According to the findings of a recent European study on competence requirement for the early childhood education and care workforce, competent systems that succeed in achieving high levels of professionalism are embedded in coherent public policies that build on consultation with key stakeholders, particularly at local level. In order to flourish,…

Community engagement in higher education is a shift beyond the traditional roles of instruction and research. This paper presents a transnational view of community engagement developed from two case studies of universities in the Philippines and Australia. The study, revealed variations in the way community engagement is understood and implemented…

Education about sexuality is one method of reducing common negative stereotypes about this aspect of the life of older people. Knowledge and attitudes toward sexuality are therefore particularly important in those who educate healthcare professionals. We surveyed schools of medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, psychology, and…

Research on youth sport within the sport coaching and physical education literature has tended to overlook the nature of experience and the meanings that sport holds in the lives of children and young people. This paper makes a contribution toward redressing this imbalance by reporting on a close-focus case study on children's reasons for joining…

In this article I present personalised socio-cultural inquiry in visual art education as a critical and expressive material praxis. The model of "Visual Performative Pedagogy and Communicative Proficiency for the Visual Art Classroom" is presented as a legitimate means of manipulating visual codes, communicating meaning and mediating…

In this volume, Furberg and Arnseth report on a study of genetics learning from a socio-cultural perspective, focusing on students' meaning making as they engage in collaborative problem solving. Throughout the paper, they criticize research on student understanding and conceptual change conducted from a cognitive/socio-cognitive perspective on…

In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and…

Informed and inspired by neo-Vygotskian theory, this article outlines a study exploiting a contemporary conceptualization of Wells's (2002) joint activity system model as an exploratory framework for examining and depicting the social-cultural-historical contradictions in second-language (L2) learners' joint activity. The participants were a pair…

This study considers the role of cognitive styles and culture in relation to students' perceptions of the value of different types and sources of feedback from sociocultural and constructivist perspectives. The increasingly heterogeneous nature of higher education highlights the importance of enhancing student accessibility to and engagement with…

Jones' (2002) discussion of polarised transitions and the "fast and slow lanes to adulthood" espoused by Bynner "et al." (2002) are good examples of how dualistic language often permeates youth transitions discourses. This often results in transitions research concentrating on a dichotomy of experience during the youth phase.…

This study investigates how mediated learning designed to improve peer cooperation within activity-based problem solving tasks influences cooperative learning outcomes. Two groups (n = 22) of Year 8 students (mean age 13 +/- 5 months) were randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. The study began with two one-hour sessions of…

This longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher's path of concept development over a two-year period encompassing her student teaching and first year of full-time teaching, both at the same rural school in the southeastern United States. The authors use a sociocultural theoretical framework emerging from the work of Vygotsky…

A substantial literature has studied gender differences in political participation in Western industrialized democracies, but little is known about such gaps in sub-Saharan African nations. Using 2005 Afrobarometer data, this paper presents a systematic investigation of the gender gap in political participation across 18 sub-Saharan African…

This study analyzes self reported transition experiences of five Latina bilingual novice teachers' into the classroom and documents how they participate in their own socialization as bilingual teachers. Informed by a sociocultural perspective of teaching and learning as socially constructed and mediated and by a critical perspective of education,…

Theoretical in orientation, the focus of this article is the study of language teachers and teaching and builds on a body of research that has become increasingly influential since the mid-1990s. S. Borg's (2006) recent review of the field identifies a number of pathways with promise for new areas of research, but it also highlights the conceptual…