This article considers four learning biographies from professional musicians. Each musician holds a different portfolio career and is from a different age category. The key questions I ask are: "How does one learn as a musician?", "What knowledge, attitudes, values and artistic skills are necessary to function effectively and creatively as a…

This article examines children's role-play within the framework of language socialization, as well as the relations between (a) utterances made by young bilingual Korean children within the role-play frame and (b) metacommunicative utterances about the play. It analyzes the language features that children use to set up the context of role-play and…

The concept of managing an organization's knowledge has caught on in recent years (Sallis & Jones, 2002). Dubbed knowledge management, the field has grown as it addresses key characteristics of knowledge, like the concept that knowledge cannot be separated from a knower and the idea that there are two types of knowledge: tacit, which is intangible…

In this article we suggest that online environments can function as alternate "organizations" for pre-service and beginning teachers who may find themselves struggling in schools. Building on prior work on framing and reframing in organizations and schools, the authors present a new frame of analysis specifically geared for web-based…

This article examines Asian women's experiences of belonging to communities of practice within higher education in Britain. The research explores the ways in which women engage in friendship and support networks, how they negotiate their identities and their experiences of being marginalised and "different". The research argues that…

Supervision lies at the heart of PhD pedagogy, but the focus has been on improving efficiency and completion rates of the PhD process rather than theorising about the nature of the postgraduate supervision process. The study explores the usefulness of situated learning as a theoretical framework for thinking about PhD pedagogy. In the process,…

Teacher educators need tools to help them think about teacher learning, to design activities and programs that foster it, and to assess the results of their work with preservice and in-service teachers. In this article, in order to improve the conceptual tools available for the design and study of teacher education, the author teases apart…

This article provides a personal perspective about the development of the seminal papers associated with the Community of Inquiry Framework. The framework and its construction are described. The main part of the paper explores the evolution of the framework and its associated methodology. Finally, research associated with the validation of the…

Australia is a multicultural country. In the ten years to November 2007, there were 647,000 migrants who entered Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). Of these migrants 76% were born in countries other than those identified by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2008) as main English speaking countries (the United Kingdom, The…

The spotlight on local education agencies (LEAs) in their efforts to improve the performance of all students, including historically underperforming subgroups, has increased scrutiny on LEA leadership. Superintendents' responsibilities have become more complex, stressful and challenging as they are required to navigate new federal and state…

Professional learning communities (PLC) have been identified as scaffolds that can facilitate, support, and sustain systemic change focused on improving student achievement. PLCs represent the application of the theoretical constructs of the learning organization within the framework of schools and school systems. Little is known about the change…

Questions about whether states play a role in ensuring access to high-quality teaching talent in local communities have ceased. Increasingly, states are encouraging and requiring more robust preparation programs; more efficient human resources departments that identify, recruit, place, and support the most effective educators; and more continuous…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the views of partners as to the process and operation of TE3 in relation to community of practice (CoP) principles in order to identify success factors fundamental to continued active participation in and promotion of enterprise education. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a narrative…

This article discusses approaches to collaborative practice amongst primary school headteachers in the implementation of inter-school networks. "Learning networks" and "learning communities" have been subject to increasing educational attention in England as part of a broader policy shift in favour of collaborative approaches…

There are concerns that the effective use of interactive whiteboard technology is being inhibited by its use only as a means of presentation. This article looks at the way in which a working group drawn from the university and school areas of mathematics teaching developed materials to enhance the pedagogic use of interactive whiteboard…