Purpose: This study aims to illustrate Mitchell's (2008) theory of critical service-learning within elementary and middle school classrooms, looking specifically at classroom events, in which community partners visit classrooms to discuss student-selected social issues. Design/methodology/approach: Data from teacher interviews, classroom…

This article is a report on a teacher study group that focused on three elementary teachers' perceptions of mathematical modeling in contrast to typical mathematics instruction. Through the theoretical lens of figured worlds, I discuss how mathematics instruction was conceptualized across the classrooms in terms of artifacts, discourse, and…

This paper describes an engineering outreach programme designed to increase the interest of under-represented youth in engineering and to disseminate pre-engineering design challenge materials to K-12 educators and volunteers. Given university students' critical role as facilitators of the outreach programme, researchers conducted a two-year…

This study explores the language ideologies of young children in a Spanish/English dual language programme in the USA. Recent studies of language ideologies in education have centred primarily on adults or older students, but this study focuses on young children from varied language backgrounds. By analysing discussions centred on children's…

In this article the author draws on the concept of positioning to examine how language is used during one particular fifth-grade writing lesson to construct both the lesson and the participants. The author's analysis of the classroom interactions makes visible how participants colluded to position one student in particular, Larnell, as a "bad, bad…

The aim of this qualitative case study is to investigate how learning in "democratic participation" is constituted by the social interaction and conversation pattern in school democratic meetings in a Swedish primary school. According to the findings, a pupil control discourse and the Initiation-Response-Evaluation pattern dominates the…

Gender and achievement is controversial. Social and cultural concerns about who boys are and who they should become is tied closely to how both coeducational and single-gender schools function, and how they approach literacy issues. Currently, there is little understanding of social and cultural influences on students' experiences with discourse…

In this self-study, a teacher educator and an experienced teacher analyze an unexpected shared opportunity to mentor pre-service elementary educators. Our partnership arose during a graduate course on literacy development for elementary students, serendipitously captured during an extended electronic conversation with the pre-service candidates.…

Background: Existing research suggests that one of the challenges for teachers in persisting with innovative inquiry curricula is their difficulty scaffolding students' transitions into technology-supported and open-ended activities. The question of whether students can effectively scaffold one another's transitions has not been previously…