A significant dilemma for the health and human service professions continues to be the question of how best to bridge the divide between academic research and practice. Communities of practice have traditionally been a vehicle for collaborative research and for information exchange (Moore, 2008). Through collaboration, communities of practice have…

In this paper we present a case study about a community of practice's foundation and development among Italian teachers, researchers and university students who participated in a European project aimed at developing and testing innovative pedagogical models and technologies for collaborative knowledge building. Forty-five people (34 teachers, five…

This paper describes the implementation of an online discussion forum as a means of facilitating case-based learning in an intermediate financial accounting course. The paper commences with a review of case-based learning literature and the use of online discussions as a delivery platform, linking these pedagogical approaches to the emerging needs…

Many educators draw the public's attention to the need for diversifying the teaching force. They argue that teachers from diverse cultures offer a variety of perspectives, encourage students to participate in community work, and exhibit cultural awareness and appreciation of differences. One of the ways to diversify the teaching force includes…

This is an educational ethnography of collective informal learning and education in social movements based on five years of participant observation among Boston's New Majority from 2003-2009. The New Majority is a "movement of movements" and an organization of People of Color in Boston that seek to address an egregious obstacle to…

Celebrating and responding equitably to diversity have become increasingly essential for teachers' work in the new millennium, which is characterized by shifting local and global communities. Aiming to broaden conceptions of teacher education within a predominantly "back to basics" literacy environment, this article draws on selected…

The research reported here documents scientists' changing practices and attitudes concerning college teaching. Graduate students and postdoctoral scientists participated in long-term, inquiry-based teaching professional development while maintaining an ongoing commitment to research science. Data analysis focused on digital recording and…

This paper presents situated learning as a theoretical framework for conceptualising new ways to approach science education. Key constructs associated with this framework, including communities of practice, Discourse and identity, are introduced. I advance an argument to develop classroom communities of practice based on engaged citizenship…

Researchers posit that teachers' teaching and learning are improved by teachers' collective efforts to examine and reflect on practice. Yet the questions of what and how teachers learn when collaborating with colleagues remain unanswered: What kinds of knowledge and skills do teachers acquire in conjunction with their collaboration? What brings…

Many would agree on the primacy of a high quality education for social and economic health, democracy, and individual prosperity, but scarcely a week goes by that we do not hear that a quality education for all children is not possible. Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) and their partners are told that parents don't care;…

Responding to the need for foreign language fluency in ever-globalizing business and cultural spheres, the federal government and foreign language institutions in an eleven-member task force collaboratively published a set of nationally recognized, foundational standards for foreign language teaching. Rather than rely on teacher-centered…

This qualitative case-study explores the ways in which an innovative M.Ed. program facilitated the development of future ECE reflective leaders. Using case study methodology, it presents the transformational process two recent graduates underwent during their studies. The findings indicate four main sources that initiated the deep student…

This article reviews the Mid-Career Development Chinese Language course (MCDCL) funded by the British Inter-university China Centre, a project funded from various public sources in the UK. The discussion focuses on how and why the MCDCL course has adopted the blended learning construct and with what outcomes. Using two frameworks for blended…

African American women are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields (Catsambis, 1994). The socialization and "under-education" of African American female students engenders ideas of inferiority, while the presence of an inferior race, sex and class, in one body, may produce an ideology of mediocrity.…

In November 2008 the Sloan Consortium published "Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States." This study produced survey statistics relating to enrollments in online courses. The study confirmed what most administrators and faculty members already suspected: the growth of online higher education continues to be astounding;…