures supported accountability, evidence of their presence was limited in government offices. The…

Distributed leadership alone is not sufficient to bring about the significant changes that are required to improve the quality of teaching and learning in K-12 public schools. Schools that distribute leadership across all levels of the organization must also work to establish collaborative cultures that promote shared beliefs, norms, values,…

This qualitative multiple case study examined superintendent turnover in four small rural school districts that were unable to retain their district leaders long-term. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, narrative data from participants were examined using constant comparative analysis to determine major emergent themes within and across…

The research presented in this article investigates the role of classroom discussions for supporting students' ongoing identity work during the study of global issues. Civic identity is theorized as a socially constructed process in which individuals become associated as a particular type of citizen created through social interactions in a given…