Authors and illustrators of children's literature bring to life characters and contexts that provide demonstrations of agency as well as resources upon which to build agency. Agency is considered here as making one's identity and perceptions visible and actively acknowledged by others to enhance and empower the personal, cultural, and social…

This article presents a study of how groups of young students discuss illustrations of human blood circulation. Transparency is not an innate quality of illustrations, visual information is always coded and interpretations are always related to culture and context. Results of this study are discussed with reference to Kress and van Leeuwens'…

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children's moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children's use of basic ("thin") evaluative concepts ("good," "bad," "right" and "wrong"), which are ubiquitous in everyday…

Drawing on sociocultural theories, this study considers the multiple resources multilingual children use to communicate mathematically. We engaged with three children and a parent, in order to understand how multilingual children express their mathematical reasoning. The family was given a mathematical problem solving activity designed to…

This case study of a university in Vietnam examines how professionalism is established and managed in the university context as manifested in institutional quality assurance policies and practices towards academic staff development. By looking at both 'regulations and instrumentalities', the research showcases the different political forces…

This article addresses the problem of integrating socio-cultural components into teaching and upbringing through foreign languages. The aim of teaching a foreign language means not only acquiring communication skill but also forming cultural and linguistic personality. The main aim of any communication is to be understood by interlocutor. The…

Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training has introduced educational reforms that require Vietnamese teachers to acquire new understanding and skills using information communication technology (ICT) to support teaching. However, there was little literature to guide Vietnamese teachers on how to achieve these goals. The research goals were to…

In the first three sections of this paper we comment on some of the ideas developed in the forum papers, pointing out possible misunderstandings and constructing new explanations that clarify arguments we made in the original article. In the last section we expand the discussion raised in the original paper, elaborating on the limits of the use of…

The article presents the cultural foundations informing the pedagogical theorization of social education in Russian pedagogy. It demonstrates the trends within the theory of social education while taking into account changes in sociocultural conditions in the XX century. [This article was translated by Kenneth Cargill.]

This paper involves a study on Aphra Ben's "Oroonoko" (1688) which is considered by many as the first black narrative of English literature, an abolitionist text, while observed by some others as extremely colonialist. The objective of this study is to examine why the novella accommodates such contradictory readings. It assumes that it…

Taking a sociocultural approach to understanding the phenomenon of learning to teach, this study examined the extent to which seven pre-service teachers, in their final year of a Bachelor of Education course in a regional Australian university campus, identified personal, professional and contextual aspects as significant influences on learning to…

This article explores the expansion of feminist ideas as both a conceptual and a political issue. It focuses on two major theories of social change, world culture theory (WCT) and world system analysis (WSA), comparing and contrasting how they frame gender as a factor shaping society, how they account for the diffusion of feminist ideas and how…

This paper uses Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach to analyze the emergence of civil society within global educational governance. The purpose is to understand the intersection of historical structures with global actors and spaces that have accompanied the globalization of education. Based on findings from a study on the impact in Cambodia…

With an increase in multilingual learners in U.S. public schools, there is an imperative to understand the language practices, ideologies, and pedagogies within culturally and linguistically sustaining heritage language programs inside schools. Building on principles of translanguaging as a theory of practical language (Garcia, 2009; Li, 2018),…

In 1960s Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian white middle class embraced the samba music written by working-class blacks as a source of authentic national culture. Cultural mediators, or individuals that bridged sociocultural spheres and negotiated the terms in which work was produced and circulated, were essential to samba's mainstream acceptance. This…