A global recognition of students' rights requires school organizations to recognize, value and provide for diversity. The move towards more inclusive schooling in Queensland, Australia, requires schools to address professional development on two levels: reculturing of the school to reflect inclusive beliefs and values; and enhancement of teacher…

The notion of a community curriculum in Thailand comes from widespread recognition that Thai society has been greatly influenced by the west in its development and modernization. According to many Thais, community curricula are needed to encourage young people to preserve Thai culture and revive local ways of thinking about "development"…

The Urban Nutrition Initiative (UNI) is a University of Pennsylvania/West Philadelphia schools academically-based community service program that integrates academics, research, and service through service-learning and participatory action research. UNI is based academically within Penn's Department of Anthropology and administratively within the…

The value of increasing student input to learning opportunity design issues was explored through an action research project. In response to student-identified learning needs, a learning session on a first-year undergraduate research methods module was re-designed. The learning outcomes of two parallel student groups (one experiencing the original…

The focus of this action research study was on the initial stage in reforming our teacher preparation programs. We designed, conducted, evaluated, and revised the components of our teacher preparation programs that were aimed at providing preservice teachers with the confidence and knowledge needed to meet the needs of youth populations…

Children's lead and pesticide exposures are used as examples to examine social disparities in exposure reduction efforts as well as environmental policies impacting children in poverty and minority children. The review also presents an estimate of the effect of social disparities in lead exposure on standardized test performance. Because including…

Writing picture compositions is part of the requirements for the mother tongue language learning in Singapore primary schools. For Chinese as a mother tongue, the prevailing materials used for learning picture composition are confined to only black-and-white drawn pictures. This has caused some problems: (1) not many good and suitable…

This paper describes a process of self-study that has developed between two teacher educators, their student teachers, and their school-based colleagues. The impetus for the research comes from a three-year action research project investigating the organization of and the instruction in a school integrated teacher education course aimed at…

This study focused on understanding why at-risk seventh-grade students often perform poorly in school and how implementing certain strategies can help motivate them to positive classroom performance. The goal was to find ways to help at-risk students become more involved in their schoolwork. Literature has shown that motivation comes from the…

This study explored alternative approaches to young people's concerts aimed at extending musical appreciations and cultural understandings while promoting interest in concert attendance among upper elementary students. The project, an artistic and cross-cultural collaboration grounded in a spirit of mutual respect, consisted of three components:…

Literary hypertext has often been acknowledged as the embodiment of poststructuralist literary theory (e.g. Coover, 1992; Landow, 1997; Bolter, 2001). The only literary medium that is produced, edited, published and received electronically, it encourages readings that defy the conventionally linear decoding process. With respect to text…

This article describes a national school improvement project involving five compulsory schools for hard-of-hearing pupils, located in different parts of Sweden. Using action research, the teachers tried to change the communication patterns among the pupils by changing their own classroom practices, In this process the teachers tested and used…

Instructional immediacy is an established communication strategy that teachers can implement to create engaging learning environments. Yet, little is known about experiences distance education learners in graduate study programs have had with immediacy. This article presents findings from a qualitative research project designed to explore…

The process of classroom observation is experienced by all, teaching in further, adult and higher education. This will either be as part of the organisation's quality assurance procedure, in-service staff completing teaching awards or the training of pre-service student teachers. Given its evaluative nature, it is a practice that generates strong…

This article discusses practitioner research that focused on student resistance to teaching about the apartheid past and issues of "race" in a first year English studies course at a predominantly Afrikaans and "white" university in South Africa. The study aimed to explore the way in which students and the teacher engaged with a…