The concept of democracy is a central component in education policy at all levels, yet its meaning can be interpreted in a number of ways. This paper examines how democracy is conceptualised and utilised as a legitimising force driving education policy reform. More specifically, attention is given to the use of democracy in the process of…

Increasingly, professional learning (PL) approaches in the U.S. and globally are reflecting highly adaptive and socially constructed views of learning. However, much remains to be learned about how professional learning groups discursively develop and sustain collaborative communities. Drawing on positioning theory in this year-long qualitative…

A sociology of conventions perspective is used in this paper to examine how non-profit organizations make sense of their educational action in the field of training for employment. Both critiques of education that such organizations voiced and compromises that they had to establish at the turn of the 21st century are revisited here in view of the…

Multimodal texts are an integral part of children's lives. Rapid advancements in media and mobile technologies have increasingly expanded children's capability to view, share, design, and produce multimodal texts. However, Australia's updated English curriculum falls short of offering teachers a metalanguage to help children understand the complex…

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) typically exhibit deficits in spoken discourse. Discourse analysis is the gold standard approach to assess language deficits beyond sentence level. However, the available discourse assessment tools are biased towards English and European languages and Western culture. Additionally, there is a lack of consensus…

The field of teacher education is subject to intense scrutiny and policy reform and within this context, the voices of those working within the field are often marginalised. Drawing on our larger study of teacher educators, we addressed the key research question: "How do those who work in the field of teacher education articulate and…

I compare arguments mobilized for and against a policy to publicly fund private schools, including religious private schools, in Alberta and Ontario, Canada, and highlight how the arguments reflect each province's historical, ideological, and social contexts. Grounded in Maarten Hajer's argumentative discourse theory and based on findings from…

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, igniting the 2023 War in Israel and Palestine. As human rights atrocities unfold, the war has sparked contentious political debate and civil discourse. Given their positions of authority, university presidents and chancellors have weighed in on the conflict through their public statements, while seeking…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

The term "repair" refers to strategies deployed by language users to resolve breakdowns in communication. In this study, I ask what strategies for conversational repair are deployed, and who takes responsibility for their execution, when a language is used in a small local signing ecology. I focus on signers from a single family within a…

This paper aims to interrogate the design studio conversations between teachers and students in order to explore the indicators regarding empathy. To investigate design conversations occurring between design teachers and design students, participant observation studies were conducted at two universities in Finland and Turkey. As an empathic…

Currently, schools in the United States are highly diversified and integrated. In other words, the integration of students representing multiple identities and positionalities existing in the same educational spaces is much more common. The purpose of this study was to examine elementary school principals' perspectives on inclusive education.…

Mechanical reasoning is crucial for many engineering fields, yet undergraduate engineering students struggle to understand discipline-specific formalisms from their courses that model mechanical concepts. The current investigation observed undergraduate engineering students' speech during mechanical reasoning and the benefits of attending to…

This qualitative dissertation conducted a critical discourse analysis of youth and adult discourses about the transition to high school. Despite being a well-researched field, studies of the transition to high school and interventions in the transition to high school do not prioritize youth perspectives. To remedy this shortcoming and examine…

Micro-credentials are gaining traction as viable vehicles for rapid upskilling of the workforce in the twenty-first century and potential pathways for gaining employment for some students. The primary purpose of the current systematic review was to understand the current conceptions and discourses of micro-credentials in higher education and to…