There are two types of challenges that adults face in their professional learning: technical and adaptive. Technical challenges simply require informational learning while adaptive challenges require transformational learning, which requires us to rethink our deeply held values, beliefs, assumptions, and even our professional identity. Adaptive…

In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her…

A community college's success hinges in large part on the effectiveness of its teaching faculty, no more so than in times of major organizational change. However, any large-scale foundational shift requires institutional buy-in, with the onus on leadership to create an environment where everyone is working together toward the same endpoint.…

Eight English graduate students and a professor reflect on their semester-long exploration of community literacy studies. The students, some in a MFA Creative Writing program and some doing doctoral work in literature, rhetoric, or English Education, discuss how the community literacies lens unsettled their relationship to English Studies.

Hobbs and Coiro describe a new approach to the professional development of educators, librarians, and media professionals that emphasizes the value of collaborative, interdisciplinary relationships. The authors explore why creative collaboration using digital media texts, tools, and technologies is vital to support the professional development of…

This article uses a well-received recent text--Hess and McAvoy's "The Political Classroom"--to suggest that democratic citizenship education today has a social accountability problem. I locate this discussion in the context of a longstanding conflict between the critical thinking approach to democratic citizenship education, the approach…

Reaching beyond traditional mentoring models in education, this essay describes eight expanded and transformative forms that diversify, enrich, and improve relationships, environments, and systems.

At the center of teacher education reform debates nationwide are concerns about how to prepare educators to address issues of educational inequity. Yet, there is little consensus among teacher educators, school districts, community members, families, and accreditation agencies regarding how the work of teacher education might rectify longstanding…

Critical, collaborative learning activities in teacher education programs prepare pre-service and in-service teachers to work collectively with a social justice stance in their work. However, at the university-level, this kind of collaboration is rare among teacher educators, as education professors are often siloed into their content areas,…

The author is a Black woman working and teaching within the field of criminology. Her students at Ball State University are predominantly White and have had few interactions with Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The author feels that it is important for her to disrupt stereotypes her students may have by introducing them to Black people who…

Freire (2005) encourages people to take "critical ownership of the formation of ourselves" (p. 44) in order to be able to act upon the world in what he (1993) calls "praxis." This praxis consists of the development of critical consciousness leading to transformative action. Critical consciousness and praxis should be conceived…

This article describes how adults learn to self-manage chronic bodily symptoms, a complex and costly health problem. It proposes a theory of learning for an innovative, research-informed intervention, The BodyMind Approach® (TBMA) aimed at developing confidence, competence, skills, and knowledge and understanding for self-management for people…

This Reflection on Practice is based upon a change in the undergraduate course "Family and Community Relations." Historically, this course has been taught on campus in a lecture format, as well as small and large group activities. However, during a spring semester at a midsized Midwestern University, it was altered to provide more direct…

Reilly leans on the metaphor of rhizomes to remind readers that the work of a coach is not linear or hierarchical, but fluid and dynamic. Reilly frames literacy coaches as rhizomatic agents in schools and urges coaches to appreciate resistance and interruptions as critical and necessary for transformative teaching and learning.

This paper focuses on a current practice piece on professional development for university lecturers, transformative learning, dialogism and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Its main goals are to identify the key characteristics that allow STEM educators to experiment with the usage of non-formal education…