International trends promoting school diversity and choice have reshaped education across Europe, leading towards a multiplicity in ownership structures and varied governance configurations. More recently, this can also be seen in European countries with a long history of state-owned and governed public schools, such as in the Nordic states. The…

Many countries around the world are implementing changes to their systems of teacher education in an effort to improve the way teachers teach and how much children learn in school. This dissertation uses the case of Ghana to examine how a suite of ambitious reforms--including the upgrading of teacher education to university education, a new…

In the spring of 2020, schools across the United States closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing a sudden change from the traditional way education was provided. When schools resumed, many teachers found themselves teaching and scaffolding learning in a new situation, online. However, there is limited information on how teachers implement…

A growing movement suggests that social and emotional learning (SEL) should be integrated into educational experiences in and outside schools. Afterschool programs can be particularly well suited for SEL, and afterschool educators can play an important role in skill development. We interviewed 23 experienced afterschool educators in…

The global 2020 COVID-19 pandemic impacted teaching and learning in all education institutions. The unprecedented and rapid shift from classroom based to fully online teaching raised unfamiliar dilemmas for educators, requiring immediate operational and pedagogical changes to meet previously unimagined demands. This study reports how an Australian…

Teacher attrition is a pervasive issue that affects educational systems globally, contributing to significant challenges in maintaining a stable and experienced teaching workforce. While existing research has explored teacher attrition in various educational contexts, there is a scarcity of studies with in-depth qualitative phases specifically…

This paper seeks to better understand how unanticipated disruption influences teacher agency and professionalism. Drawing on a conceptual model of teacher agency the paper examines data from teacher focus groups conducted in one Australian K-12 school to understand the lived experience of teachers (n = 50) during an initial COVID-19 lockdown…

In the field of TESOL, teacher guides are widely used resources providing instructional support and guidance to English language teachers. Drawing upon Vygotskian sociocultural theory, this research explored how novice language teachers perceive the mediational roles of these artifacts in shaping their teaching practices and the affordances and…

This article reports on a national survey of complementary school providers in Scotland to gain insights into their perspectives of the abrupt transition to online learning spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data gathered from a questionnaire (n=34) and in-depth interviews (n=13) covering 19 different heritage languages are analysed through the…

This study contributes to the limited research on teacher agency in task-based language teaching. Conceptualising agency through the lens of activity theory, the study investigated how two EFL teachers enacted their agency in TBLT implementation at a Chinese university and what factors mediated the enactment of their agency. Data collected by…

Purpose: This study aimed to explore "why and how" the teachers' personal funds of knowledge and identity are connected to their classroom beliefs, knowledge, and practices. Design/methodology/approach: The study lasted one academic year (October 2021 - July 2022). We used multiple data sources, including semi-structured individual…

The concept of learner engagement, widely researched in educational psychology, has recently gained attention of language acquisition researchers (cf. Mercer, S. and Z. Dörnyei. 2020. "Engaging Students in Contemporary Classrooms." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Mercer, S. 2019. Language learner engagement: setting the scene. In…

The use of open textbooks in universities is according to some organisations changing the higher education landscape and is promising for the mainstream adoption of OER. The aim of this paper is to analyse authors' views of agency and empowerment when they plan, create and reflect on their open textbooks, their teaching and students' learning.…

While research on teachers' Critical Incidents (CIs) has grown exponentially, little research has been done on teachers' assessment-related CIs, much less examining the contributions of such CIs to their identity sense-making. This study aimed to fill some of this gap by exploring assessment-related CIs of 13 Iranian L2 teachers and the associated…

This is a qualitative examination of how a Chinese language teacher responded to challenges and developed her agency in a unique teaching and learning environment, termed as the blended classroom. The uniqueness of this classroom lies in its attendance by two cohorts of students at the same time -- a face-to-face and an online group. The online…