The current paper describes an urban university-anchored but community-based consortium of early childhood centers and community partners in a large Midwestern US city. The goal of the Consortium is to provide professional development opportunities that include networking, coaching, and collaboration as part of a community of practice (CoP)…

There is growing interest, worldwide, in collaboration between schools and community organisations in contributing to and enriching school science programs, yet such collaborations are inadequately understood. This paper reports data from an Australian study designed to probe the views of members of the community who have participated in a broad…

This paper explores the experiences of 24 Early Career Researchers working in interdisciplinary and precarious employment conditions in which they are managing collaborations with multiple partners beyond the university as part of the AHRC's "Connected Communities" Programme. These conditions emerge from conflicting sources--from…

University-community partnerships can play an important role in curriculum development, but little has been written about the role of community agencies in designing curricula. This article describes the role of field education in an innovative university-community partnership aimed at transforming an MSW curriculum to integrate a trauma-informed…

This article describes a student-led assessment of a writing showcase event sponsored by a composition learning community at an urban R1 university. Participants conducted student-to-student interviews at the semi-annual writing showcase event to help assess whether and how the learning community event supported learning outcomes. The interviews,…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to outline the evidence-based development of a learning approach to school renewal that employs information from key members of a school community (teachers, parents, students) to promote school-based discussions about school renewal. Setting: The study took place in an independent system of Catholic…

Teachers spend a lot of time talking about students: They talk about how students learn, how to best plan lessons for them, and how to understand their written work using different protocols. Instead of hypothesizing about what a student might do on a task or why a student made a certain mistake, why aren't teachers just asking the student?…

The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers' tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a…

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.…

To challenge deficit thinking concerning immigrants and refugees in urban schools, we engaged members of local immigrant and refugee communities from China, Mexico, Liberia, and Sudan in focus group discussions about their prior educational experiences, their hopes and aspirations for education, and the supports and challenges they encountered in…

The aim of this study was to explore challenging encounters experienced by registered nurses (RN) during their first year in the emergency medical service by using the social learning theory of communities of practice. During the first year in a new professional practice, a new RN experiences a transition during which the new professional identity…

Academic writing is a social practice in which the writer interacts with both texts and people and uses the interaction as a learning resource. While academic interaction in the classroom setting has been extensively investigated, student interaction that takes place without teacher supervision remains largely unexplored. Since autonomy is a key…

This phenomenological case study examined the link between teacher practice within the classroom and a newly implemented middle school social studies Professional Learning Community (PLC). More specifically, the use of mandates, theories, and activities were investigated through a series of teacher interviews, classroom observations,…

This study investigated different math-talk facilitations, and conceptualized the teachers' talk moves for productive student mathematics discussions. Our findings suggest that students' strategy development is supported by talk moves coordinating a wide range of student strategies, representations and discussions that are at a process-level and…

This paper explores one implementation of an extended, structured, collaborative professional experience program. Its context is a new partnership between a university and a professional experience school. The program draws on elements of Instructional Rounds and Lesson Study, framed around a learning community model of professional experience for…