Jean Kirshner holds a Ph.D. in Education and Human Resource Development from Colorado State University and specializes in literacy and teacher education. Jean started her career as the Early Childhood Director at Saint Ignatius Grammar School, Chicago in 1988. After two years she joined the Child Opportunity Program in Denver as a Head Start…

This study addresses underlying principles to interpret scholarly-based service-related teaching and learning. Such principles include addressing specific concerns of communities, transforming theoretical knowledge into lived experiences for students, making the knowledge generated within communities meaningful and forging constant growth and…

Research Findings: Research has demonstrated the developmental and educational benefits of play. Despite these benefits, teacher-directed academic instruction is prominent in kindergarten. There is increasing acknowledgment in curricula and policies of the challenges presented by a lack of play in classrooms and the need to support academic…

This paper examines how the addition of intercultural interventions carried out throughout European credit-bearing exchange programmes can enhance sojourners' development of intercultural competencies, and it explores how both formal and non-formal pedagogical interventions may be designed and implemented. Such interventions were conducted at a…

Collaborative digital textbooks--comprehensive materials covering entire curriculums--are developing from being books in pdf format to becoming collaborative digital environments where teachers and students can communicate, engage in feedback and discussions, share and manipulate materials, test knowledge, and monitor results. This study…

Courses: Business Communication, Intercultural Communication. Objectives: Students will demonstrate understanding of some of the effects of culture on business communication. Students will explore cultural diversity in customer-seller relationships.

The fact that the prospective Turkish teachers' having a command of different methods and techniques as being Turkish teachers of the future is important in terms of its positive effects on the comprehension and expression skills of the middle school students. This study used the case study design and the qualitative approach. The aim of the…

The purpose of this article is to share the results of a qualitative research study designed to shed light on the perspectives of inclusive prekindergarten classroom teachers in the United States. This study used surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to explore understandings of recently adopted learning standards and accountability…

This study focuses on the use of a mentoring protocol, the reflective dialogue journal, to develop professional competencies for pre-service teachers within a school-university partnership. To examine the effectiveness of the reflective dialogue journal protocol and the processes employed by mentor teachers to assist pre-service teachers with…

Teacher preparation is a complex process; also complex are the standards that define what novice teachers need to know and be able to do to effectively meet the needs of all of their students. Add the demographic shift in the student population, and there are additional demands on teachers to provide students with the education they need and…

This article explores the interplay of the 'live' experience of drama learning in the classroom and curated digital content on learner meaning making, collaborative creation and subjectivities. It examines a case study conducted in an inner-city secondary school in Sydney, Australia, as part of a larger innovative international collaborative drama…

Outreach is often seen as only having an impact on the school students taking part rather than also having an impact on the accompanying teachers participating in university led outreach activities. A group of secondary school science teachers who have been long-term engagers in chemistry outreach at a single Higher Education Institution have been…

The growth of English into a lingua franca has inevitably created linguistic deviations and innovations in the use of English. These emerging uses that result from the needs and preferences of speakers whose mother tongues are all different can be broadly identified as lexico-grammatical and pronunciation features and they compose one of the main…

As higher education has shifted from an elite to an internationalised and massified system, we can no longer assume that students entering Western universities are familiar with the multiple literacy expectations of the university and professional worlds. Students are required to negotiate between different literacy practices, imbued with…

This paper describes a multiple case study on open inquiry-based learning in primary schools. During open inquiry, teachers often experience difficulties in balancing support and transferring responsibility to pupils' own learning. To facilitate teachers in guiding open inquiry, we developed hard and soft scaffolds. The hard scaffolds consisted of…