The worldwide spread of English, especially through the tenets and assumptions of the mainstream English language teaching (ELT) has had ideological, socio-cultural and political implications in the field of education. Reviewing these tenets and assumptions, this paper attempts to reveal this growing industry through publicizing the spread of…

This paper provides a brief description of the Greek-Cypriot early childhood education system and focuses on the current education reform. We focus on one of the main changes of the reform, a new status for play within the daily educational programme. The goal of this paper is two-fold; first to portray play in the former and current proposed…

Drawing on activity theory, this qualitative case study examines the emotional experiences of Maria, a preservice teacher of English as an additional language (EAL) during the practicum in an Australian secondary school setting and the factors shaping these emotions. Data included interviews with the preservice teacher before and after the…

Driven by the impetus for the school system as a whole to actualize deep twenty-first century learning, innovation diffusion has become increasingly an important vehicle for isolated pockets of successes to proliferate beyond the locale of the individual schools to form connected clusters of improvement at a greater scale. This paper articulates…

This dissertation explored how identities of students and a teacher in a first grade classroom were co-constructed through various literacy practices and within a third space. Drawing on research that documented the strong connection between literacy and identity and its socio-cultural connections, this qualitative study incorporates ethnographic…

We illustrate an analytic framework for teachers' mathematics discourse in instruction (MDI). MDI is built on three interacting components of a mathematics lesson: a sequence of examples and related tasks; accompanying talk; patterns of interaction. Together these illuminate what is made available to learn. MDI is grounded empirically in…

In this study, we examined the bilingual language development among Korean American first-graders in two southern California cities and explored the opportunities for language use available to them in various spaces: at school (one dual language immersion school and one traditional English-only public school), at home, and in the community. Data…

This one-year long ethnographic case study seeks to add to the body of literature on EFL teachers' identities in Colombia by drawing on ethnographic methods and sociocultural theories to examine the identity construction of four EFL teachers at the university level. Specifically, this study explores how EFL teachers' identities shaped and were…

The authors consider the analysis of the literature on play research by Lillard and others in the January 2013 "Psychological Bulletin," an analysis that questioned the prevailing assumption of a causal relationship between play and child development, especially in the areas of creativity, reasoning, executive function, and regulation of…

Seemingly comfortable in my physical education teacher education (PETE) role as a critical pedagogue, I was abruptly jolted into considering post-paradigmatic possibilities through participation in a collaborative project that explored shifting conceptualisations of knowledge and learning in initial teacher education (ITE). The project sought to…

Through socio-cultural analysis of the discourse of bullying, the present article aims to show that moral learning is less about teaching children the difference between right and wrong and more about making available to them what Tappan and Wertsch describe as the mediational means to engage in their own moral learning. Bullying is explained in…

The development of college students' civic identity is understudied, but worthy of attention because of its salience to many students and higher education's commitment to fostering an engaged citizenry. Using 45,271 participants from the 2009 Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership, this study uses structural equation modeling to explore…

This paper examines the resulting qualitative transformation of two students' metapragmatic awareness following a semester abroad in southern France--one of whom had access to a concept-based pragmatics instruction programme (expert-mediation), while the other followed a standard semester programme. The larger study from which these cases are…

The introduction of Free Primary Education (FPE) policy in 2003 was aimed at enhancing the enrolment of all school going-age children in Kenya indiscriminately. However, significant concerns have been raised by scholars and the public over the low enrolment of children with Special Needs Education (SNE). The main objective of this study was to…

Despite growing support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the United States, the Southeastern region continues to pass legislation that discriminates against those who do not fit normative notions of sexuality and gender. This opposition affects LGBT students and the teachers who identify as LGBT activists. This study of…