Teaching and learning support assistants (TLSAs) are notoriously underpaid and undervalued as members of school workforces in England and elsewhere in the world, where the discourse of "support" has worked to legitimize their poor status. This article reports and explores empirical findings through the lens of positioning theory. This…

The paper begins by arguing that knowledge-blindness in educational research represents a serious obstacle to understanding knowledge-building. It then offers sociological concepts from Legitimation Code Theory--"semantic gravity" and "semantic density"--that systematically conceptualize one set of organizing principles underlying knowledge…

Despite the recent growth of interest in the interactional construction of research interviews and advances made in our understanding of the nature of such encounters, relatively little attention has been paid to the implications of this for interviewer training, with the result that advice on interviewing techniques tends to be very general.…

Critical pedagogy has often been linked in the literature to faith traditions such as liberation theology, usually with the intent of improving or redirecting it. While recognizing and drawing from those previous linkages, Jacob Neumann goes further in this essay and develops the thesis that critical pedagogy can not just benefit from a connection…

This article explores citizenship education for adult immigrants through informal language education in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Based on data collected over thirteen months of ethnographic research among volunteer Dutch language coaches in Amsterdam, the primary methods used in this study were in-depth semi-structured interviews and…

This conceptual essay explores the role a teaching philosophy plays in the experiences of K-12 classroom teachers who are firmly established in a school context. We draw on our experiences as in-service teacher educators and K-12 teachers to examine the extent to which teachers make decisions that are grounded in a well-thought out and clearly…

Teaching the Nature of Science (NOS) in elementary schools and in higher education institutions has become the focus of the science education research community because there is a need to redefine teaching methods and practices. Studies have shown that elementary teachers' views and attitudes towards teaching the NOS are not always compatible with…

This paper explores understandings related to teacher professionalism amongst a sample of highly engaged members of the Alberta Teacher's Association (ATA). Highlighting the many ways in which the Association supported members in their bid to embody roles as leaders, learners, advocates, and policy actors, I argue that the ATA serves as a platform…

To examine the relations between emergent readers' social interaction styles and their comprehension processes, we adapted sociocultural and transactional views of learning and reading, and conducted statistical discourse analysis of 1,359 conversation turns transcribed from 14 preschoolers' 40 buddy reading events. Results show that interaction…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the constructs of school leadership that have gained primacy over the past 20 years. In doing so, I discuss how structures limit the role of the leader in school organisations has been overlooked, particularly ignoring the resource dependency of schools and the external control of resources they…

This paper addresses the use of videography combined with group interviews, as a way to better understand the informal learnings of 11-12 year old children in cross-cultural encounters during French-German school exchanges. The complete, consistent video data required the researchers to choose the most significant sequences to highlight the…

At the heart of the longstanding debate of addressing racial inequities in higher education is an argument about whether race should be a factor in admissions decisions. One argument is that institutions should be held accountable for diversity through external policies like affirmative action. Alternatively, there is the position that…

It has been suggested that in foreign language learning and ELF situations, identity might not be implicated in any great extent. Focusing on the impact globalization has on identities, the purpose of this study is to consider whether identity might be involved in Swedish students' reasons for enrolling on an English-medium university program and,…

This qualitative portraiture study explored how race becomes a conscious and salient dimension of teacher licensure exams for black preservice teachers. The findings focus on one black preservice teacher and how she identified as white on the demographic survey preceding her licensure exam due to the racialized nature of the experience and the…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…