This study addresses the challenges faced by Modern Foreign Language teacher trainees when asked to investigate the potential of a Personal Digital Assistant to support them both in their learning and in their teaching during their training year. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) such as the Windows Pocket PCs used in this study have previously…

This article uses "close-up" ethnographic research to provide an account of students' engagement with learning in a South African university. Broadly based on Halliday's [Halliday, M. A. K. (1973). "Explorations in the functions of language". London: Edward Arnold; Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). "Language as social…

Language teaching has, for much of its history, been subject to the heavy "evangelical zeal" of the centers who have exported their theories, methods derived from these, approaches, materials, and books to the developing countries "often with doubtful relevance to the sociological, educational and economic context of the Outer…

This chapter is about culture and mathematics teaching and learning. The authors' goal is to offer a thoughtful treatment of the role of culture in the teaching and learning of mathematics and to synthesize literature that is relevant to this concern from multiple subdisciplines in education, including math education, educational anthropology,…

There has been substantial research evidence concerning the learning approaches of students in Western and non-Western contexts. Nonetheless, it has been a decade since research in the South Pacific was conducted on the learning approaches of tertiary students. The present research examined the learning approaches of Fijian and other Pacific…

Searching for a methodology that would allow the author to "see" across worldviews and articulate them both was the academic challenge of investigating learning ideology across Canadian and Aboriginal worldviews with Aboriginal Nuu-chah-nulth Elders. A mode of inquiry was required permitting the author to hold a Euro-heritage and an…

This study looks at how primary education plays a central role in cultural reproduction in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). The paper compares primary-level Tibetan language textbooks from different periods to explore the process by which shifting political trends are reflected in the curriculum. It looks at how Tibetan identity is recreated, at…

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to…

India's rich multilingual, multicultural society creates a complex challenge to the Government as it attempts to address the educational needs of its tribal communities. Although access to schools has increased and enrolment rates are improving, the dropout rates are still alarmingly high and achievement levels are low compared to their non-tribal…

An educational program was developed to train practitioners to provide care for patients and families that are responsive to cultural concerns. The aim was to increase knowledge and improve attitudes toward providing culturally proficient and culturally sensitive care for patients and families facing life-threatening illnesses. The program…

This paper reviews past research that focused on questions of culture in distance learning. Of specific interest are the studies that examined the influence of culture on students' learning and engagement in asynchronous learning networks (ALNs). The purpose of this review is three-fold: to present the state of knowledge concerning the questions…

In this paper, the authors highlight features of the social and cultural context which surrounds services to children. Emphasis is given to the point that those who work with children exist within the same cultural landscape occupied by the children, parents and other parents. Whilst this landscape is diverse, it contains certain dominant,…

Many have suggested that issues of democracy are fundamentally related to school curricula and contexts (Conant, 1948; Dewey, 1944; Dimitriadis and Carlson, 2003; West, 2004). Current social theorists have suggested that a globalized social, economic, and cultural structure has necessitated a rethinking of the relationships between individuals,…

We do not just live in a social world; the social world is already within us determining how we think. At a general level, Vygotsky's sociohistorical theory has its roots in this perspective that emphasized the importance of cultural-historical context in which learning takes place and how that context has impact on what is learned. Later on,…

This paper focuses on the relation between two areas of research which owe a great debt to the work of Giyoo Hatano: the ways in which the use of the abacus mediates arithmetic problem solving and the way in which the use of the kanji writing system mediates the interpretation of unfamiliar words. These examples are related to L. S. Vygotsky's…