This article describes the details about a local school board meeting in a suburban high school auditorium outside Philadelphia. The district superintendent had committed suicide a few days earlier in the midst of hearings about his alleged misdeeds on the job. In this article, the author assesses what measures could have been taken to avoid such…

The notion of "professional practice knowledge" has been significant in some recent explorations of the nature of practice and discussions of the development of practitioners and practices. This article begins by outlining "professional practice knowledge" as a window into practice, but suggests that practice has features that…

The history of pedagogics gives the impression that pedagogics has never had an identity of its own. Throughout history it has borrowed its identity from philosophy, theology, psychology and sociology. Against the background of this historical challenge, the article proposes pedagogical practice as an alternative identity to pedagogics, although…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide a literature synthesis of the learning organization and discuss several pertinent theoretical concepts on the subject. Design/methodology/approach: A range of works mainly from 1990-2004, which aim at providing a variety of perspectives on the learning organization, have been analyzed and discussed based on its…

Purpose: Through a conversation with a practitioner, aims to understand the definitions given to the learning organization and how they relate to a model of organizational learning. Design/methodology/approach: Provides a brief overview of a conversation concerning organizational learning vs the learning organization. Findings: Organizational…

Rhetoric is often about "good guys" and "bad guys." Even more basically, it concerns who is in and who is out, what is included and what is excluded, who is placed inside and who outside a cultural community, a political movement, a professional organization. These ins and outs concern both the commonplaces of rhetoric and the rhetoric of …

Professional programmers need common coding conventions to assure co-operation and a degree of quality of the software. Novice programmers, however, easily forget issues of programming style in their programming coursework. In particular with large classes, students may pass several courses without learning elements of programming style. This is…

The relationship between research and teaching has become a highly contested issue perhaps because evidence of synergy between them is modest and inconclusive. It could be argued that the separation of research and teaching is itself the result of policy and operational decisions made over some time to distinguish the way these activities are…

In this paper, we have attempted two ambitious tasks. We have undertaken a wide-ranging survey of the Network learning (NL) literature, and tried to identify the emerging themes of this work. We have selected three of these themes, and in each case tried to identify the main theoretical perspectives in use, the main directions of the studies, and…

In the field of applied linguistics the activities involved in developing instructional materials and those working in second language research and the more theoretical areas of applied linguistics are often seen to have little connection. This paper is an exploration of some of the kinds of interaction that are possible between research, theory…

The purpose of this article is to provide direction to those entertaining a developmental research project. There are two categories of developmental research, both of which are examined here. The two types vary in terms of the extent to which the conclusions resulting from the research are generalizable or contextually specific. This article…

This historical sociology deconstructs the interrelationship between the theory and practice of the troublesome notions of leadership, social justice and feminism. First, it tracks marginalised groups' relationship to the field of educational administration and their claims upon the state. Mainstream approaches have been informed by theories,…

This article attempts to identify the limitations inherent in the model of teacher preparation as training within the context of current educational reforms in Singapore. Through clarifying the distinction between training and education, this article argues that two largely overlooked aspects of teacher education--one concerning transforming the…

This article discusses the research reported in this special issue with respect to implications for policy, practice, and future research. The discussion focuses on the functions of research in reporting, enlightenment and conceptualization, short-run empiricism, and testing for replication. The article concludes by calling for systematic and…

The development and application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the field of Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) have had a considerable impact on the teaching methodologies in China. With an increasing emphasis on strengthening students' learning initiative and adopting a "student-centred" teaching concept in FLT,…