Against the background of Swedish preschool's historical and traditional functions in Swedish society, this article focuses on some of the choice points and their implications for professional and organisational development in preschool. By combining feminist pragmatism and feminist action research, some analytical points are made regarding the…

Critical reflection is defined as an educational imagination that allows candidates to look at themselves and their situations with new eyes, and in the process, become conscious of the multiple ways they can interpret, critique, challenge, confront, and reconstruct teaching. This study examines the effectiveness of using explicit instruction in…

This paper explores the views that students and employers have on innovative work-based learning (WBL) programmes in English higher education. The experiences of both students and employers were analysed methodologically, using the organizational story-telling framework (Gabriel, 1999). The themes that have emerged are learning support,…

The purpose of this research-to-practice article is to describe the literacy and oral language professional development (PD) model that took place in a 3-year Early Reading First project in 9 Head Start and community-based school classrooms. Through our data-driven PD model, we provided 55 hr of training workshops for all classroom teaching staff…

While perceptions that the roles of teacher and teacher educator as an oppositional binary are being challenged, sustaining and incorporating both professional identities has presented challenges. This paper presents a narrative account of my professional identity journey, including a description of a partnership that enabled boundaries to be…

The growing numbers of English language learners (ELLs) in U.S. K-12 public schools have raised many questions about how to best educate these students. Much of the research on teaching ELLs has discussed the kinds of practices that should be used to increase ELLs' school achievement, but few studies have documented the actual practices that…

This article chronicles a qualitative study of the impact of a pedagogical practice called cultural and political vignettes (CPVs) on graduate students enrolled in a teacher education course. CPVs are cultural and political "situations" that are presented to teachers so that they can practice the decision-making skills that they will use…

This case study explored the promise and possibility of doing action research both for aspiring principals engaged in such research and for professors using it as pedagogy for teaching educational leadership. The study of a class of graduate students aspiring to be principals had a constructivist theoretical framework. The research design…

Two forces motivate this special section, "New Methods for New Questions in Developmental Psychology." First are recent developments in social science methodology and the increasing availability of those methods in common software packages. Second, at the same time psychologists' understanding of developmental phenomena has continued to grow. At…

In this article, the author discusses how it is simply too late to be still speaking about French theory and its role in the intellectual life of the United States today. It seems to many observers that the gap between real-life politics and theory's guerrillas is much too wide already, after 30 years of academic fever, for the two worlds to even…

This study builds upon existing socio-cultural work into sports coaching by probing the meanings and varieties of the shared coach-athlete experience. Specifically, the paper utilises an autoethnographic approach in an attempt to chart the complex and dynamic relationship that existed between me, the principal author, as a rowing coxswain and my…

Variability of experience and outcomes among violence-exposed people pose considerable challenges toward developing effective prevention and treatment protocols. To address these needs, the authors present an approach to research and a class of methodologies referred to as person oriented. Person-oriented tools support assessment of meaningful…

Research on professional development (PD) typically focuses on what teachers learn as a result of their participation in PD. Questions are framed unidirectionally: To what extent does participation in PD affect teachers' classroom practice? The authors challenge this unidirectional conceptualization of teacher learning and instead argue for…

This article provides an overview of constructivism and its implications for classroom practices. To that end, it first describes the basic features of constructivism along with its major forms or variations. It then elucidates the constructivist view of knowledge, learning, teaching, and the relationship among these constructs. More specifically,…

Formal instructional design (ID) theories, intended to guide instructional designers' decision-making and design practices, have grown in abundance in recent years. These ID theories are based on learning theories that form the foundation for applied work in the field. However, researchers are concerned that these theories may not be applicable to…