Academic writing is rested on a view of academic negotiation between writers and readers in which writers ultimately aim to gain credibility in their academic discipline. In doing so, they utilize a wide range of linguistic devices based on cultural and disciplinary norms to communicate with readers and convince the readers about the truth of…

This study is about graduate students' discourse practices in classroom text-based synchronous computer mediated discussions (SCMD). Cultural historical activity theory (in short, Activity Theory) is the primary theoretical lens through which the data are analyzed. Engeström's (1987) Activity System model among the various theoretical positions or…

In exploring homophobia in schools, the author discusses a qualitative research study conducted with a group of teachers from New York State. The article examines how the group of teachers (participating in professional development program) discusses their perceptions of homophobia in their classrooms and schools. Specifically, the teachers…

In this article, we describe a project on reasoning about socio-scientific issues (SSIs), involving French and Australian pre-service science teachers engaged in on-line discussion and development of a wiki. In the research, we developed frameworks for looking at the quality of reasoning about "socially acute" sustainability questions.…

This chapter is framed by the three questions related to learning in Practice Theory posed by Johannes Wagner (2008): (1) What is learned?; (2) Who is learning?; and (3) Who is participating in the learning? These questions are addressed in two learning theories: Language Socialization and Situated Learning theory. In Language Socialization, the…

The relationships between a multidimensional model of school community and civic engagement were examined using survey data collected for the 1999 IEA Civic Education Study from large, nationally representative samples of adolescents in Australia and the United States. This study extends previous research by considering the extent to which…

Judith Rance-Roney calls on teachers to form intentional learning communities within their classrooms. The Culture Share Club, initially conceived to provide scaffolding for ELL students to acquire English and pass the statewide test in English, legitimized student knowledge by benefitting all students as they prepared materials for lessons and…

While plagiarism is often viewed in terms of ethical binaries, scholars in composition studies have recognized plagiarism as part of literacy practices governing identity construction. In this light, what is at stake is how writers construct identity by positioning stance-claims according to the standards of respective discourse communities. For…

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the "epistemic public(s)" constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that…

Globalization has brought more and more peoples and societies around the world into contact with "international" standards of law, commerce, and communication. That process has also enabled a number of formerly underdeveloped societies to experience extraordinary patterns of economic growth, especially in the last third of the twentieth…

Academic criticism is defined in this paper as a statement which reflects a discrepancy between the stance of a researcher/author, on the one hand, and that of another researcher or the discourse community as a whole, on the other (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza, 2003). Despite researchers' awareness of the potential difficulty academic criticism…