Western education systems have become globally embedded, and comparative education, by focusing on the delivery model of education, reinforces the status quo. A neo-comparative education would focus on learning and its relationship with culture as a means of understanding how individuals can be encouraged to engage with the many emerging forms of…

Suggests that stories about the classroom experiences of expert teachers can provide novice or struggling teachers with knowledge useful to their own situations. Presents a cyclical model of learning from expert stories--the textual assimilation interchange--in which the text of the story brings the reader (learner) into the expert's world and…

The Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are promoting various "citizen science" projects in which amateur naturalists make local observations of birds, butterflies, or natural phenomena and report their observations to interactive databases on the World Wide Web. Events such as the Great Backyard Bird Count motivate people…

This article presents a teaching experiment on the relationship between informal out-of-school and formal in-school mathematics, and the ways each can inform the other in the development of abstract mathematical knowledge. This study concerns the understanding of some aspects of the multiplicative structure of decimal numbers. It involved a series…

This ethnographic study is an investigation of the environment that students create when making music that is meaningful to them. The initial purpose of the study was to describe a developing "rock group", and the factors that contributed to its creation. The significance of the study may be in the discovery of ways to "counter mechanisms of…

This paper shares findings from a recent study that engaged a group of Kenyan teachers in a review and development of interpretive materials through a participatory action research framework. It focuses on critical contextual reviews of interpretive materials in non-formal organisations and development of similar materials in schools with…

Arguing against a concept of learning as only a formal process occurring in explicitly educational settings like schools, the paper proposes a conception of the workplace as a learning environment focusing on the interaction between the affordances and constraints of the social setting, on the one hand, and the agency and biography of the…

This paper demonstrates how case stories can be used to disseminate the findings of several case studies on negotiating accommodations in the workplace. It highlights the power of interactive technology and of the partnership between the researchers and the Canadian Council for Rehabilitation and Work (CCRW). The paper describes the process of…

Little empirical research is currently available on Jewish distance learning, a nascent but growing field of practice. By way of qualitative case study methodology, this research explored the learning experience of a group of adult learners participating in a Jewish education Master's degree program that is offered by way of videoconferencing…

This paper focuses on "digital inequality"--a key mediating issue within the education technology debate. In particular, it examines how the social and cultural resources of young people relate to their usage behaviour within the informal space of the Internet and what options are available to counter this digital inequality in terms of…

In San Diego, California, 800 public school students from the inner city are attending a program called School in the Park (SITP), for approximately one-fourth of their 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade education. This unique program blends rigorous academic standards (formal learning) with hands-on, experiential curricula (informal learning), using…

A copy of a letter to a cable company, printed in large block letters and not following standard rules of spelling and syntax, serves as a catalyst for thoughts about the person who wrote the letter and a discussion about what constitutes literacy. Despite the appearances of the letter, a case can be made for the author as a writer. A close look…

A singular means of blending the history, language arts, and journalism classes is by teaching oral history. By assigning students oral history projects, the teacher helps students place themselves within a living history in the United States. For example, Eliot Wigginton, a public high school English teacher in Rabun Gap, Georgia, whose classes…

The varied roles animals had and currently have in different cultures are discussed in this report. Samples of roles drawn from a catalog of 1000 examples indicated that animals have been used throughout history as food, clothing, pets, heroes, mascots, trademarks, and symbols. Suggestions were stated for using this listing of animal roles in a…

After decades of neglect, adult numeracy and mathematics education are coming to be recognised as worthy of serious research but the area is beset by conceptual difficulties. Adult numeracy and mathematics may at last be "on the educational research map", but where exactly are they on the map? This article explores the question of what…