Accounts of fathers' reluctance to engage with locally based family learning groups rarely acknowledge the relationship between learning and identity. This tends not to be the case in parallel accounts of women's reluctance to become involved in groups or networks where the mainstream clientele is male. Drawing on the case study of a national…

This qualitative case study examined the beliefs of preservice teachers about teaching struggling readers. The study was concerned with participants' beliefs in the context of tutoring struggling readers in order to discover how these beliefs influenced the preservice teachers' expectations, instruction, and evaluations of these learners. The…

Ireland has experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth since the mid-1990s. The present article assesses the extent to which this phenomenon has altered the level and nature of youth unemployment, using data from six waves of a nationally representative survey of school-leavers. The main impact of the "Celtic Tiger" has been…

Vocative texts are expressive poetic texts that strive to show rather than tell, that communicate felt knowledge, and that appeal to the senses. They are increasingly used by researchers to present qualitative findings, but little has been written about how to create such texts. To this end, excerpts from an inquiry into the experience and meaning…

This article examines adequacy-based education reform, beginning with the reforms undertaken in Kentucky, but then expanding out to the rest of the states to obtain a fuller picture and to conduct a study more amenable to statistical analysis. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data were used as part of the analysis, with a focus…

This study explores preschoolers' real life engagement with music in everyday life, examining the choices that they have over music listening and the engagement that they show in relation to music in different contexts. A total of 32 children from the United Kingdom aged 3.2-3.9 years participated with their families, nursery teachers and other…

Background: Many believe the "outdoors" is a key factor influencing student learning in "outdoor education" because it is so different from the "everyday" indoor contexts of students' lives. In much of the outdoor education literature the outdoors is construed as a neutral and simplified space which allows students to…

Limiting, or nonconforming cases are good tests in research for extending a concept's reach and broadening generalisations, but the method is under utilised in the formation and assessment of educational policy. In this paper a rural town is described as a case, among others, not fitting policy regulations for "learning or earning" in…

This article examines the ethnographic case study in education in the context of policy making with particular emphasis on the practice of research and policy making. The central claim of the article is that it is impossible to establish a transcendental epistemology of the case study on instrumental rationality. Instead it argues for the notion…

This article was presented as the 2008 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. It argues that, to generate robust and generative theories of human learning and development, researchers must address the range of diversity within human cultural communities. The…

The study examines whether writers from shared cultural backgrounds display common writing patterns in their texts and whether these patterns differ while writing in L1 versus L2. The study explored the presence and bidirectional transfer of rhetorical patterns in eighteen Turkish participants' writing in relation to previous writing instructional…

This chapter begins with the statement that all talk happens somewhere, somehow, at some time and is produced by somebody for some purpose, and the approach that practice theorists have taken is that talk and its context are inseparable. The challenges that face an analyst of practice are then to describe the context, describe the talk, and…

What is the effect of the diminution of tenured, professional faculty or librarians by adjunct faculty or librarians? The author explores the effects of adjunct faculty and librarians on student learning, faculty governance, curricula, and academic freedom. The author discusses solutions offered by professional organizations as well as an…

In 1795 America's preeminent scholarly organization sponsored a contest for the best essay on education. The two winners have been canonized in the scholarship on early American educational thought. This essay refocuses attention on the great contest itself, not only seeking understanding of the works that it produced but also analyzing its…

Extant data collected through the Experience Sampling Method--a signal contingent method for gathering data about students' immediate experiences--were analyzed to describe adolescents' subjective experiences doing homework. Analyses were conducted to explore variation in subjective experience in relation to the contexts in which homework was…