In this interpretive research study, Claire Alkouatli inquires into the pedagogical activities Sunni Muslim educators employ in sites of Islamic education that are often marginalized by stereotypes, misperceptions, and charges of anachronism and indoctrination. She invited thirty-five Muslim Canadian educators to share their perspectives on their…

The work of Vygotsky is widely used in teacher education and other education-related literature, in discussion of sociocultural perspectives, and in relation to themes such as second language acquisition, the teaching of mathematics, and approaches to teaching and learning. Much of this work gives the impression that Vygotsky's work is…

Purpose: The purpose of this theoretical essay is to discuss recent scholarship in sociocultural studies of literacy -- including two recent books by Peter Smagorinsky (2011) and Luis Moll (2013) and recent articles by Gutierrez and Engestrom -- and to synthesize ideas from this scholarship into a coherent lens for understanding innovations in…

This article focuses on the learning that is enabled while a primary school child makes a story using multimodal software. This child is diagnosed with autism. The aim is to use a cultural-historical framework to carry out an in-depth analysis of a process of learning with action as a unit of analysis. The article is based on a collaborative…

Set against instructional practices that promote competition and individual performance, Dynamic Assessment, in our view, offers a more appropriate form of pedagogy for learners from cultural backgrounds that favour cooperation during joint activity. Indeed, these learners appear to be disadvantaged when negotiating the contrasting values and…

As people consider the critical importance of inner control in the development of human functioning, it might be wise to reexamine a fundamental insight from cultural psychology: from the very beginnings of life the growth of the individual mind is a reflection of and response to the minds around people, including the stimuli to which those…

The article grapples with the question of how much curriculum change is appropriate in a given context and in a given time frame. How can a balance be struck between stagnation, on the one hand, and the promotion of unrealistic innovation on the other? In answer to this dilemma, the concept of a zone of feasible innovation (ZFI) is proposed and…