The case study describes the early stages of building and using a learning management system (LMS) to aid in the productivity of an education faculty unit. Little to no research exists regarding teacher education units using LMSs to create an online web group for work purposes. The literature review preceding the case study illuminated some of the…

Discourses of public education reform, like that exemplified within the Queensland Government's future vision document, Queensland State Education-2010 (QSE-2010), position schooling as a panacea to pervasive social instability and a means to achieve a new consensus. However, in unravelling the many conflicting statements that conjoin to form…

Effective educational and management programs to improve water quality will require an improved understanding of public perceptions of the relationship between land use and water quality. We analyzed a large database of newspaper articles in the Upper Mississippi River Basin to assess the public discourse about water quality and land use, and…

The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of a study that examines whether the Community of Inquiry (CoI) dimensions of social, teaching, and cognitive presence distinctively exist in e-learning environments. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, the author will briefly review recent studies on the dimensions of this…

This article explores discourses of leadership and learning within a Norwegian context. It is inspired by critical discourse analysis. The analysis draws upon, and compares, some findings from two studies. The first is a textual analysis of policy documents. The second is a case study of school leadership and how principals and teachers talk about…

The ideologies underpinning public/private partnerships (PPPs) have been much contested in theory, but what does promulgating a social partnership mean in practice? This qualitative research study has been "critiquing" a construct of "ecologies of learning" or "capacities of capital" for social partnerships between…

In this study of an Indonesian language class in Australia, I propose that students are agentive in adopting, rejecting and deploying discursive positions within the classroom. There are a range of identities made available in the classroom, only some of which are taken up and privileged within specific moments in the classroom. I apply the…

In 1997, the Medical Faculty at Hong Kong University adopted a predominantly problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. At the same time, a sizeable PBL component was added to an already established English as a Second Language (ESL) Course for Medicine to help first-year students develop PBL discussion skills. However, it was felt that not enough…

This paper shows how cultural models mediate children's "Discourse about reading" (in Gee's sense), which is considered as a boundary object between the community and school. An empirical case study of the stories of 7- and 8-year-old children, in conjunction with classroom ethnography show gendered positioning in a Discourse about reading, which…

Over the years, substantial shifts in theory, belief, and practice have occurred in the teaching of language, specifically vocabulary, grammar, or their combination in lexicogrammatical features of a language as part of the writing class or curriculum (Paltridge, 2004; Reid, 1993, 2006). Much of the instruction in L2 writing for adult learners who…

Language and learning advisers and non-English speaking background (NESB) postgraduate students negotiate complex territory when working together to improve students' texts. However, the individual writing consultation is sometimes conceptualised one-dimensionally by faculty as a form of editing. The writing consultation with NESB postgraduate…

This article illustrates the importance of classroom discourse and its effect on the writing of students with dyslexia; specifically, this article examines the nature of discourse that took place within the context of two writing classrooms at The Garden School (pseudonym). When teaching students with dyslexia, the teachers in this study followed…

Background: A critical issue in academic assessment is the effect of children's language and culture on their measured performance. Research on this topic has rarely focused on science education, because science is commonly (though erroneously) assumed to be "culture free." Students' scientific understandings are influenced by the cultural values,…

In the context of low fertility and Australia's ageing population, a national longitudinal telephone survey, "Negotiating the Life Course" (NLC), asks women about their childbearing intentions. This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine interaction between an interviewer and respondents on one NLC question about the likelihood…

Purpose: This article explores distributed leadership as it relates to two teacher teams in one public secondary school. Both situational and social aspects of distributed leadership are foci of investigation. Methods: The qualitative study used constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis to explore leadership as a distributed phenomenon.…