Under the constructivist learning paradigm, which emphasises authenticity as a required condition for learning, distance educators have been striving to create authentic learning environments that reflect the real world. However, it is inevitably challenging to make an online learning environment authentic for learners when it is ultimately…

Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or "paperwork." We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable…

This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter--an embodied experience of sensations and intensities--might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal narrative with theories of affect, new materialism and post-humanism, we write an affective encounter that catches up people and objects in relations…

In this article, the authors explore what it means to be critical qualitative researchers before, during, and after the 2016 US presidential campaign and election. They reflect on their positionality as scholars of color and second-generation immigrants with commitments to marginalized communities, but also with concerns for their own everyday…

Previous studies of citizenship preparation in upper secondary school, including studies on vocational programmes, have primarily focused on general subjects. Potential and actual roles of vocational subjects in this context have received little attention, so we have little knowledge of what is likely a significant part of the citizenship…

Early childhood care and development has increasingly become a part of the global development agenda. Fueled by a threefold rationale, rooted in development psychology, social economy, and human rights, the arguments for investing in early childhood care and development are virtually unassailable. However, this rationale is somehow at odds with…

The aim of this article is to show how autoethnography is a useful and revealing research methodology that should be encouraged in academia, especially in higher education. With objectivity, autoethnography, which is a relatively new approach, may be a path toward deeper cultural discussions that are so important in everyday life. Moreover,…

The purpose of this study is to argue that formal education had multiple, independent origins in the emergence of ancient civilizations, for universally the same reasons. It uses socio-biological literature to outline the nature of human societies; ethnographic literature to show that no systems of formal education existed in small-scale…

Research framed by evolving sociocultural theories have been fundamental in advancing the study of early childhood literacies. More recently the field has been enriched by posthumanist theories that have shifted the analytic gaze from children's participation in literacy practices and events, to the fluid relationality of literacies. Concurrently,…

Teacher educators must embody an equity-focused orientation when working with preservice teachers. The article shares insights gained from a quantitative exercise as part of a critical autoethnography project. We situate this project as professional development for two teacher education researchers. The goals were to deepen knowledge of and…

This study investigates how recently resettled refugee youth took up STEM-rich making experiences at an after-school community club in relation to negotiating their resettlement process. Using critical participatory ethnography grounded in sustained engagement with and in community, authors 1 and 2 worked with refugee youth through sustained…

This article seeks to explore intercultural communication among a group of students with diverse linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds in an English-medium transnational university in China, focusing on multilingual students' practices and perceptions of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Informed by an expanded understanding of translanguaging…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the challenges the author had encountered and the counter-strategies she had adopted to overcome them while conducting ethnography for the first time during her doctoral research. In this paper, the author hopes to provide guidance for future researchers by discussing the role she played in her…

The death of a parent can strike at our very core, rattling our sense of self and raising questions of how we could possibly continue beyond their departure. For the PhD student, parental loss can act as a significant disruption, saddling them with a heavy emotional toll to carry alongside the typical challenges of completing a thesis. Yet,…

The current literature on 'sense of belonging' spans a number of disciplines, with no apparent consensus on definition between these, complicated by the fact that sense of belonging is temporal and context-sensitive (such as during COVID-19). In particular, a closer look at how students define sense of belonging is needed from an up-to-date…