English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

Wenger describes an educational community of practice (CoP) as a group of professionals who share a passionate concern for practice-based issues and who voluntarily choose to deepen their knowledge, understanding and skills through collaborative and critical dialogue. Peer collaboration of this kind, which involves social interaction, reflection…

In this paper we present a case study about a community of practice's foundation and development among Italian teachers, researchers and university students who participated in a European project aimed at developing and testing innovative pedagogical models and technologies for collaborative knowledge building. Forty-five people (34 teachers, five…

Service-Learning has become a popular pedagogical strategy; yet, little attention has been given to the construction of a syllabus that includes a service-learning component. The purpose of this paper is to help instructors identify essential components of high-quality service-learning, to learn ways to incorporate these components into…

As students, educators, outreach and community service experts enter their distinct professional worlds, each will be compelled to make a wide variety of decisions. The shaping of peoples' ethical beliefs occurs through personal experiences as well as family, culture, religion and peer pressure. In order for these students, educators, outreach and…

This study sought to determine the factors that enhance the effectiveness of reflective video journals to increase the metacognition of adolescent students. To achieve this pedagogical goal, this study followed the six-phase methodology of a formative experiment. Twelve high school students participated in a six-session after-school reflective…

The projections for higher education indicate a large number of senior academic leadership posts being vacated in the future due to retirement of existing leaders. The gap in leadership positions lends itself to an increased importance for developing a pipeline of talent to fill these positions. The leadership lifestyle lived by academic leaders…

This dissertation chronicles my search to engage high school English students in inquiry as part of a formal research process. The perspective of critical literacy theory is used to describe the four phases of the problem posing process in shaping student research and action. Grounded in Freire's approach and consistent with Dewey and others who…

This research proposal identifies those experiences that lead to the pursuit of visual art as sustained passion in life. In seeking the potential factors that contribute to an individual's continued interest in visual art at key points in their physical maturity and educational lives, strategies for success could be developed for the benefit of…

Reflection is essential to deep learning and problem solving. From a socio-cultural perspective, reflection is developed through social interaction and semiotic mediation (Vygotsky, 1978; Wells, 1999). To reflect, students need to be given opportunities to review their own and others' mental processes and to use techniques such as writing or…

This paper shows how globalization has given rise to a number of new theoretical and methodological issues for doing education policy analysis linked to globalization's impact within critical social science. Critical policy analysis has always required critical "reflexivity" and awareness of the "positionality" of the policy analyst. However, as…

Product life cycle (PLC) stages and diagrams are briefly and dispassionately covered in the standard marketing textbook format with little attention to the social-psychological experiences of those actually participating. This qualitative study used process drama as a teaching tool and a research instrument to probe the PLC phenomenon in a…

Recent research on how infants and toddlers grow and learn has provided new evidence for creating child care practices that support healthy development. The author describes 6 program practices drawn from this research. The article discusses practices that support secure attachments, identity formation, family practices, attention to developmental…

In this article, the author considers the ways in which a White first-year teacher performs critical racial consciousness in the context of her urban fifth-grade classroom. The process of critical racial consciousness engagement is complex as well as understudied outside of preservice courses. The findings of this study fall into three…

In this article, the authors share some of their learning about art, aesthetics, and people's ways of living. They discuss why the renewal of professional learning is important and demonstrate how K-12 teachers can engage in this process by creating a journal of critical inquiry about their own local communities' art, aesthetics, and cultures.…