Increasingly, educators from all disciplines are using blogs, social networking sites, VLEs and wikis to encourage academic discourse between students. However, a common problem experienced by educators is how these important learning experiences can be assessed and because of this difficulty many are not assessed. For some time now, I have been…

This study pursues a Habermasian analysis of citizen discussions and of the local public sphere to shed light on renewable energy futures in rural east-central Canada. Using data from group discussions, it pursues an investigation of utterances, validity claims and of discourses. The analysis is supplemented by participant observation of publicly…

Intergroup dialogues (IGD)--face-to-face, structured interactions between people of different social identities--is one educational intervention used to foster engagement across differences and to promote social justice. Using an 18-month case study methodology, we examined the experiences of IGD students and facilitators at one campus to gain a…

As the proportion of children from culturally diverse backgrounds in the nation's schools increases, the teacher workforce is projected to remain overwhelmingly White, monolingual, and female. These differences are believed to have fostered a cultural mismatch, where teachers are challenged in their ability to meaningfully connect with their…

This paper presents a normative pragmatics analysis of students' use of science content in eight socioscientific group discussions about human gene therapy. The specific focus of the paper is on the argumentative role that invocations of science had in the dialectics of the discussions. The analysis suggests that science content occasionally…

This study explores asynchronous online discussions as a learning strategy for Japanese EFL students from various perspectives. A text analysis of learner posts and replies was performed to determine the quantity, quality, and accuracy of the written language produced. Student participation rates during all four online exchanges were measured to…

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…

The purpose of this study was to explore how critical and reflective thinking about race and culture evolved and manifested in online threaded discussions among pre-service teachers during a required Multicultural Education course. Because of the ubiquitous presence of computer-mediated forms of communication, research has increased in recent…

Science education reform calls for learners to be engaged in hand-on, minds-on activities related to science. As a part of this reform effort, learners are encouraged to use writing as a means of documenting their work and developing their understandings. This qualitative case study employed the Conceptual Change Perspective and Sociocultural…

This dissertation examines the participation of one Chinese teacher and five 13 to 15 year-old Chinese heritage students in a classroom in a Chinese community school during group discussions about narrative texts. In this study, the teacher used Collaborative Reasoning (CR) (Anderson, et al., 2001) to help the Chinese heritage students extend…

This paper describes the "practice architectures"; and "ecologies of practice" of LS (lesson study) in an Indonesian private elementary school. It aims at drawing on LS as a form of professional learning from the perspective of contemporary practice theory (Kemmis, Wilkinson, Hardy, & Edwards-Groves, 2009; Kemmis, 2009a,…

Gabriela Montserrat (pseudonym) is a Mexican-American child classified by her school district as an "emerging bilingual" and is the focus of this qualitative case study that took place at a public elementary school located in a suburban community in the southwestern US in Mrs Pérez's (pseudonym) second-grade classroom. The student's use…

In this article, we explore the experiences of four girls with reading difficulties who participated in a book club designed to promote critical discussion of sociocultural gendered issues. Using the book "Dork diaries: Tales from a NOT-SO- fabulous life", they connected content in the book to their lives as relates to school "food…

This study examines the role of online communities in connecting and supporting librarian researchers, through the analysis of member activities in the online community for academic librarians that attended the 2014 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). The 2014 IRDL cohort members participated in the online community via Twitter…

It can reasonably be said that the discussion board is the "heart" of an online course. The discussion board can and should help the learner to make meaning of the content or topic and to find relevance to their lives. When this "engagement" does not occur, the individual does not benefit from the discussion, and it becomes…