This article focuses on the challenges and opportunities a researcher may encounter in practice, and presents four narratives that take the reader into situations which may arise when the researcher steps into the practice field. Episodes that challenge the researcher both cognitively and emotionally are depicted in the narratives. The authors…

This paper presents new insights from ongoing design-based research of graduate-level online courses in a school of education. This research has been refining the use of widely available wikis and online assessment tools to deliver broad learning outcomes. The research started with a general goal that reflects current situative theories of…

All education proceeds within a complex array of epistemological and ontological factors that constitute a shifting and intricate learning environment for teachers, pre-service teachers and school students alike. We have expanded a "praxis inquiry" protocol into a "critical praxis" protocol for use in pre-service programs. A…

Action research allows teachers to evaluate and gain insight into their own practices in their teaching contexts through reflection, and inquire into ways to improve their practices and student learning outcomes. This study is a reflective self-inquiry in which the research team engages in a deliberate and retrospective analysis of the principal…

The discourse of competitive sport is, and has been, a defining feature of physical education for many years. Given the privileged and dominant position competition holds in physical education curricula, it is concerning that competitive physical education remains steeped in traditional pedagogies and that these pedagogies are constrained by…

Set in an undergraduate Secondary English Education Program, this qualitative study draws on theories of power, positioning, and identity to explore how positions of power affect teacher identity construction. Drawn from a larger study, the authors examine how one preservice teacher negotiated positions of power with students in ways that enabled…

Teachers are expected to frequently collaborate within teacher communities in schools. This requires teacher education to prepare student teachers by developing the necessary community competence. The present study empirically investigates the extent to which teacher education programmes pay attention to and aim to stimulate the development of…

This paper reports on the systematic development of a teaching methodology for two chemical engineering courses. The aim was to improve the quality of teaching to achieve expected learning outcomes more effectively. The development was carried out over a period of several years based on an action research methodology with data systematically…

"Metasyntactic Ability" (MSA) refers to the conscious reflection about syntactic aspects of language and the deliberate control of these aspects (Gombert, 1992). It appears from previous studies that heritage-language learners tend to demonstrate lower MSA than their monolingual counterparts (Lesaux & Siegel, 2003). In the present study, we…

This is an ethnographic study of promotion of metacognition, focusing on the teaching practices in secondary mathematics classrooms of three teachers in the UK. With all three teachers, observations of their teaching and interviews regarding their teaching were conducted. The main aim was analysing and substantiating the parallels and differences…

This study reflects on teaching and learning contemporary dance in Amman, Jordan, focusing on the experiences of three contemporary dance students. Through the three case studies, various issues regarding teaching and learning contemporary dance in a Jordanian context are raised, revealing that contemporary dance can be perceived as a taboo and…

Determined to shift the balance by providing a venue for students' voices, Cordi and Masturzo reclaimed and remade a Web space to address bullying using digital storytelling (Ohler, 2009). Using "Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories", they guided their undergraduate students on a valuable journey of self-exploration, reflection, and…

This essay offers suggestions for faculty who are designing study abroad (SA) experiences by outlining a three-week Maymester study abroad to Reggio Emilia, Italy, and a semester-long study abroad to Brussels, Belgium. The authors reflect on commonalities in planning, recruiting, preparing students, and conducting each trip, as well as some of the…

The central goal of this exploratory study was to characterize the effects of experiments involving different levels of inquiry on the nature of college students' written reflections about laboratory work. Data were collected in the form of individual lab reports written using a science writing heuristic template by a subset of the students…

This article explores the experiences of students who participated in a series of seminars that employed active learning methodologies. The study on which the article is based involved two parts. First, students completed a questionnaire after each seminar, resulting in 468 questionnaires. Second, nine students participated in a focus group where…