In response to a request from a campus student organization, faculty from three fields came together to develop and teach an integrated interdisciplinary course on water issues and social activism. This course, "Water as Life, Death, and Power," brought together topics from the fields of anthropology, biology and chemistry to explore…

Research suggests that the development of a teacher educator identity is a central process in becoming a teacher educator. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the concept of teacher identity. However, teacher educator identity seems to be still under-researched. In this article, a review of literature on teacher educator identity is…

The Ontario Consortium of Undergraduate Biology Educators (oCUBE) brings together over 50 biology educators from 18 Ontario universities with the common goal to improve the biology undergraduate experience for both students and educators. This goal is achieved through an innovative mix of highly interactive face-to-face meetings, online…

In order to remain successful and competitive in business today it is important that SMEs can sustain themselves by adapting to economic changes. SMEs have a distinct advantage over large companies in that they have less bureaucracy and hierarchical restrictions and can implement changes quickly. However often they are slow to change their way of…

In order to be effective educators in the 21st century, it is essential for teacher candidates to develop a deep understanding of the culture and contextual factors surrounding their students' lives, and the ability to apply this understanding to classroom instruction. This action research study discusses how the implementation of teaching…

Multiple forms of support for teachers new to the profession are important and necessary. The use of an online community by 11 novice instrumental music teachers at the middle school and high school levels was investigated in this case study. The teachers exchanged messages and information within the online community during the 2010-2011 school…

Investments in the select few who already are or will become academic leaders are essential but insufficient. Investments also need to be made in collective leadership because leadership is an activity or function, not merely a person. Both good leaders and collective leadership are needed in the never-ending journey toward selective excellence. A…

The Next Generation Science Standards and other reforms call for students to learn science-as-practice, which I argue requires students to become epistemic agents--shaping the knowledge and practice of a science community. I examined a framework for teaching--ambitious instruction--that scaffolds students' learning of science-as-practice as…

Adult learners on Access to Higher Education courses struggled with institutional and social structures to attend their courses, but transformed their identities as learners through them. Although asymmetrical power relationships dominated the intentional learning communities of their courses, their work was facilitated by collaborative cultures…

We examined the effectiveness of a community of practice (CoP) model for introducing tablets to 139 faculty members at a higher education institution. Using a CoP within a systems model, we used large- and small-group mentorship to foster collaboration among faculty members. Most faculty members agreed that the project was well organized and…

Increasingly, top-tier journalism and media schools are entering into partnerships with mainstream media organizations to create and distribute student-produced content. While internships have long been a sanctioned way students learn professional practices, downturns in the economy have led to reductions in paid internship programs. On the rise…

In 2010, I volunteered at Green Shoots, a service-learning educational non-profit school focused around environmental justice. While the school claimed to operate under an egalitarian, empowering "community of practice" framework, the experiences of youth and myself revealed a hierarchal power dynamic that put unequal demands on youth…

The aim of this study is to investigate learners' transforming participation as they enter and engage in a learning community. To do this, we investigated the micro-development of two students' learning and collaborative practices in the context of a unique learning community that was fostered within a graduate level course.…

Children and young people have the inalienable right to be part of a learning community. Nobody can learn on his/her own. Education is always a communal enterprise. In this article the concept of the "spiritual learning community" is developed as a contemporary answer to the socioeducational issues raised by Martin Buber and John Dewey…

Student engagement and making community happen is a policy manoeuvre that shapes the political subjectivity of the undergraduate student In Australia, making community happen as a practice of student engagement is described as one of the major challenges for policy and practice in research-led universities (Krause, 2005). Current efforts to meet…