This research is about a redesign of the online and mobile app African Storybook (ASb) initiative services that support the creation of openly licensed storybooks for Africa. This redesign was initiated after a review of the ASb web site. The redesign makes use of cultural-historical activity theory principles, including: object of activity, tool…

In this paper we explore how students can experience the relevance of mathematical modelling activities. In the literature we found that relevance is a connection among several issues (relevance of what? to whom? according to whom? and to what end?). We framed this concept in terms of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), a theory for…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational research was to examine to what degree a relationship exists between the frequency of participation in Title I public school mentoring programs and the mentored student's self-esteem among fourth and fifth-grade students in two southeastern elementary schools. Social learning and development take on…

A new employee being successfully socialized into the organization and their role in particular is associated with overall individual and organizational success. Moreover, newcomer proactivity is a critical component of the organizational socialization process as individual socialization tactics can contribute to increased newcomer learning. The…

Universities rely heavily on co-operation between staff to function effectively. They are complex, interdependent and highly relational organisations which often appear to run on goodwill. Organisational structures, systems and processes play an important role in the delivery of professional support services, but working relationships between…

The concept of social capital has become in recent decades one of the most powerful ideas in social science. Having its roots in sociology and economics, it has consistently "settled" in almost all fields that deal with human functioning--pedagogy, social work, social anthropology, history, health sciences. This multiplicity of…

There is no standard definition of empathy, but the concept is assumed to be innately pro-social and teachable regardless of factors such as power dynamics or other manifestations of social injustice within a society. Such assumptions in discursive practices, whether academic, popular, or pedagogical, obscure the emergence of two important…

A common charge levelled at English and Welsh citizenship education, whether taught as a separate subject or incorporated into other disciplines, is that it encourages compliance more than it inspires critical thought. There is room within the compulsory citizenship framework, however, for teachers to advance genuinely critical attributes in…

We examine the impact of "Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading" ("BNR") (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985) with the idea of extending literacy learning beyond the early grades, describing present-day conceptions of secondary-school literacy learning, and calling to "further…

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which Arendt's writings on totalitarianism act as a warning sign for political and miseducational circumstances in the USA. Because the term totalitarianism has been used imprudently (largely in the mass media) to express repressive conditions in so-called models of democracy, this paper seeks to…

The contextualized nature of learning with technology is widely acknowledged in research, but there remains a lack of sound social theorization to conceptualize and understand this contextualization. Giddens' structuration theory has been proposed as an appropriate tool for analysing and understanding human interactions with technologies. Drawing…

This article addresses inter-professional work and decision-making around inclusion in school, using an approach inspired by social practice theory. Based on a case analysis, the article presents analytical examples of the ways in which knowledge from children's everyday life tends to be considered anecdotal and disregarded in the decision-making…

The influence of social capital on an individual's educational achievements is the subject of numerous scientific papers. Research on social capital is most frequently based on Coleman's (1988) or Bourdieu's (1986) theories of capital, which are related to different paradigms of social theory: whereas Coleman's approach has its roots in structural…

Organizations spend millions of dollars training employees in ways to improve their skills--recently through mandatory professional development delivered virtually or through online asynchronous platforms. This research investigated how social exchange theory and self-efficacy theory inform faculty participants' motivation to transfer such…

In recent years a host of scholars have considered the contributions of various critical and post-structural perspectives to the study of college student development. This body of work has drawn on critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory, among others, to advance more power-conscious approaches to student development. Critical…