This article examines the possible implications of reintegrating the concept of context into identity theory. Through the analysis of a case study of one individual attempting to form an identity within the larger juxtaposed sociocultural contexts of premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity, the article demonstrates how diversity of…

The question raised here is about the extent that liberal individualism and the consumerist ethos is the result of technology and to what extent is it the cultural norm of modernity. There has been a polarization in the way technology is understood. Predominantly it is assumed to be neutral but it can also be argued that technology exacerbates the…

As more North Americans sojourn abroad in the emerging global marketplace, it is important to understand the factors related to successful cross-cultural adjustment. This study explores how personality factors and acculturation influence the cross-cultural adjustment process of North Americans sojourning in Taiwan. The results reveal that greater…

Background: The concept of quality of life (QOL) is explained on the basis of traditional Chinese culture and contemporary social and cultural trends. Method: The importance of internationally recognized QOL domains and indicators was determined for three respondent groups: consumers, parents of the consumers, and teachers and rehabilitation…

Although prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) programs are predicated on maternal behavior change, little is known about sociocultural factors affecting maternal-child care practices in this arena. The authors used narrative methods (key informant workshops, questionnaires, focus groups, and case study analysis) to explore how…

This paper reports on empirical research into formative assessment conducted in a blended learning environment within a professional doctorate in education (EdD.) programme in an English university, focusing primarily on peer discussion forum activity. This was conceptualised within sociocultural learning theories, where learning entails processes…

For David E. Kirkland, the New English Education locates English language arts in the realities of youth, where texts emerge from students' lives, and the notions of reading and writing in English classrooms are open to revision. Kirkland reflects on how "postmodern Black experience, especially as seen in hip-hop, gives English teachers one way of…

The cultural validity of a psychological or educational theory is a function of its sensitizing and heuristic power for a given task addressed by a given community. African universities have inherited from the West a number of institutionalized arrangements for learning that tend to decontextualize the learning process by extracting learners from…

This article describes a 3-year study of school visits to four natural history museums and addresses the research agenda with regard to out-of-school learning. More specifically, the findings focus on the "process of learning" in museums. Comprehensive data collection allowed for an analysis of patterns of guided visits, the way the…

This study explores the relationship, if any, between an individual's culturally based worldviews and conceptions of nature of science. In addition, the implications of this relationship (or lack of relationship) for science teaching and learning are discussed. Participants were 54 Taiwanese prospective science teachers. Their conceptions of…

The following article examines the sociocultural needs of higher education students on an international degree programme delivered jointly by a post-1992 university in England and a polytechnic institution in the Netherlands. A brief discussion of relevant literature is followed by a methodological overview, detailing the qualitative research…

Suspension and expulsion are widely used to exclude students with and without disabilities who present problem behaviors in school, despite contentious legal debate and evidence associating these methods with high ecological stress and problematic developmental outcomes. Using selected participant data (N = 1,824) from the SEELS study, the study…

This paper illustrates how classroom discourse demands a multi-layered analysis. The first analysis focuses on classroom discourse and provides a picture of pupil participation in teacher-pupil interactions: who is inducted into discourse and who is not. However, this local micro-analysis does not afford interpretation at the level of the…

Research within a constructivist approach often relies on interview data, which are used to reveal beliefs held by the interviewee or to expose conceptions or conceptual structures that are supposed to reside within the interviewee. From a sociocultural perspective, severe criticism has been leveled against the neglect of the problems of inferring…

This article addresses the relationship between the call for authenticity, its relocalization in other contexts, and the use of English. Hip-hop forces us to confront some of the conflictual discourses of authenticity and locality, from those that insist that African American hip-hop is the only real variety and that all other forms are…