This article explores the usefulness of communities of practice theory for understanding how districts can create organizational environments that foster teachers' opportunities to learn the new ideas and practices required to carry out ambitious reforms. It draws on data from a longitudinal study of the implementation of ambitious mathematics…

Drawing on recent developments in dialogic approaches to learning and teaching, I examine the roots of dialogic meaning-making as a concept in classroom practices. Developments in the field of dialogic pedagogy are reviewed and the case for dialogic engagement as an approach to classroom interaction is considered. The implications of dialogic…

This article presents a Norwegian primary school teacher facing the challenge of realising the curriculum's vision of inclusive education. Ann teaches a third-grade class with 22 pupils among which are pupils with special needs. Two of them are John and Paul. The article focuses on how the teacher deals with these two boys as she, at the same…

The "Research & Action Report," published twice a year, is a window on the activities and initiatives at the Wellesley Centers for Women. The report typically features news about the Centers, interviews with researchers, commentary on recent events or social trends affecting women and girls, announcements of new publications, and…

This study examined the generalizability of direct and mediated links posited in objectification theory among internalization of sociocultural standards of beauty, body surveillance, body shame, and eating disorder symptoms with a sample of Deaf women. The study also examined the role of marginal Deaf cultural identity attitudes within this…

This article offers a clarification and application of aspects of John Dewey's philosophy of art and music that have often been misunderstood, even by philosophers (such as Susanne Langer) and, in particular, by philosophers of music education who quote Dewey in support of neo-Kantian aesthetic conceptions that Dewey was in fact at pains to…

The concept of development is currently under revision in education and psychology. In this essay, Eugene Matusov, Renee DePalma, and Stephanie Drye examine a traditional notion of development and provide an alternative sociocultural view. As educators working within a sociocultural approach to learning, development, and education, the authors see…

This paper reports a case study in which 53 adult refugees initiated their own forms of learning with the aim of strengthening their opportunities for integration into Swedish society. The overall research interest was to find out what theoretical implications can be drawn from a case study where two different forms of learning were implemented.…

This paper reports on a qualitative study of students' engagement with a Web-based inquiry environment aimed at prompting student reflection in processes of scientific inquiry. In order to demonstrate how prompts become structuring resources for students' scientific inquiry, detailed analyses of students' interaction processes are conducted. The…

This article investigates the home literacy practices of two immigrant families, one each of Lebanese and Chinese descent. It explores the consequences of mismatches between home and school literacy practices in relation to mainstream academic outcomes. Two mothers of the families in this study are interviewed about their beliefs and parenting…

The argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speaking competence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued that multimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

The article reports on a small-scale in-depth research study investigating formative assessment enacted and theorised from a sociocultural perspective within a part-time Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme in an English university. Going beyond its conventional conceptualisation within psychological and motivational frameworks,…

Background: Research investigation into epistemological beliefs and students' approaches to learning (SAL) from a qualitative perspective has been limited to a few studies. In particular, very research has attempted to explore the origin of personal epistemology and its relation with SAL, taking into account the sociocultural background and …

In this study, we examined the influence of child gender and sociocultural (SCL) factors in language production. Subjects were French Parisian children in nine age groups (24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45 and 48 months). A total of 316 language samples were recorded during a 20-min standardized play session. Measures of grammatical and lexical…