This article calls for a focus on well-being and mental/emotional health in teacher education programs--driven by two important, accelerating societal and educational trends: an influx of digitally-networked technologies, and a rising crisis in mental health and emotional well-being. Internet technologies have significant learning affordances to…

The concept of Funds of Identity (FOI) comes from a theory of learning that emphasizes the importance of recognizing and using students' cultural, linguistic, and personal backgrounds to enhance their educational experiences. FOI is like a "toolbox" of resources that people gather over time. These resources are shaped by historical,…

According to Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934), the highest levels of abstract thinking and self-regulation in preschool development are established in "pretend play using object substitutions." An extensive research literature supports Vygotsky's empirical model of the internalization of self-guiding speech (social speech > private speech…

By the year 2000, the management of education in England had lost much of its capacity to ensure the commitment of headteachers and teachers. As market forces engendered competition among schools, the bureaucratic monitoring of schools by agencies of government increased on the grounds that objective and comparable data about schools should be…

Time factors complexly, dynamically interact with each other and with other contextualized variables in language learning. The time-tied nature of language learning is captured in what I call the "time-prism," which is the central symbol of temporality in this paper. The facets of the prism discussed in this article are (1) language…

The value of athletics in character development has been anecdotally touted for centuries, but the reality is that sporting environments have regularly failed to achieve the potentials of moral education. The shared physical and mental demands of sports combined with the intensity with which much of society approaches competition makes the playing…

This article takes a broadly sociocultural perspective on the development of an Armenian English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher. It focuses on how experiences and actions outside the professional development classroom influence language teacher agency. The paper is framed within activity theory and specifically draws on Galperin's orienting…

This article provides an overview of the contributions made to this special issue on feedback by the seven papers, examining how they reflect both the growing interest in different areas of research into feedback on writing and the continuing search by teachers for more effective feedback practices. Focusing first on the papers by Van Beuningen,…

A framework, termed the RSP, is proposed. It is mainly for analyzing and explaining how learning occurs. This framework is grounded in the social-cultural perspective, in particular, in the thinking of both Vygotsky and Popper. Although the thinking of Popper is generally not referred to as having a social-cultural orientation, mostly due to…

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.…

Learning to juggle has become popular among corporate training programs because it shows participants how to appreciate mistakes and use "Intelligent Fast Failure" (learning quickly by daring to make a lot of simple mistakes at the beginning of a process). Big business also likes the way juggling can get executives "out of the…