The purpose of this article is to identify and examine the barriers between Afghan refugee families and a school in Pakistan and how they could have been diminished by leveraging families' funds of knowledge (Moll & Greenberg, 1990). Pakistan was a country of temporary asylum (or first safe country) for these parents/guardians as they awaited…

This article discusses the nature of the student affairs professionalization project, by analyzing the discourses evident in and legitimized through the "Journal of Student Affairs in Africa" ("JSAA"). The analysis is driven by three research questions: What is the extent of the journal's engagement with the terms profession,…

This article investigates the level of anatomical knowledge of the Hong Kong public and uses the data to help suggest public engagement activities and health campaigns to raise health literacy in the general population. In the annual public engagement event organized by the University of Hong Kong, 250 attendees took a survey assessing basic…

When I look back before 2020, before the murder of Mr. George Floyd in particular, and think about this special issue, "Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research," a question comes to my mind: "Are we, the field of literacy research, sure that we want to include literacy research among the incalculable responses (already in progress)…

The importance of early vocabulary development to later reading comprehension has been well-established. However, there have been a number of criticisms that the assessments typically used to measure oral vocabulary knowledge do not adequately capture the complexity of this construct. This conceptual review works towards a more robust theoretical…

A key insight of a transdisciplinary perspective on second language acquisition (SLA) as articulated by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) is its usage-based understanding of language. Evidence on the fundamental role that usage plays in shaping individual language knowledge is no doubt compelling. However, while the force of social interaction in…

The authors examine the social construction of language, labels, and knowledge associated with disabilities, arguing in favor of critical and intersectional perspectives on disability identity.

Mathematical discourse is often described as abstract and devoid of human presence, yet many school curricula espouse an aim to develop active, creative mathematical problem posers and solvers. The project The Evolution of the Discourse of School Mathematics (EDSM) developed an analytic scheme to investigate the nature of school mathematics…

In this paper we report the results of a survey of financial literacy levels among Australian secondary school students. While key issues concerning financial literacy among adolescents are fairly well known, and governments see the urgency of addressing low levels of such literacy among a vulnerable cohort, less is understood about the variation…

Almost forty years after Stalnaker's (1974) initial call for "the development and application of a pragmatic theory in which detailed explanations of phenomena relating to linguistic contexts can be given" (p. 214), a unifying construct definition and theory still does not exist to explain fully pragmatic knowledge and ability (Roever,…

This article examines Ronald Barnett's notion of an ontological turn in higher education as a language for framing the current existential demands and emerging learning needs of young adults. After presenting different interpretations of ontology, I make a case for how contemplative approaches can be applied to communication-based higher education…

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011), is collecting information about the early educational experiences of a nationally representative sample of children who were in kindergarten or who were of kindergarten age in ungraded classrooms or schools in the 2010-11 school year. The data collection began in…

A challenge of today's teacher preparation programmes is to educate teachers about families formed through international adoption and of the challenges they face, in order to meet their educational needs. This population has a unique developmental history affected by pre- and post-adoption conditions which stand to impact on learning experiences…

The study of bilingual children shows that learning and using two languages may affect fundamental aspects of cognitive and neural development that influence how knowledge is acquired and used. The positive effects of bilingualism are seen most profoundly in what are known as executive function or self-control tasks, and in how the knowledge that…

Much of the research on students' understanding of the greenhouse effect and global warming reports poor results. Students are claimed to hold misconceptions and naive beliefs, and the impact of teaching on their conceptions is also low. In the present study, these results are called into question, and it is argued that they may to a large extent…