In recent years, pedagogical pragmatics has sought to improve the effectiveness with which learners express and interpret meaning, through awareness-raising activities that draw on authentic materials and break away from simplistic explanations of form-function correspondences. By and large, these efforts have been informed by an inductive…

Taking the 2009 UKLA conference theme of "making connections and building literate communities" and recalling Hoggart's plea for literacy to be critically and morally engaged rather than merely functional, this paper calls for a reassessment of the pursuit of literacy in schools so as to connect the language of learning with the language of…

Given the serious decline in the number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities in general, and literature in particular, teachers of Children's Literature have a unique opportunity to serve their discipline by tapping the power of classroom dialogue to introduce students to the practical reasoning central to humanistic study. This essay…

The key idea is that 50 minutes of teacher talk with passive student listening is relatively ineffective in developing student learning. Teachers can create silences for productive active student learning. Students can also change from passive listeners to active talker-discussers of their learning. Ideas are given about how to overcome silences…

This study examines the didactic suitability of introducing a teaching sequence when teaching the concept of magnetic fields within introductory physics courses at the university level. This instructional sequence was designed taking into account students' common conceptions, an analysis of the course content, and the history of the development of…

This qualitative study explores the uses of reading and note-taking in two pre-service teacher training Social Sciences courses. Data analysis of in-depth interviews with professors and students, class observations and course materials suggested two polar teaching styles according to how bibliography was included in the course and the presence or…

Have you ever avoided discussing controversial issues in the classroom? Teachers report often avoiding these types of discussions due to concerns about the unpredictability of student reactions, accusations of trying to push a political agenda, and insufficient knowledge or skills to work through complex issues. Debates, however, have been shown…

Disinhibition is recognized as an effect that prompts online users to communicate with less constraint than in face-to-face discussion. This article describes how disinhibition may affect more than individual instances. In a blended learning environment, disinhibition may alter the entire context of discussion by disrupting established patterns of…

African children who care for sick or dying adults are receiving less than optimal support due to confusion about whether or not young caregiving constitutes a form of child labour and the tendency of the authorities to play it "safe" and side with more abolitionist approaches to children's work, avoiding engagement with support…

The use of mentoring within teacher education has become more common in recent years, however, there still seems to be a lack of research about formal group mentorship models as a pedagogical process. In my study, I presented knowledge about how a formal group mentorship model used during a teacher education program at a Swedish university has…

Through the construction of arguments, students are invited to make sense of the concept of a species and its connection to both extinction and local biomes. Scientific argumentation is the process by which scientists engage in discourse aimed at developing common knowledge about the natural world (Driver et al. 1994). This article describes a 5E…

This article reports findings from a 3-year study on preservice middle and secondary social studies teachers' common content knowledge of politics and current events. Surveys showed that both groups were generally uninformed about these issues, and on almost all measures, the middle-grades preservice teachers performed worse than those in the…

Mary Ledbetter's fifth grade students at the University of Texas Elementary School know immigration well. Some of them are recent immigrants from Mexico, or they have family members who are. Several of Mary's students are first or second generation Americans. For Mary, immigration is one of the most important units she teaches, one that integrates…

In this two-part activity, high school biology students examine human karyotyping, sex-chromosome-linked disorders, and the relationship between biological sex and gender. Through interactive simulations and a structured discussion lab, students create a human karyotype and diagnose chromosomal disorders in hypothetical patients, as well as…

For students who major in meteorology, engaging in weather forecasting can motivate learning, develop critical-thinking skills, improve their written communication, and yield better forecasts. Whether such advances apply to students who are not meteorology majors has been less demonstrated. To test this idea, a weather discussion and an eLearning…