Background: Focusing on ways a common endeavor brings people together, Gee offered the concept of affinity spaces, which suggests that open participation without exclusion or membership is possible. This theory contrasts with Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, which called attention to situated, hierarchical participatory practices.…

How can educators leverage blogs and other social media spaces to encourage a reflective, critical discourse about civic engagement that fosters a true learning exchange over promoting one's own ideas? This article reports upon a single case study of the "Community Engagement Learning Exchange," a multi-author blog on civic engagement.…

A qualitative research focused on a case study aiming to monitor emergent knowledge in a discourse group by tracking the development of the concept "goal." The analysis, based on "Semiotic Evolution" methodology facilitates the description of interactions between personal perceptions in the group discourse, illustrating the…

Knowledge elaboration plays a critical role in promoting knowledge acquisition and facilitating the retention of target knowledge in online collaborative discussions. Adopting a key-term-based automated analysis approach, we proposed an indicator framework to measure the level of knowledge elaboration in terms of coverage, activation, and…

This article provides a reanalysis of a multisited case study of youth arts, media, and critical literacy to theorize the role of networked and physical "publics" within which youth engage with issues they care about, making claims about their lived experiences. An understanding of the nature and role of publics is crucial to productive…

Several organizations in the 53-member KIDS COUNT network and many other Casey grantees and partners have taken on the challenge of making race equity a priority of their work, providing lessons for other organizations as they begin this process. This first case study focuses on the importance of organizing community conversations about race as a…

This case explores how a monolingual teacher, embedded in a large urban school context, saw and understood her role in supporting emergent bilingual learners' development of mathematics discourse. Particular attention is paid to the classroom arrangements and curricular and instructional choices this teacher made to facilitate this development.…

This article draws on data from an action research project carried out in a lower secondary school environment in the Czech Republic. The project involved the implementation of a teacher professional development programme aimed at transforming teacher-student communication and reinforcing opportunities for student participation in classroom…

The authors, working from a "new literacies studies" perspective, suggest that educators can better teach their students if they develop their own knowledge of the purposes, types, and language conventions students use in their informal out-of-school literacy practices. The purpose of this study was to identify the literacy practices…

This paper describes the activities of a course on adult development. The course intended to sensitize participants to the theories and reality of adulthood and aging by introducing them to selected literature on adult development and to the preparation of case records and mastery of activities that permit an analysis of the adult's world. The…

The interaction between participation and the emergence of common knowledge is the subject matter of this paper. A case study of a single class provides the focal point of analysis. During the semester the students participated in a blogging activity. As a result of their participation, the students create and distribute knowledge. The online…

Continuing professional development (CPD) is currently high on the Scottish Education agenda. Recent curriculum reform in Scotland, with the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence, places physical education (PE) at the forefront for its role in directly supporting learners' mental, emotional, social and physical well-being. This emphasis on PE,…

The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program…

Supervising masters and doctoral dissertations is a key function of teaching in higher education and giving written feedback on draft sections is an essential component of this function. However, the specific types of response that supervisors give to their dissertation students' written work have received limited research interest to date. The…

This article reports one of the case studies in a 3-year longitudinal study in environmental science education. This case explores the process of teaching about ecosystems through co-teaching and co-generative dialogue in a Year-9 science classroom in Western Australia. Combining with co-teaching and co-generative dialogue aimed at transforming…