This article explores practices of othering through formations of normative sameness in discussion-based seminar classrooms. It takes literary scholar Stanley Fish's question, "Is there a text in this class, or is it just us?", back into the classroom to explore the formation of a "just us," an imagined homogeneous interpretive…

All course activities should be aimed at moving students towards the learning outcomes, including class introductions. This article provides detailed instructions for implementing an online Class Session Introductions (CSI) activity that immediately engages students with their peers, the content and the instructor. The activity may be useful to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate connections between questioning, learning, achievement and conscious knowledge and beliefs held by tutors and how these are applied in a teaching/learning situation. Design/methodology/approach: The design of this study involved the authors listening to, but not participating in, classroom…

This article documents the experiences of three early career academics trying to establish a network of early career academics (ECAs) in a middle-ranked university in Australia. The changing context of academia means that ECAs face considerable challenges in understanding and negotiating effective career paths. Some of the issues encountered…

Game-centred approaches (GCAs) were designed for the effective integration of skills into contextualized situations. Despite a plethora of research, few studies explore the articulations between pre-service teachers' experiences, conceptual understanding, pedagogical practices, the wider cultural and political realities of teaching and their…

The purpose of this study was to determine the value that graduate students place on different types of instructional methods used by professors in educational leadership preparation programs, and to determine if master's and doctoral students place different values on different instructional methods. The participants included 87 graduate…

Food constitutes an important pedagogical component of elementary science, yet research on how to approach this topic is scarce. The present study attends to this issue by exploring "food appraisal" (dialogic sense-making wherein elementary teachers and students orally evaluate particular types of foods and eating habits) during science…

Attending to precision (ATP) is essential in mathematics. This study examined ATP instances through the lens of univocal (functioning to convey information) and dialogic (functioning to generate new meaning) discourse. Analysis of data from five secondary mathematics classrooms focused on whole-class instances of ATP with coding based on the…

As the demand for Information Systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT) graduates remains strong, it is imperative that the curriculums in IS and IT programs meet employer needs. IS and IT educators encounter a continuing challenge to ensure that their courses and curriculum stay up to date with new and evolving technological changes in the…

In this paper, we describe a novel methodology, grounded in techniques from the field of machine learning, for modeling emerging social structure as it develops in threaded discussion forums, with an eye towards application in the threaded discussions of massive open online courses (MOOCs). This modeling approach integrates two simpler, well…

In the 21st century, oral communication skills are increasingly important for business graduates who will start their careers. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to discover the best method to help business students enhance their oral communication skills during their college years. This research also helps professors to make their…

Helping students develop an understanding of how to interpret experimental data trends is an important part of the introductory physics laboratory. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues have lamented that too many of their students do this poorly. This is a common refrain, and past research has already revealed student difficulties with…

In seeking to prepare students to be "citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world," teachers engage students in live, online discussions about what justifies war, while at the same time grappling with the requirements to teach the memorization of people, places and isolated events. Teachers and a…

Theoretical models of collaborative learning through online discussions presuppose that students generally attend to others' posts. However, a succession of studies over the last decade has shown this assumption to be unwarranted. Instead, research indicates that learners attend to others' posts in diverse and particular ways--an…

Peer Instruction (PI) is an evidence based pedagogy commonly used in undergraduate physics instruction. When asked questions designed to test conceptual understanding, it has been observed that the proportion of students choosing the correct answer increases following peer discussion; however, relatively little is known about what takes place…