Educational institutions are acknowledging the requirements of a globalized world on students' mobility, interculturality, and language skills by offering study-abroad programmes. These need to be accompanied by procedures to assess student needs prior to and during their time abroad as well as upon their return. In the exploratory study reported…

Although the need for a better understanding and deconstruction of the barriers that underpin and impede the realisation of inclusive education in many developing countries is acknowledged, few studies focus specifically on exploring how stigma affects the choices that parents in developing countries make on behalf of their children. This paper…

This is a conceptually oriented article which questions established notions concerning the framing of international students in Anglo-Western universities through a literature review. Focusing largely on students from Confucian Heritage Cultures (CHC), and resulting from concerns regarding their level of participation, the literature is considered…

This article describes a unit in which students were able to create projects that went far beyond the initial scope of what the authors imagined due to the scaffolded and sociocultural learning environment (Vygotsky, 1978). The article begins with an explanation of constructivism, design thinking, and Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and…

This study explores secondary history, literature, and science teachers' learning in cross-disciplinary professional development (PD) designed to support inquiry in disciplinary literacy instruction. As part of a larger design-based research project, teachers participated in a three-year Teacher Network designed to build knowledge and pedagogical…

While research on teacher feedback has largely been influenced by second language writing and second language acquisition perspectives, little attention has been paid to the contextual and sociocultural dimension of teachers' work. Overall, there is a dearth of discussion on teacher feedback that is influenced by sociocultural perspectives.…

In this forum we engage in a dialogue with Allison Gonsalves's paper '"Physics and the girly girl--there is a contradiction somewhere": Doctoral students' positioning around discourses of gender and competence in physics'. In her paper Gonsalves uses a sociocultural approach to examine women doctoral students'…

The aim of this study is to investigate learners' transforming participation as they enter and engage in a learning community. To do this, we investigated the micro-development of two students' learning and collaborative practices in the context of a unique learning community that was fostered within a graduate level course.…

This paper falls into two parts--a Western interpretation and an Eastern critique of the same process. The first part provides an interpretation of how we learn to become culturally embedded individuals. The paper notes the learning processes in the formation of the cultural and national self. We, in the West, have traditionally assumed that the…

This article brings together a range of research and scholarship from various disciplines which have investigated and theorized social and cultural aspects of infants' bodies within the context of contemporary western societies. It begins with a theoretical overview of dominant concepts of infants' bodies, including discussion of the concepts of…

Children's art work has often been the subject of study by researchers seeking to gain insight into the role of art making in children's learning and development. However, rarely are children's own explanations of their art making used to inform these studies. Children's perceptions of their own art making are important for research and practice…

In this article, the educative value of scientific biographies will be explored, especially for non-science major college students. During the "Scientist's life and thought" course, 66 college students read nine scientific biographies including five biologists, covering the canonical scientific achievements in Western scientific history.…

The social situation of development (SSD) specific to each age determines regularly the whole picture of the child's life. Therefore, we need to learn about the whole context surrounding children relevant to their development. The focus of the study is to understand parent's views on infant-toddler's science concept formation in the family…

Social-emotional health influences youth developmental trajectories and there is growing interest among educators to measure the social-emotional health of the students they serve. This study replicated the psychometric characteristics of the Social Emotional Health Survey (SEHS) with a diverse sample of high school students (Grades 9-12; N =…

Children's narrative skills have been widely studied in North America, but there is a paucity of African research. Within South Africa's diverse socio-cultural context, this study of mixed-race children explored the development of narrative production and the influence of home background variables. Using the Bear Story picture prompt, this…