This article considers a noted trend by teacher educators at a South African University where student teachers seem to have very little connection with children they teach on their teaching practicals. This lack of engagement and ability to see individual children that are being taught and respond to them is the focus of the paper. The paper…

This article reports the findings from a study of undergraduate students in an academic program focused on integrative learning rather than interdisciplinarity. One aspect of this study included how students defined integrative learning. This participant-shaped understanding of integrative learning was broad and reflected a continuum of…

The authors are both professional practitioners (law and social work, respectively) who entered the university as discipline-based scholars. Their respective interests in teaching and learning have led them both down a path where they have transitioned from a discipline-based orientation to organizational roles grounded primarily in teaching and…

Three elementary teachers share how they engaged in active listening with the families of children in their classrooms by using home-school journals. Their use spans pre-Kindergarten to fifth grade, and the techniques and responses by each teacher vary based on need and intended purpose. The authors share explanations of process, findings, and…

Research on preservice teacher learning has often focused on coursework and course related field experiences, and not as much on the learning that takes place during student teaching field experiences. Since preservice student teachers are engaged with children on a daily basis, attention to their own students' thinking should be viewed as a means…

Some years ago, the author had her first opportunity to teach an undergraduate American Romanticism course, which meant she had a chance to teach "Moby-Dick" the way she thought it should be taught. Meeting two days a week, her course was set up so that students read about thirty pages of "Moby-Dick" for one class meeting a week paired with…

This research explores the ways in which normative structures organize experiences and representations of identities. It reports on two groups, one in which the members identified as rural and heterosexual and the other as urban and lesbian. Both participated in literary reading and response practices organized by a literary anthropological…

This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological…

In this paper, I show how Mead's theory of emergence can prove explanatory in how the theory-practice gap is co-created and sustained in "front-end loading" university programs. Taking teacher education as an exemplar, I argue that trainee teachers encounter different and oft-times conflicting environmental, social and cultural conditions in the…

This qualitative study reveals the ways in which reading and reflecting on two counter-narrative young adult novels fostered opportunities for preservice English teachers to think more acutely about their understandings of race within and beyond the text. Participants expressed feelings of empathy with and connection to characters whose cultural…

After reading a detailed account of a serious mistake in which a similar-age other went against personal values or a prior commitment, undergraduates rated their feelings of dissonance (regret, hypocrisy, and stupidity) had they been in the actor's place. Relative to a control condition, reading relevant proverbs such as "everybody makes mistakes"…

The general aim of this study was to examine the relations among epistemological, reading and writing beliefs held by psychology undergraduates and the role played by these three types of belief in influencing the degree of perspectivism manifested in a written argumentation task based on reading two texts presenting conflicting perspectives on…

This article discusses an application of the Lewinian/Kolb experiential learning model in the context of undergraduate participation in the Missouri Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) program. CAPS is designed to simulate common, everyday experiences among people living in poverty as participants take on the roles of family members working…

Two collaborative writing partners sought to deepen their understanding of transformative learning by conducting several spirals of grounded theory research on their own collaborative relationship. Drawing from adult education, business, and social science literature and including descriptive analysis of their records of activity and interaction…

In 1994 Orlikowski and Gash articulated Technological Frames of Reference as a systematic theoretical lens to examine technological developments in organisations. A decade later, in 2004, Davidson and Pai expressed concern that while the lens was widely cited in academic discourse, the incidence and adoption of the model as an analytical framework…