Since the beginning of the 21st century, the appropriation of the sociocultural perspective by the physics education research community has represented a linguistic turn in the field, pointing out a promising path to overcome the dominance of the "individual paradigm," both in terms of student learning and initial and continuing teacher…

The economic dislocations and political antagonisms brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are once again fueling speculation that we are collectively witnessing the terminal crisis of the neoliberal order. It will be argued here that this crisis rhetoric is grounded in a fundamental misconception of neoliberalism that fails to capture its…

Bakhtin is a source of theoretical inspiration for educational research. This article will be an attempt to activate also Bakhtin's analytical practice and his methodology. I will explore and elaborate the typology of discursive relations which are suggested in Bakhtin's book on Problems of Dostoevsky' Poetics (Bakhtin ,1984), and the potential…

The challenges involved in navigating between home, school and academic languages, especially in a low resource context, have been well documented in the literature. Processes and strategies that allow the use of students' "language as resource" have also been suggested by research. In the context of explorations, where students work…

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined as an overarching concept that integrates the main tenets of Vygotsky's theory of human development. The conceptualization of the ZPD begins with its social, cultural, and historical context and traces its development as a spatial and temporal metaphor that reflects the sociogenetic root of all…

Art educators have been promoting Community-Based Art Education (CBAE) in schools in order to enhance students' sense of socio-cultural identity and contextual learning about local art and culture. It cannot only bridge the gap between the students' daily lives and the communities and art, but can also enhance their inquiry, discovery and…

Language in education for children and youth from low-income communities of color, including those learning English as an additional language, has been fraught for decades with ideological entanglements, conceptual ambiguities, and empirical limitations. Meanwhile, the teacher learning challenge to implement equitable teaching practices remains…

Narratives have become increasingly important in the field of applied linguistics, as recent publications have illustrated, yet narrative analysis could still be considered undertheorized. This article outlines a specific, dialogical approach to the narrative analysis of data in qualitative research. Building on Bakhtin's notion of dialogue,…

We illustrate an analytic framework for teachers' mathematics discourse in instruction (MDI). MDI is built on three interacting components of a mathematics lesson: a sequence of examples and related tasks; accompanying talk; patterns of interaction. Together these illuminate what is made available to learn. MDI is grounded empirically in…

In this paper, one of the goals is to highlight a disciplinary intersection between applied linguistics, psychology and gerontology. Though connections between applied linguistics and psychology, and applied linguistics and gerontology, have been made in the past, the particular intersection described offers some new insights by making use of a…

Theories of human development and learning provide an essential framework in which to understand the mechanisms involved in the process of formal instruction as a specific form of teaching and learning in the school setting. The sociocultural theory of development, founded on the works of Lev Vygotsky, espouses the view that social interaction…

The "purpose" of this article is to illustrate how potential learning is related to hegemonic speech genres. This we do through examples from two religious education (RE) classrooms, one Norwegian and one Swedish. By presenting important dimensions of speech genres used in RE classrooms, the article also contributes to developing theory.…

Held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Denver, CO, USA; 21 March 2009. This all-day colloquium was part of an ongoing discussion of ways that methods and frameworks from micro-ethnography, Conversation Analysis (CA), and Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory are re-specifying "language" and "acquisition" from a…

This paper captures and characterises the interplay between a group of student teachers' narratives of social network practice and their emergent professional practice with technologies. Teachers on an Initial Teacher Education programme in the UK spent a semester studying a module that synthesised university-based lectures with a professional…

This article states that in order to exercise citizenship with responsibility, language teachers need to popularize a discourse for criticism in which students and teachers transcend tacit knowledge and common sense due to meta-cognition and argumentation and reach systematic knowledge and procedures posed by experts in the different disciplines.…