The role of educators in mitigating the negative experiences faced by marginalised students has garnered increasing attention. This study highlights the key attributes of teachers who create a supportive environment for these learners, particularly in English Language Arts classrooms. Through an integration of Positioning Theory, Critical…

Classroom discourse is a core medium of instruction -- analyzing it can provide a window into teaching and learning as well as driving the development of new tools for improving instruction. We introduce the largest dataset of mathematics classroom transcripts available to researchers, and demonstrate how this data can help improve instruction.…

Teachers of English as an Additional Language learners in high schools have long navigated the seemingly intransigent deficit thinking about their learners' capacity to engage fully with the intended or required curriculum. These learners are frequently constructed as the problem, as if the curriculum exists in a vacuum. This gives rise to the…

This qualitative study utilized positive discourse analysis (PDA) to explore the classroom discourse practices of three grade-level teachers at a highly diverse school. The purpose of the study was to investigate ways elementary teachers who employ biography-driven instruction (BDI) (e.g., Herrera, 2016) use discourse to invite and nurture student…

Translanguaging offers a new perspective on language learning by affirming and leveraging the diverse language practices that make up learners' unitary language repertoire as resources for their learning. Despite the potential pedagogical benefits of translanguaging, English-only policies are still prevalent in many language classrooms. Even when…

Dual language (DL) programs propose to be vehicles of social justice and transformation by valuing an additional language other than the dominant one in a society and thereby contesting language hierarchies and the subordination of those who speak/use a non-dominant language (Flores, Flores, Educational Policy 30:13-38, 2016; Menken and García,…

Dialogic pedagogy is widely viewed as an excellent means of educating students for civic participation in deliberative democracy. While many intervention-based studies have researched dialogic teaching and learning, we know very little about the enactment of dialogic and related ideas "in the wild," in regular classrooms. This paper…

This study examines how language-minority and language-majority students and their teachers created a community of practice which allowed for meaningful participation of diverse learners in literacy practices, within a high school context in which language-minority students were historically marginalised. Drawing from ethnographic data, interviews…

This article aims at developing an external language of description to investigate the problem of why particular groups of students are systematically not provided access to school mathematical knowledge. Based on Basil Bernstein's conceptualisation of power in classification, we develop a three-dimensional model that operationalises the…

The contemporary South African subject English classroom is a complex space requiring ongoing attention to issues of cultural and linguistic diversity, and frequently manifesting the need to work across historically constructed differences in race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. This article reports on one aspect of a broader research…

This paper focuses on the relationship between minority languages/cultures and educational achievement in mixed industrial societies, highlighting, in particular, the role of language and discourse strategies in the reproduction of educational inequality. Three major factors underlying accounts of inequalities in social and educational…

Challenging the Cartesian dualisms that essentialize difference, this essay offers strategies for building transracial, feminist alliances through pedagogy. The authors argue that resistive classroom spaces should be created in which students and teachers challenge the discourses of domination that structure our understandings of identity and…