This article examines how a refugee-background student of Somali Bantu heritage employs linguistic resources to make sense of his experience with forced migration, resettlement, and formal education. Much of the educational research on refugee-background students (and other groups of English learners) propagates a deficit orientation in which…

This article presents an approach to reading like a digital writer to support adolescents' narrative writing in digital formats. By providing digital mentor texts for students to read like digital writers, a more comprehensive and perhaps deeper understanding of digital writing and the memoir genre can emerge.

In her manuscript, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers," author Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa composes several open and honest letters to women of color, challenging them to actively incorporate the process of writing into their everyday lives. She encourages her readers to engage in organic writing by recapturing…

This chapter provides insights into organisational storytelling, narrative learning and identity work in a socio-cultural context. Hakanurmi's research interrogates the meaning-making process during the story circle, what the single participant felt and learnt through digital storytelling and how the social aspect influenced the individual one.…

Current research literature indicates there is a disparity of people of color at the executive level working within institutions of higher education, particularly those with religious affiliations. Similar studies have focused on students and faculty of color, but there has been limited research directed toward administrators (Jackson &…

This chapter focuses on the idea of embodiment to explore how doctoral education can be enhanced by paying attention to narratives of experience and emotion.

When the author was asked to write a mini-memoir about his time as Cal Council president, his first thought was "Now, when exactly was that?" He says that pretty much summarizes the quality of his memory these days. The author's first contact with the California Council on the Education of Teachers was back in the 1970s when the…

We propose a method to quantify "semantic linguistic maturity" (SELMA) based on a high dimensional semantic representation of words created from the co-occurrence of words in a large text corpus. The method was applied to oral narratives from 108 children aged 4;0-12;10. By comparing the SELMA measure with maturity ratings made by human…

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Canadian faculty of education explore their past positionings within the postdoctoral space. We share personal narratives related to issues of agency and…

This article discusses the relation between emotions and testimony, by asking the questions: What do emotions do? Are emotions possible and desirable starting points for teaching difficult and complex subjects such as injustice and historical wounds? This article explores the 2015 image and testimony of Alan Kurdi, lying on a beach of the…

The purpose of this pilot study was to examine and refine an oral narrative intervention addressing personal narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and severe language impairment. A multiple baseline across participants design investigated the effect of the intervention on the macrostructure of personal narratives. Three…

Employability is a complex, contested concept which has tended to be considered in terms of a dominant discourse of skills. This article argues that employability needs to be thought of more holistically, as ongoing, life-long, situated learning, whilst acknowledging that the contested language of skills and the need to demonstrate competency…

Official policy texts in England have long assumed that students make their Higher Education choices in an individualized, rational and context-free manner. Under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government (2010-2015), a greater emphasis was placed on accomplishing higher levels of widening participation in elite institutions. Those…

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student's subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written…

Imagine a fourth grade classroom filled with 26 students all equally unique in their abilities, successes and challenges, talents, likes and dislikes. What is a teacher to do to meet all of their instructional needs? What about their behavioral, social, and emotional needs? Differentiated instruction (DI) is an approach to teaching that suggests…