This paper explores the implications of grounding professional development in the Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical framework for regular classroom teachers who must deal with the cultural and linguistic diversity in their daily interactions with students. A solid conceptual framework for professional development is significant because it…

Cultural competence and cultural humility dominate discourses on practice across difference within social work and other helping professions. Despite their prominence, they remain contested constructs, thoroughly critiqued within the literature, and fall short in providing guidelines for intersectional practice across myriad differences. This…

It's not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of…

The aim of this article is to analyze discourse from historically pertinent policy and strategic documents of the Norwegian Schools of Music and Performing Arts, in order to explore the nature of the intractable discrepancy between curriculum, policy, and practice. Popular music has long been part of Norwegian compulsory-school and higher music…

This paper reports on the process of understanding myself and my pre-service teacher education students better through my lecture reflections and deliberations with critical friends as I taught a South African film entitled Tsotsi. Conversations with colleagues deepened my analysis as I was challenged to revisit my musings on lecture reflections,…

Classroom pedagogies that foster global, international, and intercultural (GII) learning across academic disciplines have the potential to reach all matriculated students, preparing them for diversity in their immediate communities, the international reach of their professions, and their responsibilities as citizens in the world. A number of…

Since Margaret Mead's field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a…

In this paper, collaborative autoethnography is used to explore the authors' involvement as participants in and facilitator of an academic development programme that took place in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Recognising the significant differences in cultural origin between the Iraqi participants and its British facilitator, the authors share…

Little research exists on humility in human learning and from a cultural perspective. This article reviews current research and conceptualizes humility as a basic human potential that can become a virtue when cultivated. But the cultivation depends on the cultural values placed on humility. Although humility is recognized in the West, ambivalence…

This article illustrates the author's transnational learning experiences in a China-Australia 2 + 2 articulation programme. Transnational articulation programme is being actively adopted by many Chinese universities to enhance the diversity of educational structures as a response to the growing trend of internationalisation of higher education.…

This article analyzes "Xueji" ([Chinese characters omitted]) and discusses some of the myths and facts in Western perceptions of Chinese educational practice. It also looks at the similarities and contrasts between Eastern and Western conceptions of teaching and learning. A careful study of "Xueji" ([Chinese characters…

Written from the perspective of a Grade 5/6 French Immersion teacher, this paper examines the role of music, poetry, and the visual arts in enhancing learner identity, in the context of the elementary school classroom. It begins with a focus on artistic metaphors that represent cultural and linguistic hyphenation. It then addresses practical…

This paper demonstrates that the phenomenographic methodology -- the study of variations of lived experience -- has the capacity to manage cultural and paradigmatic differences between researchers and participants in cross-cultural research. The process of cross-cultural research presented herein makes a contribution to the existing body of…

We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between all scholarly activities, most importantly between teaching, learning, research and professional learning. The article builds on the work of others who call for a social justice approach to inform the SoTL. It focuses on the implications for professional learning, as an aspect of the SoTL…

Depending on the perspective and even language, the concept of didactics is defined in different ways. The debate about conceptualization, particularly concerning the equivalence in English of what in other languages, specifically Germanic and Latin languages, is termed "didactics", is well documented in the research literature. There is…