Student engagement is highly visible in higher education research about learning and teaching, but lacks a single meaning. It can be conceived narrowly as a set of student and institutional behaviours in a classroom or holistically and critically as a social-cultural ecosystem in which engagement is the glue linking classroom, personal background…

This article looks closely at the talk of two pre-service teachers over time to examine how they used language as a way of rehearsing their evolving agency as literacy educators. Drawing on critical sociocultural theory, I use Agency Tracing to highlight how pre-service teachers' agentic actions are not isolated phenomena but ones developed and…

The metaphor of talking "over the fence" underscores the neutrality of tools. Shovels and hoes do the job, but the gardener creates the transformation of earth to food. Each garden requires a unique approach. Such are the tools of education for sustainable development (ESD). Pre-packaged textbooks and toolkits provide definitions and…

The present paper interrogates the dominance of formal education. As formal education system relies on ability based academic achievement as a goal, exploring post-formal approaches, such as sociocultural notion of academic achievement is the hallmark of present paper. An attempt is made to interrogate the existing cultural dominance in formal…

The neoliberal proposition that the "invisible hand" of the market is the most efficient and just mechanism for structuring economies, societies, and cultures has had a powerful impact on the nature and delivery of what have historically been considered as "public goods" in America, including social welfare services and public education. The mode…

This study investigates two Korean heritage language teachers' motivational practices in relation to their identity positioning as heritage language (HL) teachers. Constant-comparative analyses of teachers' interviews and classroom practices showed that the two teachers' identity positioning as HL teachers was partially shaped by their earlier…

Background: Effective co-practice is essential to deliver services for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). The necessary skills, knowledge and resources are distributed amongst professionals and agencies. Co-practice is complex and a number of barriers, such as "border disputes" and poor awareness of respective…

The research aims at exploring how macro and micro contextual factors have influenced on the construction of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' identity in education reform contexts in Chile based on sociocultural theories. Grounded theory was used in the methodological design to analyse and categorize data utilizing the ATLAS.ti…

Dynamic assessment (DA), having its theoretical base in Vygotskyan Sociocultural theory of mind, is a newly developed classroom assessment through which learners are helped to perform beyond their current ability. Drawing upon the theoretical aspect of DA, the present study explored the impact of DA on the development of speaking skills. To this…

Using sociocultural concepts of authoritative and dialogic discourse, I sought to examine 5th-grade teachers' questioning practices during small-group reading instruction to understand the differences between groups reading text on grade level and groups reading texts below grade level. The purpose was also to examine how questions functioned for…

English Language Learners (ELLs) are students who speak a language other than English; they are the fastest growing student population in United States' (US) public schools and will include over 17 million students by the year 2020 (NCES,2015). The dramatic increase in the ELL student population means that all mainstream classroom teachers will…

This article provides a qualitative inquiry into the influences of immediate family members (i.e. parents and siblings) on a group of Gulf Arab EFL students regarding their language learning experiences and strategy use in their Arab homelands. The participants came from financially comfortable families, with different levels of education. The…

Teacher education programs are responsible for preparing science teachers for today's culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, which includes preparing them to support students' science learning and language development. Given the rapid growth in linguistic diversity across the country, science teacher preparation for English learners,…

"Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Education" provides a much-needed blueprint for how school leaders can leverage the power of collaborative learning to create more culturally and linguistically responsive schools. The book describes an innovative network of twenty preK-8 schools located across the United States striving to…

Commitment is a complex attitude that is potentially influenced by the nature of the groups and is contingent on the context in which an individual functions. Thus, different sociocultural environments will prescribe different imperatives for individuals' or groups' attitudes toward their work, particularly teachers' commitment in a multi-ethnic…