This commentary dialogues with three articles that analyze the same database about science and religion discourse produced 17 years ago. Dialogues in these three articles and this commentary across space and time allow us to develop new and different understandings of the same database and situation. As part of this commentary, I discuss topics…

Interactive relationships in online learning communities can influence the process and quality of knowledge building. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between network structures and social knowledge building in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums in a learning management system. The…

Key to introducing information and communication technologies in museums is to support meaning-making activity in encounters with artefacts. The study presented in this paper is exploratory in nature and investigates the use of social and mobile technologies in school field trips as a means of enhancing the visitor experience. It is anchored in…

The purpose of our article is to illustrate the use of mixed methods research as necessary to uncover maximum information and perspective, increase corroboration of the data, and render less biased and more accurate conclusions. This study used the case study method to closely examine the people, issues, programmes and topics related to the…

The concepts of "access" and "relevance" feature prominently in the discourse of change in mathematics education in South Africa. One way in which these concepts have been played out in mathematics classrooms is in the use of mathematical problems with real-world contexts. This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis of…

Recent policy in England has created a new status of "Early Years Professional", thus imposing professionalisation of the early years workforce. There has been an increase in policy focus on those working with young children, and such a focus raises questions about practitioners' own responses to the debate about their training,…

Educators have criticised vocational education in Australia and elsewhere for being gendered and classed, thereby not giving those students who choose to undertake this form of study the broadening of opportunities envisioned (e.g., Falk, 1999; Huws, 2000; Host & Michelson, 2001). Recently, the Queensland Studies Authority (formally the…

This article reports on a study that analysed life history accounts of language learning. The key aim of the study was to understand how the experience of language learning was discursively constructed through recourse to particular cultural worlds and narrative strategies. The study contributes to the growing field of research using language…

The idea that a new generation of students is entering the education system has excited recent attention among educators and education commentators. Termed "digital natives" or the "Net generation", these young people are said to have been immersed in technology all their lives, imbuing them with sophisticated technical skills and learning…

This article challenges the common-sense observation that Japanese and American education have been moving in "opposite directions" in recent times. Drawing on postcolonial discourse studies and cultural studies, the article extracts from this observation an Orientalist binary epistemology that continues to set discursive limits on the…

The micro-time context of group processes (such as argumentation) can affect a group's micro-creativity (new ideas). Eighty high school students worked in groups of four on an algebra problem. Groups with higher mathematics grades showed greater micro-creativity, and both were linked to better problem solving outcomes. Dynamic multilevel analyses…

This paper explores the argumentation ability of ten science teachers in two South African schools on opposite ends of the resource spectrum. Toulmin's model is used to analyse individual contributions in six group discussions. The findings show that levels of argumentation improve with teachers' involvement in the development of teaching…

In this article, I add a discursive analysis to the discussion about Muslim girls and women's dress in non-Muslim educational contexts. I argue that a law or policy that prohibits the wearing of "khimar," "burqa," "chador," "niqab," "hijab," or "jilbab" in the context of public schools is a form of censorship in educational contexts. This…

Mentor teachers need a versatile supervisory skills repertoire. Besides taking the prevalent role of daily advisor and instructor, mentor teachers should also be able to stimulate reflection in student teachers. Video recordings of 60 mentoring dialogues were analysed, both before and after a mentor teacher training aimed at developing the…

Wireless networks are fast becoming ubiquitous in all aspects of society and the world economy. We describe a method for studying the impacts of combining such technology with dynamic, representationally-rich mathematics software, particularly on participation, expression and projection of identity from a local to a public, shared workspace. We…