English educators at all levels have endeavored to understand difference in their classrooms both in terms of the content that they teach and in terms of the social and cultural identities of students in their classrooms. However, although educators have come a long way in understanding identity as it is constituted by race and gender, much work…

In this article, the author describes the use of active and collaborative learning strategies in an undergraduate sociological theory course. A semester-long ethnographic project is the foundation for the course; both individual and group participation contribute to the learning process. Assessment findings indicate that students are able, through…

Utilizing an integration of social-cognitivist and socio-cultural approaches, this study--comparing the interactive processes among peers and their mentor in two contrasting groups--was designed to explore the reasons why two learning groups, engaged in an inquiry-based learning project with comparatively sustained discussion, produced vastly…

This article demonstrates how literacy practices in an 11th grade, urban, English classroom in the United States worked to delineate and patrol gender borders between acceptable masculine and feminine social practices. Drawing upon Blackburn's (2005) and Thorne's (1993) studies of the gendered boundaries that are created and questioned in literacy…