This article attempts to explore the concept of the professional learning community from the critical discourse perspective. Instead of viewing collective learning as being controlled by higher levels within the school hierarchy as a means to increase power, critical discourse seeks to uncover how power, knowledge, and truth are continuously being…

Findings related to the background knowledge, writing, and reading of disadvantaged students in a South African university geography department are discussed. The notion "academic discourse community" is used as an analytical framework. Findings indicate that students and instructors alike face several extreme challenges. (Contains 6…

High school teacher James C. Mayer explains how a student-run symposium can promote "risk-taking and participation" and help students practice effective persuasion skills before demonstrating them in writing. The symposium places students in roles that encourage responsibility and ownership for discussion and learning, shifting the classroom…

The vision of K-12 standards-based mathematics reform embraces a greater emphasis on students' ability to communicate their understandings of mathematics by utilizing adaptive reasoning (i.e., reflection, explanation, and justification of thinking) through mathematics discourse. However, recent studies suggest that many students lack the…

This volume in the TESOL Classroom Practice Series asks one fundamental question, "How can teachers teach the students, not the book?" The response, given within "Using Textbooks Effectively", is to move beyond the textbook as a separate entity and view it instead as part of the ESOL curriculum process and as a tool for student learning. The…

This dissertation addresses the related questions of how online communication technologies affect communication in science and, more broadly, how new ways of interaction in online spaces affect how texts enact genres. Genres have been usefully thought of as typified discursive responses to recurrent social exigences, and much recent work has shown…

Migration has shifted the world's population such that hardly a monocultural society still exists. These demographic changes have brought about changes in the strategies used to maintain national unity and in the distribution of benefits, goods, and services within the society. Providing equitable access to high-quality education has been among…

The paper discusses the value of peer observation followed by professional learning conversations for the professional development of teacher educators. The authors Analise their shared learning experiences and articulate what challenged them in these experiences. They discuss the ways in which their perceptions of this process differed or were…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the central role of critical reflection for practitioners. Design/methodology/approach: This joint paper is informed by a practitioner and an academic perspective and is an output from ongoing research. An MA in Strategic HR provides the initial focus. This partnership programme is…

Our argument concerning the debate around the process of "conceptual change" is that it is both an evolutionary learning process and a revolutionary paradigm change. To gain a deeper understanding of the process, the article focuses on the discourse of educational facilitators participating in a community of learners. Applying the methodology of…

This exploratory study uses qualitative methods to analyze the impact of conversations in the Border Pedagogy "Cafes" on more than 500 binational educators from the Tijuana/San Diego area on the U.S.-Mexico border. Four important themes emerged from the analysis that describe the impact of the cafes and offer a strong foundation on which…

The American Academy's Rome Prize brings together scholars and artists whose work relies on the rich and ancient city, in a Renaissance-style palace, which was custom-built for the institution in 1914. The academy experience is intrinsically communal, with staff members and fellows alike, regularly using the term ecross-pollination to describe the…

Notions of distributed leadership and professional learning communities are bedfellows in the drive to school improvement. However, these ideas of sharing leadership and mutual learning as a community are not introduced and developed in a neutral context. Power relationships, priorities and purposes are constructed in certain ways within the…

Princeton University Press recently published the American moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit", which quickly made the New York Times best seller list. Originally published in the journal "Raritan" in 1986, Frankfurt's book has been heralded as an important theoretical development in the study of what he (and society)…

Teacher professional learning communities provide environments in which teachers engage in regular research and collaboration. They have been found effective as a means for connecting professional learning to the day-to-day realities faced by teachers in the classroom. In this article, the authors draw on survey data collected in primary schools…