The language of a literate classroom is profoundly impacted by that which is included, excluded, ignorantly condoned, and perpetually presented with distortions. The article analyzes seven comprehensive frameworks: (1) diverse voices; (2) identities of the language users; (3) present and absent curriculum; (4) cognitive structures influencing…

Traditional educational policy analysis is typically evaluative, focusing on degrees of success or failure, often obscuring how particular forms of knowledge and power reproduce social inequity. A Foucauldian, postmodern framework is particularly appropriate for analyzing educational policy because, in part, the Foucauldian concepts of…

Presents the case study of an online conference for students of English in a teacher education course. Argues electronic conferencing reveals the inadequacy of the concept of "reflective practitioner" to describe and analyze the complex process of teacher development. Demonstrates the social character of learning, highlighting the place…

States that cooperative learning in developmental mathematics classes has greater success rates than do traditional remedial courses. Discusses learning communities--in which instructors work with other instructors to help students connect mathematics with other disciplines, and in which there is an increased level of peer interaction--as an…

Providing high-quality student services to students enrolled in distance education programs is a critical link to the academic success of this growing student population. (Contains 7 figures.)

In this study, the oral conversations of primary students were examined in an effort to understand how student participation and role in discourse community affects their learning. Discourse analysis provided both an analytical framework for analysing student and teacher talk and a definition of discourse communities. The concept of discourse…

This article reports on doctoral research which explored the meaning and role of information literacy among a specific group of workers--firefighters. An alternative concept of information literacy and a broader definition of information literate people are introduced. The article suggests that librarians are currently bound by an educational…

The use of English as an international language of science (EILS) is by now well documented; depending on one's orientation, English may be seen as a neutral "lingua franca" or it may be seen more insidiously as a dominating and overpowering force. This paper explores these co-existing roles of EILS through various perspectives. It begins by…

Advocates of computer-mediated instruction have pointed to the potential of online teaching for facilitating students' active learning behavior. Small-group online discussion can have a role in meaningful student interaction. Yet, what is less known are the conditions under which students actually engage in interaction in online discussion groups…

Despite the rich literature on disciplinary knowledge construction and multilingual scholars' academic literacy practices, little is known about how novice scholars are engaged in knowledge construction in negotiation with various target discourse communities. In this case study, with a focused analysis of a Chinese computer science doctoral…

Richard Gambino's "Blood of My Blood" was of help to a writing instructor coming to terms with the role that her Italian ethnicity played in her life and education. Gambino's understanding of the inner tensions experienced by an individual who must negotiate between two cultures has helped the instructor in teaching working-class and…

A study examined from a feminist poststructuralist perspective the discourses available in a classroom using a critical pedagogy, based on a belief that teaches need to make it possible for their students to question the social world constructed in texts. The teacher of an Australian junior primary classroom (with students age five to eight) took…

The intercollegiate forensics community appears less receptive to women than it is to men. Women report a variety of positive and negative gender-based experiences in intercollegiate forensics. Positive experiences tend to include women into the intercollegiate forensics community or to allow women to include others in the community. Negative…

Generally speaking English department faculty respond very differently when reading freshman writing than when reading most other kinds of writing. Mina Shaughnessy has pointed out that "ordinary readers" try to understand what they are reading, but the writing teacher, "like a lawyer examining a client's document for all possible ambiguities and…

The current public debate between the images of the smiling war hero and of the grimacing Vietnam veteran provide opportunities to define two discourse communities that manifest themselves in students' written discourse. These can be seen as akin to the first American jeremiads, which were Puritan treatises written by seventeenth century religious…