This article examines the role that professional experiences (practicum) can play in building resilience in pre-service teachers. In particular it focuses on a learning communities model of professional experience with its emphasis on relationships and its attention to the complex and dynamic interactions between individuals and their…

In an ethnographically designed study, guided by a critical community psychology framework, Black staff members at a historically White Afrikaans university campus conducted email conversations relating to issues of race, social justice and reconciliation. The conversations were initiated by the author (Black) who mainly used prompts found in the…

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the inner workings of a North American summer enrichment programme named Freedom School. More specifically this research explores how participants of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom School programme experience "the Freedom School way", an amalgam of ideologies, discourses, and behaviours…

Extant research shows that individuals who discuss politics and current events with their peers also participate more actively in civil society. However, this correlation is not sufficient evidence of causation due to a number of analytical biases. To address this problem, data were collected through a panel study conducted on students who were…

Collaborative inquiry groups, such as professional learning communities and lesson study groups, are proliferating in schools across the United States. In whatever form, the potential for impacting student learning through this collaborative work is expanded or limited by the nature of teachers' conversations. Polite, congenial conversations…

A household name synonymous with modern telecommunications, Verizon's performance management innovations in 2010 kept pace with the growth of its brand. Many people probably are customers of the company's services. What's less known to the public is the consistent quality of Verizon's learning and development programs. A regular on the "Training"…

Learning communities, a small cohort of students enrolled together in two or more linked courses, have become a popular intervention to help underprepared students succeed in college. Though learning communities abound in practice, the key structural feature of a learning community--the cohort--may not be fully understood. Authors posit that a…

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements:…

Within the integration of technology into language education, special attention needs to be paid to languages for specific purposes (LSP), drawing on developments in computer-assisted language learning and applied linguistics, on the one hand, and on the pervasive use of technology in academic and professional communication, on the other. From a…

In this article, we explore findings from a semester-long online mentoring project between graduate students enrolled in a doctoral program and university students observing in local high schools early in their teacher education program. The project's goals were to provide supervised mentoring experiences for doctoral students to better prepare…

This article deals with how economists present their new knowledge claim in the genre of the research article. In the discipline of economics today, the claim is typically included not only in the obvious results/discussion section(s) but also in three other locations of the article: the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The present…

Just as in the United States, political changes in the United Kingdom and other nations affect education policy. Louise Stoll, professor at the London Centre for Leadership in Learning, Institute of Education, University of London, offers a different view on policy in these excerpts from a conversation with Tracy Crow, Learning Forward's associate…

Founded in the 1850s to promote an informed citizenry, public libraries advanced both adult learning and citizenship education in the first half of the 20th century, thus becoming cornerstones of democracy. But with a more recent decline in public engagement in libraries and beyond, librarians question whether democracy requires more than an…

This paper offers a narrative framework for understanding how multilingual graduate students make sense of the continuous and frequently contradictory talk they engage in as they write. It illustrates how attention to the telling, form, and content of the stories such students relate about their ongoing interactions around academic writing can…

Drawing on an evaluation experience of a teacher education preparation project in a rural area of South Africa, this paper attempts to explore the possibility of using Communities of Practice (CoP) in teacher preparation. The paper concludes that the concept of CoP is powerful in providing spaces for self-reflection to pre-service teachers and…