Embedded librarians working in online classrooms present a new avenue of learner support direct to students in the space where they learn. The development of embedded librarian practice has evolved since 2004 and is becoming commonplace in online tertiary classrooms, but what is not yet so common is theory underlying this new practice. A multiple…

Effective mentoring brings positive outcomes for mentees, mentors and their organizations. Modern mentoring is developing through employment of technology and thus it is important to better understand these new opportunities and their limitations. Termed as "e-mentoring", the field remains under-researched and sub-optimally theorized. In…

Background/Context: Sustained school improvement requires adequate organizational and instructional coherence, yet, in typical high schools, subject department organization, norms of teacher professional autonomy, and involvement in multiple initiatives present powerful obstacles to forging a coherent approach to improvement. This study examines…

A key educational objective for the twenty-first century is developing students' epistemic agency. Epistemic agency is the active process of choosing when, what, where one learns and how one knows, as well as the capacity to create knowledge in a community. The knowledge-building communities model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter was used in…

Natural disasters are frequently exacerbated by anthropogenic mechanisms and have social and political consequences for communities. The role of community learning in disasters is seen to be increasingly important. However, the ways in which such learning unfolds in a disaster can differ substantially from case to case. This article uses a…

Purpose: This paper highlights important lessons for co-innovation drawn from three ex-post case study innovation projects implemented within three sub-sectors of the primary industry sector in New Zealand. Design/methodology/approach: The characteristics that fostered co-innovation in each innovation project case study were identified from…

This article summarises the results of a study of the effects of quality audit at an institution over time. The findings from four academic audit reports, prepared for one New Zealand university between 1996 and 2009, yielded a large dataset. Once grouped thematically for analysis, the data were analysed in terms of how well the institution…

In order to teach about sustainability, teachers need to be able to translate their personal understanding of this concept into their pedagogy in ways that make it accessible to their learners. This translation process is known as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This study investigated the way that two teachers translated their understanding…

We know various factors can influence how teaching staff engage with student evaluation, such as institutional policies or staff beliefs. However, little research has investigated the influence of the technical processes of an evaluation system. In this article, we present a case study of the effects of changing the technical system for…

Professional learning communities are receiving increasing attention within the schooling sector but empirical research into their development and use within early childhood education contexts is rare. This paper reports initial findings of an exploratory study into the development of professional learning communities in New Zealand's early…

This article presents a professional development programme which brought an indigenous minority group of tertiary staff together. We describe a peer-mentoring model, piloted in 2009 at The University of Auckland, New Zealand with university staff in order to promote staff advancement. The participants were all Maori, the indigenous people of New…

Learning advisors provide academic literacy development support in a variety of configurations, ranging from one-on-one consultations through to large-scale lectures. Such lectures can be generic, stand-alone modules or embedded within a discipline-specific course. Pragmatic and institutional considerations suggest that a generic model of delivery…

Pirie and Kieren (1989 "For the learning of mathematics", 9(3)7-11, 1992 "Journal of Mathematical Behavior", 11, 243-257, 1994a "Educational Studies in Mathematics", 26, 61-86, 1994b "For the Learning of Mathematics":, 14(1)39-43) created a model (P-K) that describes a dynamic and recursive process by which…

Learning provision, including professional learning, needs to embrace mobility (of knowledge, cultures and contexts--physical and cerebral) to enable education practitioners to interact locally and globally, engage with new literacies, access rich contexts, and to question, co-construct and collaborate. Virtual mentoring, also known as distance,…

This case study forms a foundation for understanding the drivers for successful online learning within a constructivist paradigm. It investigates whether Chinese international students completing a degree had achieved a level of independence necessary to succeed in this context. It found that these students had not achieved the independence…