Drawing from critical sociocultural perspectives that view play, literacy, and gender as social practices, boys' Disney Princess play is examined as a site of identity construction and contestation situated within overlapping communities of femininity and masculinity practice where children learn expected practices for "doing gender".…

Starting school is a critical and potentially stressful time for many young children, and having supportive relationships with parents, teachers and peers and friends offer better outcomes for school adjustment and social relationships. This paper explores matters of friendship when young children are starting school, and how they initiate…

This article describes in detail a conversation analysis of conceptual change in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. Conceptual change is an essential learning process in science education that has yet to be fully understood. While many models and theories have been developed over the last three decades, empirical data to…

The media's response to the release of "Math Instruction that Makes Sense" (2011), a research report by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP), helped spark a public controversy and spur the Saskatchewan government to reexamine the Ministry of Education's math curriculum. The purpose of this article is to examine the CBC's…

This study reports on the development of a professional spoken register among learners of German as they participate in four synchronous Web conferences with German-speaking professionals. The researchers investigated the effect of interaction with expert German speakers combined with an instructional intervention focusing on pragmatic competence…

This article reports research that is contextualised within reforms of secondary education in Hong Kong and the reintroduction of Liberal Studies, which jointly emphasise the need for a learning environment that facilitates the practice of group work and the development of critical thinking. A study is described that explores the relevance of…

In contemporary Western societies, disciplinary and normalising technologies function to create a sense of moral obligation within each individual to monitor and regulate the body in terms of health, including diet and exercise. The settler/Aboriginal experience in Australia provides an example of the ways in which biopolitics has operated at a…

This article explores the microgenetic development of learners' understanding of sociolinguistic variation in French during an instructional conversation (IC) that followed a language analysis task in which learners attempted to formulate hypotheses about the nature of language variation. During the IC, the instructor led students toward a…

Mark 13 predicts that certain events will occur literally within the generation of Jesus' contemporaries, and today's reader recognizes that some of these events have not taken place. The reader therefore appropriates the text as a false configuration of the world because it describes the world differently from how it is. However, the hermeneutics…

This research study investigated preservice teachers' levels of mathematical understanding and their roles in classroom discourse. Qualitative methods, involving classroom observations, task-based interviews and analysis of responses to selected test items were employed. Five preservice teachers served as cases for this study. Results showed…

Research that has examined university assignment writing has varied from large-scale, inventorial surveys across disciplines to more specific, finer-grained analyses of the assignment requirements of specific disciplines. However, while such research has involved surveys of the views and expectations of faculty or the analysis of assignment tasks,…

Jean Anyon's (1981) "Social Class and School Knowledge" was a landmark work in North American educational research. It provided a richly detailed qualitative description of differential, social class-based constructions of knowledge and epistemological stance. This essay situates Anyon's work in two parallel traditions of critical educational…

The proverb "chalepa ta kala" ("fine things are difficult") is invoked in three dialogues in the Platonic corpus: "Hippias Major," "Cratylus" and "Republic." In this paper, I argue that the context in which the proverb arises reveals Socrates' considerable pedagogical dexterity as he uses the proverb to rebuke his interlocutor in one dialogue but…

This paper draws on engagements with "voice" in youth studies and "student voice" work in order to interrogate the limits and opportunities of the call to "youth voice" in HIV prevention discourses. Building on the limitations and opportunities within the debates of the "who", "what" and "how" of speaking and the construction of the youth subject,…

The study explored whether aspects of elementary students' writing about their personal values could predict if students were considered more at risk or more resilient. Essays from 176 fifth-grade students (79.54% African American, 20.46% Hispanic) from a low-income, urban district in New Jersey were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word…