In the 2021 Presidential Address, I argued that critical scholarship in higher education unsettled the demarcation between the street and the ivory tower and spans the gulf between theorizing and policy. I portrayed critical scholarship both as an insertion which disrupts bodies, stories, and refusals, as well as sitting uneasily on the fulcrum of…

The author follows a new materialist approach to consider the informal and collaborative creative gathering called jamming as creative play, and she makes a case for the jam as a transformative event of genuine intrasubjective dialogue. She uses Karen Barad's theory of agential realism and Hans-Georg Gadamer's ethics of play to argue for the jam…

Successful and high achieving schools have leaders that establish clarity within the school and know they "have a hand in shaping events" and results they want to achieve (Bandura, 2012, p. 11). Successful and high achieving schools not only implement specific research-based practices that help all students succeed, but they also…

Digitally-based assessments create opportunities for collecting moment to moment information about how students are responding to assessment items. This information, called log or process data, has long been regarded as a vast and valuable source of data about student performance. Despite repeated assurances of its vastness and value, process data…

Bullying is a significant problem that has received a great amount of research attention, yet a basic definition of bullying has proven challenging for researchers to agree upon. Differences of definitions between academics and the public pose additional problems for the ongoing study and prevention of bullying. Qualitative methodologies may…

Traditional physical chemistry conceptions of reaction mechanism are formulated in terms of stationary points of an Arrhenius-style "energy profile" that differs sharply (in purpose and form) from the corresponding Robinson-style "arrow-pushing" mechanistic conceptions of organic chemistry. We show here how these diverse…

Frank Abrahams's career in music education has been marked by a theme of advocacy for others. This article examines three areas of advocacy apparent in his work and publications: advocacy for students; advocacy for teachers; and advocacy for people historically marginalized in American society. Through books, articles, research, book chapters,…

The brain must strike a balance between reliable information processing and adaptation to an ever-changing environment. At a gross anatomical level, the brain's wiring diagram is believed to be relatively set after development. Therefore, a fundamental question arises: how does stereotyped wiring lead to flexible dynamics, computation, and…

This book is for educators who believe that schools need to be improved and are hopeful that real change can be achieved. The authors argue that if educators want to create more equitable, socially just, and learner-focused schools, then they need a more robust, transformational theory of school change--an UnCommon Theory. After describing the…

Teacher evaluation systems often include classroom observations in which raters use rating scales to evaluate teachers' effectiveness. Recently, researchers have promoted the use of multifaceted approaches to investigating reliability using Generalizability theory, instead of rater reliability statistics. Generalizability theory allows analysts to…

This piece critically follows David Bakhurst's 2009 article "Reflections on Activity Theory" in light of recent developments in the field. It sketches three directions for further research. First, it examines his identification of "two strands" of activity theory (AT)--the philosophical, which he associates with E.V. Ilyenkov…

In this article, I comment on the potential benefits and limitations of open science reforms for improving the transparency and accountability of research, and enhancing the credibility of research findings within communities of policy and practice. Specifically, I discuss the role of replication and reproducibility of research in promoting better…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides guidance and expectations to state education agencies. We examined the intersection of improvement science and ESSA through a qualitative analysis of the state guidance documents. Utilizing six principles of improvement as a conceptual framework, we identified three themes: improvement as an outcome;…

The amalgamation of multimedia, collaborative learning, and established language acquisition theories engenders a dynamic and continuously evolving milieu within the domain of language instruction. The objective of this study was to examine the correlation between cooperative learning, multimedia, and specific language acquisition theories across…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to place the idea of the learning organization in a historical, multidisciplinary context with the aim of identifying obstacles and opportunities for its greater realization in practice. Design/methodology/approach: Marking the 30th anniversary of publication of Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline",…