The construction of a pedagogy of teacher education requires a sustained, systematic, and careful inquiry into one's own practice, predicated on the understanding that teaching is a discipline. This article begins by arguing that it is more appropriate to speak of a basis for knowing, rather than a knowledge base, for thinking about teaching and…

This article examines the pattern of incentives for work versus retirement in six state teacher pension systems. We do this by examining the annual accrual of pension wealth from an additional year of work over a teacher's career. Accrual of wealth is highly nonlinear and heavily loaded at arbitrary years that would normally be considered…

This study is a survey and interpretation of professional development literature related to professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools. Current K 12 trade publications focusing on PLCs were analyzed against four different theoretical models of professionalism. Each model encourages and legitimates a different understanding of the…

Health care improvement and continuing professional education must be better understood if we are to promote continuous service improvement through interprofessional learning in the workplace. We propose that situating interprofessional working, interprofessional learning, work-based learning, and service improvement within a framework of social…

In the 20th century, Los Angeles built its reputation as a city of golden excess, enshrouded in smog and traversed by freeways. In the 21st century, the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is helping the City of Angels fashion a new reputation--one of sustainable living. From 2001, when the district's board first passed a $1.2 billion…

Ideas about what makes a good teacher are important in thinking about educational reform, and have come into focus recently. These ideas are contested and open to change. The first part of this paper traces models of the good teacher in Australia from the colonial-era good servant, through an ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, to…

When superintendent Calvin Baker of the Vail School District in Vail, Arizona, substituted laptops for textbooks in Vail's first 1-to-1 high school in 2005, he saw that his district now had the freedom to purchase digital content the way he purchased digital music. "People would say, "So, what digital textbook are you going to use?"…

This paper reports results obtained in pedagogical interventions in a Brazilian public high school which aimed at promoting a dialogue between scientific and traditional knowledge in the context of biology teaching. The interventions were based on the use of a didactic material and teaching sequence elaborated on the grounds of school knowledge…

This article compares data from service encounters conducted in person and over the telephone in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the in-person phase, the author and 8 fieldworkers entered businesses and initiated conversations with Latino service providers in Spanish, noting the language of response. The rate of non-reciprocal…

Student learning may be classified according to the sensory modalities by which one prefers to take in information. One such classification scheme uses the VARK instrument, which categorizes learning preferences as visual (V), auditory (A), reading-writing (R), or kinesthetic (K). Many students have a single, strong preferences…

We report upon implementing blended self-managed action learning (SMAL) within graduate and postgraduate courses in digital entrepreneurship. In four out of five cases, we found that SMAL was highly motivating to our learners and integrated well with a blended and flexible approach to learning. We report a case where a SMAL set broke down due to…

This questionnaire-based study of Japanese massage practitioners with visual impairment (n = 155, 126 males, 29 females, mean age = 41 years) found that measures of self-repression, helplessness and "daily hassles" were positively correlated to measures of trait anxiety. Also, trait anxiety was negatively associated with measures of…

State agencies have been encouraging the development of different enterprises to diversify farm incomes in an effort to retain farmers in business, attract new entrants to agriculture and promote regional development. Entrepreneurship and farming are known to be driven by a complex set of goals including those which are economic and intrinsic in…

The theme of this special issue is timely as the world becomes increasingly flat and globally connected (Friedman, 2007). By focusing on an international perspective in problem-based learning (PBL), it puts culture squarely in the center, whether it is a national or disciplinary culture. The articles in this special issue represent Thailand, South…

In this paper, we explore the circumstances leading to an elementary teacher's decision to leave the profession. We analyse her accounts of eleven years of teaching using a storyline technique and a framework provided by the five aspects of teacher self-understandings (Kelchtermans, 2009). We also analyse the interplay between vulnerability,…