Focussed dialogue (as lived and living practices) can have a powerful role in renewing professional practice, advancing its sustainability and development as administrative and political systems colonise the practices of teachers and teacher educators. However, participating in discussion groups for many teachers, including those in academia, is…

In this article, we discuss how our analysis of several popular culture artifacts featuring "super" women characters (superheroes and supernatural) provided the foundation for a media discussion group for female college students with learning exceptionalities. We explore the use of popular culture in discussion groups as well as discuss…

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in distance learning in higher education. Given this, it is extremely important to understand faculty attitudes about distance education, not only because they can vary widely, but also because it is the faculty, through their design and implementation of online courses, that will shape the…

The purpose of this study was to examine how teacher talk influenced the way issues of race, culture, and disability were addressed in literature discussion groups. Discussions of one teacher with two groups of students, of varying reading levels, were studied. The research questions were: 1) How does the teacher's perspective on the students…

Drawing on and reexamining theories on gender and literacy, derived from research performed between 1974 and 2002, this qualitative study explored the gender assumptions and expectations of 19 preservice and practicing secondary language arts teachers in a graduate level adolescent literature course. The theoretical framework was structured around…

Videogames, such as "The Sims," are a digital media passion drawing adolescents to online spaces where they create and share content. This article explores how discourses and expectations are taught in one online, videogame-related fan site of adolescents who read and write "Sims" fan fiction. Using Bernstein's pedagogic…

The engagement of immigrant children in literature discussion groups in an elementary school classroom in the United States is studied in this article. The analysis shows how the students' responses are embedded in translocal movements across places, time, and people that can be characterized as constructing dynamic cultural flows. The findings…

Is it feasible to hold concurrent, small-group, peer-managed discussions in large elementary school classes? We sought an initial answer to this question in a fifth-grade class in Hefei, China. The 52 students in the class were divided into seven small groups. The seven groups held four simultaneous discussions without immediate supervision or…

In this quasi-experimental case study, we compared five sections of a basic undergraduate technology course. Within an asynchronous web forum, pre-service teachers wrote short critiques of websites designed by their classmates. This peer feedback was provided anonymously by students in two classes (n = 35) whereas providers and recipients of peer…

This study examined how message-response exchanges produced in the interactions between active learners only, reflective learners only, active-reflective learners and reflective-active learners affected how often active versus reflective learners posted rebuttals to arguments and challenges across four types of exchanges that believed to promote…

Project-based learning engages students in problem solving through artefact design. However, previous studies of online project-based learning have focused primarily on the dynamics of online collaboration; students' knowledge construction throughout this process has not been examined thoroughly. This case study analyzed the relationship between…

Recent research indicated that students' ability to construct evidence-based explanations in classrooms through scientific inquiry is critical to successful science education. Structured argumentation support environments have been built and used in scientific discourse in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, no research work in the…

In order to collaborate effectively in group discourse on a topic like mathematical patterns, group participants must organize their activities in ways that share the significance of their utterances, inscriptions, and behaviors. Here, we report the results of a ethnomethodological case study of collaborative math problem-solving activities…

This article reports a grounded theory study of the moderation of asynchronous online discussions, to explore the processes by which tutors in higher education decide when and how to moderate. It aims to construct a theory of e-moderation based on some key factors which appear to influence e-moderation. It discusses previous research on the…

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights…