The "ecologisation" of Australian primary schools brings new opportunities for curriculum expansion and renewal for sustainability education. My contribution to the broader discussion of place, geography, sustainability and literacy stems from an interest in how children are brought into contact with sustainability discourses via sensory…

Drawing upon the literature on the history of the language teaching methods focusing on the use of L1 in L2 teaching, the debate surrounding the role of L1 in the L2 classroom in general and in the English classroom in particular and recent studies of the issue, this article presents at its core a study that investigated the attitudes of…

Recently, twenty-one instructors at a Midwestern university participated in a faculty development seminar entitled, "Developing Pedagogies to Enhance Excellence and Diversity." They designed a pedagogical change for the following academic year based on the workshop. During the following year, we collected data on the workshop…

Reflective teaching has become a focus of interest and a powerful movement in teacher education. The complexity of teaching requires teachers to question their practices for their own professional development in order to improve and to increase learner performance. This article aims at investigating student teachers' reflective experiences during…

The research aimed broadly to understand how Botswana's written government curricula for music are interpreted by music teachers as well as teachers' ideals for music teaching, and to what extent they thought it was possible to achieve those ideals. Grundy's writing on curriculum based on Habermas' technical, practical and emancipatory interests…

In recent years, policy documents, curricula and other educational initiatives have promoted a pedagogy founded on the concept of independent learning. This is broadly defined as "having the belief in yourself to think through learning activities, problems or challenges, make decisions about your learning and act upon those decisions".…

Objectives: To examine the experiences of Aboriginal Australians with or at risk of diabetes who attended urban community cooking courses in 2002-2007; and to develop recommendations for increasing the uptake and effectiveness of nutrition education in Aboriginal communities. Methods: Descriptive qualitative approach using semistructured…

Internship programs too often do not provide the types of experiences that effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice and prepare school leaders who are capable of leading and transforming schools. To help address this problem, the current study is directed at providing insight into practicing principals' views of the types of…

This empirical mixed methods study examines educators' understandings of student risk factors. The research was conducted in a Title 1 combination middle high school in the Florida panhandle that had been open for three years and had received a grade of F school in each of these years. In Florida, schools are graded according to the Florida…

Teachers in various contexts worldwide are sometimes unfairly criticized for not putting teaching methods developed for the well-resourced classrooms of Western countries into practice. Factors such as the teachers' "misconceptualizations" of "imported" methods, including Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), are often blamed,…

Quality educational leadership preparation has positive influences on practices of graduates. In the Finnish decentralized education system, little is yet known about the sources of principals' practices. This research explores the sources of principals' self-assessed leadership practices in Central Finland and identifies areas for more emphasis.…

In response to the research priorities of members of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), this study investigated language learners' realworld tasks in mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) to inform the future development of pedagogic tasks for academic English as a second language (ESL) courses. The data included…

One quality indicator of intervention research is the extent to which the intervention has a high degree of social validity, or practicality. In this study, I drew on Wolf's framework for social validity and used qualitative methods to ascertain five middle schoolteachers' perceptions of the social validity of System 44®--a phonics-based reading…

This study investigated code-mixing practices, specifically the use of L2 (English) in an L1 (Chinese) class in a U.S. bilingual program. Our findings indicate that the code-mixing practices made and prompted by the teacher served five pedagogical functions: (a) to enhance students' bilingualism and bilingual learning, (b) to review and…

This paper, an exploratory case study, examines how students' preferences and motivation to learn English are influenced by their perceptions of teaching practices--both of native English teachers and local English teachers. To better understand the context of this research question, this study adopts a method of triangulation in collecting data:…