How do the children in our classrooms get identified as certain "types" of students, as "disabled" or as "competent"? What factors bear on who the children in our classrooms are able to be? How might exploring the answers to these questions lead us to create classroom communities that are more inclusive, livable, and equitable? Beginning with this…

This article explores Japanese EFL learners' classroom silence in a Japanese EFL context. The existence of silence in second language learning contexts can be a source of conflict between students and teachers and even among students themselves. It can also be an obstacle to acquiring the target language. In order to tackle this problem and to…

From the work of sociocultural theorists like Rogoff (1990), Vygotsky (1978) and Wenger (1998), it is widely understood that learning is an act of the individual resulting from experience in a sociocultural context. Within this context, following Dewey (1998), learners need to take an active role, engaging and constructing their own understanding.…

This article offers a perspective on the relationship between cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and one particular strand of action research--Freirean participatory action research (PAR). It reflects on a research collaboration conducted two decades ago with a community organisation and seeks to "show" the interaction of CHAT…

Schooling and science education are embedded within larger socio-cultural, political and economic contexts, influenced by global flows of capital, labor, ideas, and images. In this article we consider the ways in which ethnography traces the web of interactions (circuits), in a rural community and the ways that science inquiry was associated with…

This article examines multilingual interactions in the complementary school classroom for ethnic Chinese children in the UK. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the children and their teachers, the study aims to demonstrate how they alternate between different varieties of Chinese and English and different modes of…

This study reports on a sequence of iterative redesigns of a graduate-level foreign language teacher education course. The study describes the interplay between technology and pedagogy that resulted in important curricular changes, from a focus on individual to social and then holistic reflection. Using a team-based design model, instructional…

This study examines the discourses on content reduction of South Korea's national curriculum shaped by policymakers and subject specialists, as well as compares the two discourses to uncover the differences between the two. For this purpose, the paper collected academic articles that discuss the issue of content reduction from the past thirty…

This article reports a study done with five English language teachers in Colombian rural areas. Questionnaires and interviews were used to see how these teachers understand their professional practice considering the contextual features of their regional workplaces. Amongst the findings, we noticed that these teachers have to mediate between local…

Perspective taking, which is seeing a viewpoint other than one's own, is critical in interpersonal understanding and in cross-cultural communication. It is especially crucial in diverse societies such as the United States as well as in countries where immigrants from other nations are living as one community. Hence, this article focuses on…

Community organizations, especially those aiming at social change, play a significant role in establishing societal health and contributing to adult learning in daily communities. Their existence secures marginalized groups' involvement in society and enhances community development by building community leadership with multiple stakeholders…

South Carolina biology Indicator 5.6 calls for students to "Summarize ways that scientists use data from a variety of sources to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory" (South Carolina Department of Education, 2006). Levinson and Sutton (2001) offered a sociocultural approach to policy that considers cultural…

What kind of self is being made available and denied to student teachers as they participate in life in their teaching practice schools? In addressing this question empirically, the article seeks to show the forms of meaning being made and experienced by student teachers and the identities that are authored, authorised and constrained. A…

Starting with the research question "What is the role of play as a means of genuine inclusion of home language and cultural traditions in an intercultural early learning programme?", the article focuses on the role of cultural artefacts in a programme in which the majority of the children were refugees from Africa. The sociocultural…

Research from interactionist second language acquisition and sociocultural theoretical perspectives shows that referential questions are important for learning, but also, that they can be difficult for English language learners (ELLs) to understand and produce answers to. By integrating analytical tools from both traditions, this study examined…