Since the middle of the twentieth century waves of immigration have increased heterogeneity in American classrooms and contributed to new challenges and problems for both teachers and learners. These trends in the United States are, in fact, part of a global phenomenon of large-scale movement of people (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2009;…

Bilingualism is a common phenomenon in India. We are all instinctively bilingual. A large proportion of the world's population is bilingual. A bilingual speaking to the other bilingual chooses the language unconsciously or semi-consciously with no extra time or effort. Language alternation has become significant in the Indian context in view of…

In this article I address a hitherto used buzz phrase in English, "Yes, we can." This phrase represents various forms of meanings--challenge, possibility, ability, permission and opportunity in social, political and linguistics domains. I consider the syntactic and the semantic properties of "Yes, we can." I also compare its conventional usages…

This paper examines the educational projects of Patrick Geddes in late-Victorian Scotland. Initially a natural scientist, Geddes drew on an eclectic mix of social theory to develop his own ideas on social evolution. For him education was a vital agent of social change which, he believed, had the potential to develop active citizens whose…

This study, conducted at a historically Black university, evaluated the impact of awareness and internalization of the Western thin ideal of beauty on body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, and bulimia in African-American, African, and Caribbean women. The relationship between internalization of the thin ideal and disordered eating was…

Immigrant children from diverse language backgrounds face not only linguistic challenges when enrolled in mainstream English-medium classrooms, but also difficulties adjusting to an unfamiliar learning community. The culture of primary school classrooms in New Zealand typically reflects conventions across three dimensions: interactional,…

Traditional lecture-based teaching methods are being replaced or supplemented by approaches which call for reframing the roles and identities of teachers and learners. Enquiry-Based Learning (EBL) is one such approach. This paper reports on a study investigating the perceptions of staff and students (N=25) involved in an EBL capacity building…

This article reflects the voices of the authors who are three early childhood tertiary educators and who have presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Arts Educators Conference held in Wellington in July 2007. The authors revealed many common threads that interwove throughout their individual presentations and made visible an emerging…

School counselling is developing rapidly in many countries around the World. As with any practice in a secondary setting, challenges and special issues are often identified, discussed, and managed. These can be categorized into four distinct domains: 1) Internal challenges, which include issues related to clientele groups, teachers' attitudes…

This article suggests that approaching vision loss from age-related macular degeneration from a sociocultural perspective, specifically considering perceptions of aging, blindness, disability, and generational viewpoints and norms, may be critical to understanding older adults' responses to vision loss and visual rehabilitation.

Traditional e-learning efforts use information communication technologies to create and support educational opportunities that are not constrained by temporal and spatial considerations. The focus of ee-learning is to couple e-learning's approach with experiential education models that employ service-learning methodologies and with…

Based on a sociocultural perspective, this study investigated the learning experiences of a selected group of older adults learning computing technologies at a social center in Hong Kong. Data generated from in-depth interviews were used to develop a model of evolving motivation that explains how this group of "anxious novices" had…

In this accessible introduction to Vygotskyian sociocultural theory, narratives illuminate key concepts of the theory. These key concepts, addressed across seven chapters, include mediation; Zone of Proximal Development; collaborative dialogue; private speech; everyday and scientific concepts; the interrelatedness of cognition and emotion,…

Recent research on education and Latina/o immigrants has indicated an escalating crisis, but few studies have focused on why so few immigrant students participate in higher education, or why many leave college before receiving degrees. Past research has been largely quantitative or theoretical, and offered little qualitative insight into the…

Reflecting on the influence of English nursery rhyme poems on one individual Asian child's language development, the paper reviews current studies on the socio-cultural dynamics of creativity, to examine how these theoretical and empirical investigations may help shape specific pedagogical practices in the expressive language arts in a Hong Kong…