The need to "raise aspirations" among young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds has been prominent in UK policy debates over the last decade. This paper examines how this discourse is negotiated and contested by teachers and pupils in a Scottish secondary school. Interviews, group discussions and observations were…

Many students of color who are also identified as "struggling" readers are likely to have negative experiences in school. In this article, I discuss the findings of a case study examining how reader identities emerged in and through language for such students. The discourse data analyzed here concern an interactional pattern in which the…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was two-fold: to investigate the dialog about psychosocial aspects of health care in problem based learning (PBL) groups in a single medical school; and to describe the factors that learners and PBL facilitators identify as influencing dialog about these issues in PBL groups. Medical education is a…

Purpose: This work investigated the narratives of development extensionists in relation to natural resource conflict, in order to understand the competing discourses surrounding the wicked problems of natural resource management in Laikipia County, Kenya. Methodology: Q methodology was used to elicit the conflict narratives present among extension…

The author employed a 3-step qualitative research design with multiple instances of source validation to capture expert teachers' (n = 28) reflections on which manifest signs they would look for when they asses students' innovation competency. The author reports on the thematic analysis of the recorded talk in interaction that occurred in teacher…

This study explored how adults used a self-selected online forum to advance their own and others' literacy practices. The study was a discourse-centered online ethnography using triangulated methods, including analysis of list archives, semi-structured and informal interviews, and document collection. These data were analyzed by discourse…

Identity refers to all the characteristics that "specify who we are and also how we see other people" and is formed with the accumulation of our own experiences and those from social life with regard to certain roles like professional, political or parental roles. Some of the characteristics of identity that determine and describe…

More and more educational institutions are moving towards online distance learning. Although asynchronous online learning overcomes the constraints of time, place and pace, online distance learners feel isolated due to the lack of real-time communications. One possible solution for overcoming this sense of isolation is regulating student online…

This research is an ethnographic case study of a book group focusing on the reading and teaching of multicultural literature in a rural, predominately white, middle school setting. We examine how participants co-constructed teacher identities through the parallel narratives they created about themselves and their students. We discovered that the…

This exploratory netnographic study describes how a sample of Ontario kindergarten teachers perceive the new Ontario Full Day Kindergarten (FDK) curriculum. Discussions from teacher message boards, the comment sections of online news articles, and interviews with kindergarten teachers were analyzed and coded using a qualitative approach. Analysis…

Drawing on an evaluation experience of a teacher education preparation project in a rural area of South Africa, this paper attempts to explore the possibility of using Communities of Practice (CoP) in teacher preparation. The paper concludes that the concept of CoP is powerful in providing spaces for self-reflection to pre-service teachers and…

This article focuses on the ways world language teachers individually and collectively negotiate intercultural encounters and symbolic competence while abroad, at the art museum. In this empirical study, I locate, describe and analyze emerging third places by examining the teachers' discourse, in interaction at the museum. The data consists of a…

Background: In the last decade, asynchronous online discussion forums have become a primary focus of many educational researchers. Some advocates believed that the process of typing out messages in itself can promote in-depth critical thinking skills. Nevertheless, empirical research has not provided much support for this claim in natural…

The aim of this research is to identify and analyse the ubiquitous learning acquired through blending education settings devoted to the "lifelong training of trainers" and how these contribute to the development of a conscious, critic and engaged citizenship. Through active exploration of the learning process, the study analyses the…

This article describes a study which explored the social interaction and the reproduction and challenge of gendered discourses in small group discussions in physics. Data for the study consisted of video recordings of eight upper secondary school groups solving physics problems and 15 audiotaped individual interviews with participating students.…