The study describes the factors that render possible and restrain students' learning when they try to develop new knowledge through collaboration in a net-based learning environment. The pedagogical platform takes as its starting point a framework of socio-cultural theories of learning and is based on dialogues and collaborative situations in…

Teacher education programs around the nation continue to be challenged to prepare prospective teachers to use technology "meaningfully" in their instruction. This implies that university faculty in teacher education programs must become proficient at technology use and must come to understand content-specific, pedagogical uses of technology for…

The World Wide Web has made possible an entirely new form of communication in the classroom: asynchronous, public, non-sequential, and selective (Windschitl, 1998). However, it is unclear how discussion webs can contribute to educational processes. Our research investigates the role of instructional interactive webs in promoting among preservice…

This article describes how teacher leadership emerged within schools with either a high level or a low level of readiness to establish a professional learning community. Through the perspectives of principals and teacher leaders, there were distinct differences in the emergence of teacher leadership, the operation of shared leadership structures,…

A team of faculty and students from a principal preparation program sought to discover how administrators and teachers in two culturally diverse middle schools were implementing the concept of learning community. The purposes of the study was to: (1) Explore how administrators and teachers defined learning communities; (2) Determine how the two…

This article examines how multilingual scholars who work outside English-speaking countries negotiate the demand to publish in English alongside their broader academic and publishing interests. Based on our ethnographic study of the academic writing and publishing practices of 16 psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, and Spain, we characterize…

Some learning scientists are beginning to investigate social and cultural aspects of learning by examining the interactions between a learner and the environment as well as with other people in the learning environment. This article proposes conversational analysis (CA) as a tool to analyze interactions between learners and instructors in…

In this article, the author examines the character of the conversations generated in an elementary teacher group as they worked on mathematical problems together and analyzed their students' work. Two distinct forms of talk--"exploratory" and "expository"--were found. The first type of talk occurred most prominently when discussions centered on…

Many instructors are planning to teach their writing classes in the networked computer classroom. Through the use of electronic mail, course listservs, and chat programs, the instructor is offered the opportunity to facilitate a more egalitarian classroom discourse that creates a strong sense of community, not only between students, but also…

A study explored how teenage audiences interpreted brochures intended to discourage them from taking drugs, and more broadly, how readers respond to the visual and verbal messages presented through brochures that aim to inform and persuade. Over 100 brochures and handouts from national and local drug prevention agencies were collected. A subset of…

Whole language, a theory of language instruction that was developed primarily in terms of helping children learn to read, has now been extended to middle- and secondary-school levels. Andragogy, the learning of adults, is a specific theory of adult education, conceived in contradistinction to pedagogy, the teaching of children. When these two…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

Sample excerpts from e-mail discussion used in place of the traditional journal in freshman composition illustrate the fascinating issues raised in this new forum. E-mail allows confrontational statements that would not have been made face-to-face and puts in written form a dialogue for analysis by the entire class. A study concentrated on three…

"Questioning the Author" is a particular style of classroom discussion that tries to get young students (fourth and fifth graders) to actively grapple with the ideas they read about in class. It may be distinguished from other reading strategies by the following approaches: (1) it addresses a text as the product of a fallible author; (2)…

Teachers of advanced technical and professional writing need to provide credible ways in which their students can extend the cultural critique the teachers try to engage them in into the world outside the classroom. The nature of resistance in nonacademic discourse can be explored to help both the teachers and students think through the imposing…