Drawing on qualitative research, this study explores (1) how Hong Kong university students' existing L1 and L2 affect their learning motivation for an L3 and (2) how an individual's L2 motivation changes because of learning an L3, from a dynamic systems theory perspective. Eight undergraduate students from Hong Kong participated in this study.…

There is a growing body of action research on school improvement and development. Many of these studies have found the use of critical friendship valuable in relation to teachers' or principals' practice. Yet, little attention has been paid to critical friendship at the school district level. This study explores how a superintendent and three…

An extensive number of studies acknowledge the transformed nature of literacies by building on the complexity of multimodal semiotic repertoires and available digital resources (Reinhardt & Thorne, 2019; Toffoli, 2020). The exposure to such resources and tools makes digital literacies dynamic as environments provide students with opportunities…

Throughout history educational leaders have looked to other countries and have attempted to learn by borrowing useful examples to implement in their own educational systems. As recent comparative policy research shows, processes of policy lending and borrowing have their own socio-historically defined dynamics. In this paper, the authors approach…

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech is in the fourth year of a large-scale change project called "Revolutionizing Engineering Departments" (NSF RED) (Lord et al., 2018). Our project has three interrelated goals: (1) broaden the range of students entering the department, (2) expand the boundaries…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if foreign-born academics employed in Poland and Slovakia have a sense of being marginalised in the global world of knowledge production, and, if so, what are the basic indicators of this marginalisation. The paper is based on 100 qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in Poland and 40 interviews…

In the spring of 2011, a teacher allowed his fourth and fifth grade students to draw and write on their classroom tables. What began as a few names eventually turned into a series of frenetic marks that completely covered the tabletops. Over the course of two years, new groups of students brought with them another cycle of marking that evolved in…

Drawing on theoretical insights from a complex dynamic systems framework, this work explores the ways that learner selves, as they relate to learning and using languages, manifest across different contexts and timescales and emerge in interaction with various factors. First, a broad overview of dynamically-oriented L2 motivation research is…

Purpose: Education is a key institution of modern society, long recognized for its central role in the reproduction of inequities and with the potential to challenge them. Schools behave as their systems are designed. Achieving equity and excellence is not possible through attempts to fix "the school" or educators. Principles of systemic…

Despite the emerging discussions about the growing role of engineers in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is a lack of agreement on which competences should be prioritised to prepare engineering students to resolve future sustainability challenges. This study examined and compared the views of key stakeholders of…

Spurred by the 1986 IDEA reauthorization, the movement toward collaborative, or blended, preservice early childhood personnel preparation now spans an impressive 30-year history. In this paper, we trace the evolution of blended preparation by applying a conceptual framework that situates the development of blended program identity within a…

The understanding of inclusion in education has transcended the assumption that inclusion is about students with special needs. It concerns the inclusion of all children. With systems theory as a framework, the article argues that in order to handle inclusion as a phenomenon that concerns all children, we need an operational definition of…

We present a theoretical review of notions of autonomy to show how they organize discourses within social sciences around the biological reality of ideal self-regulating individuals. First, we reconstruct key meanings of autonomy in biological theory, focusing on theories of autopoietic systems and their connections to constructivist…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to give practical insights into the systemic approach to organizational learning "triple loop learning" (TLL; introduced in Part I) by reflecting on a facilitated research-and-intervention undertaken in South Africa as part of the "500 Schools Project". Design/methodology/approach: The…

Transition requires a multidimensional, interdisciplinary approach for its re-conceptualisation to bring to the fore systemic and power related concerns affecting marginalised and vulnerable groups. This concluding article examines the special issue articles through a range of perspectives. These include examining transitions through a…