Initial teacher education programmes have been identified as crucial to meeting the twin policy aims of professionalising the further education (FE) workforce and achieving improved learner outcomes, yet college-based teacher educators are underrepresented in published research and commentary. Drawing on a case study of teacher educators employed…

Despite the emphasis laid on demonstrating English language proficiency by Non-Native English Speaking Teachers (NNESTs), research has shown that for various reasons English language teachers graduating from a state-owned university in an Arab country for the past 25 years or so have been found lacking communication skills due to reasons pertinent…

In this article we approach the problem of identification and recognition of argumentation by teacher educators of a physics undergraduate course of a large university in the southeast of Brazil. Our proposed markers criteria, such as "opposing" of ideas and "reciprocal justifications" were partially validated by the…

This paper presents aspects of a small scale study that considered student teachers' language and discourse around race and ethnicity at a university in the northwest of England. The first part of the paper critiques current education-related policy, context and practice to situate the research and then draws upon aspects of critical race theory…

The purpose of this multiple case study was to describe the experiences of graduate education faculty of varying racial/ethnic backgrounds, learning to navigate difficult discourses on race effectively over time. The study employed positionality as a theoretical framework. Findings indicate that faculty balance what we refer to as "strategies…

This qualitative case study is an exploration of the phenomenon of the ways in which Urdu as the national language is represented in discursive practices of senior business academia. The research design, built on Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model (2009) is of dialectical-relational approach. The participant in this single case…

We present findings from an in-depth study on a school-based multi-disciplinary learning community in the context of practice teaching in university pre-service education. We elaborate on one of the three predominant patterns of talk identified, the "star" pattern, and show how it created particular power relations in the discourse which…

The teacher-student writing conference has long been recognized as being able to provide personalized instruction and contribute to learners' writing development. However, teachers often find it time-consuming to conference with individual students on a regular basis. Conferencing with pairs of students, therefore, may become a more pragmatic…

This article studies the problem of the implementation of European educational standards in Kazakhstan higher education. This is considered in the frame of post-socialist education, when reforms in several post-Soviet states were undertaken under the Bologna Process. Kazakhstan, as this article argues, is justified for consideration in the frame…

Constructing explanations is an essential skill for all science learners. The goal of this project was to model the key components of expert explanation of molecular and cellular mechanisms. As such, we asked: What is an appropriate model of the components of explanation used by biology experts to explain molecular and cellular mechanisms? Do…

Feedback has typically been studied as a means of improving academic performance. Few studies inquire into the processes by which feedback shapes student identity. The authors carry out a discourse analysis of written comments to explore how feedback is discursively constructed by both teachers and students. Analysis of written feedback,…

Energy is an abstract science concept, so the ways that we think and talk about energy rely heavily on ontological metaphors: metaphors for what kind of thing energy is. Two commonly used ontological metaphors for energy are "energy as a substance" and "energy as a vertical location." Our previous work has demonstrated that…

This case study about one university's internationalization initiative, known as North Goes South, provides a nuanced and finely grained understanding of what internationalization looks like in practice. The study was guided by a desire to probe the perceived impact of a Canadian-East African internationalization initiative on students, faculty,…

Introduction: This paper advocates Foucault's notion of pouvoir/savoir (power/knowledge) as a conceptual lens that information researchers might fruitfully use to develop a richer understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power. Methods: Three of the authors' earlier studies are employed to illustrate the use of this conceptual lens.…

This article addresses the issue of gender imbalance in Finnish universities in the domain of physics as a historical and dialectical phenomenon. Drawing from the Gramscian notion of hegemony and the activity-theoretical notion of contradiction, this paper analyses gendered hegemonic and contradictory forces steering physicists' careers. This…