This article applies Engestrom's Activity Theory (AT) as an analytical lens to identify defining characteristics of the collaborative creative music making activities of composing and arranging. Attention is paid to the complex interrelationships among the various elements of interaction in children's collaborative creative music making as…

Currently, numerous on-line discussion forums have been developed for educational purposes; therefore, a better understanding about peer student discussion or discourse interactions is quite important. Through gathering peer learning interactions on 57 college computer science students, who were randomly assigned into 14 small groups for solving…

This paper first discusses why the sentence-level drills still being used extensively in the teaching of grammar to second language learners have not been successful. What follows is a presentation of an innovative approach; namely, using context and discourse to present and practice grammar in more authentic and effective ways.

This article examines how academics position themselves towards an ideologically complex policy text, which outlines an institutional strategy for teaching and learning. It focuses on two main issues: the way their position is established through discourse, and the range of factors that come into play in determining that position. A sample of six…

This article will illuminate how public narratives about teachers within the Norwegian national curriculum documents regulating teacher education (1999 and 2003) and elementary school (1997) construct teacher identities. The aim is not to define what identity Norwegian teachers as a group or individuals possess, but to describe how teacher…

The aim of this study is to characterize the discourse of two problem-solving courses for prospective teachers. The data, consisting of audio recordings and field notes, were examined from a dialogical approach combined with the theory of contextualization. I show not only the substantial differences between the two classroom discourses but also…

This article presents a Vygotsky-inspired analysis of how a teacher mediated a "thinking aloud" whole-group discussion in a 6th grade mathematics classroom. This discussion centered on finding patterns in a triangular array of consecutive numbers as a phase towards building recursive and direct algebraic formulas. By a "thinking aloud" discussion…

This study investigated the impact of the use of computer technology on the enactment of "inquiry" in a sixth grade science classroom. Participants were 42 students (38% female) enrolled in two sections of the classroom and taught by a technology-enthusiast instructor. Data were collected over the course of 4 months during which several "inquiry"…

This article presents a conception of the qualitative research interview as discourses crossing swords. The article draws on examples showing how the researchers' view on learning is challenged by the interviewed apprentices. The apprentices do not assume learning in itself to be an important aspect of their lives. They consider the process of…

Information behavior and information practice, two major concepts denoting the general ways in which people deal with information, are analyzed. Because of their general nature, they may be conceived of as umbrella concepts drawing on "umbrella discourses" with similar names. Information behavior is currently the dominating umbrella concept, while…

The UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Program (1975-1995) provided impetus for developing, legitimizing, and institutionalizing environmental education. More recently, UNESCO was mandated by the United Nations to carry out a worldwide shift towards education for sustainable development. As international organizations'…

It is through the media that audiences come to learn about the apparent successes and failure of the education system. Despite this power, the connection of the media to educational leadership and policy making is often given little attention in determining the forces at play in evaluating what happens in schools. Using a critical discourse…

After decades of research into formal or logical fallacies of reasoning, psychologists have only recently begun to examine the informal reasoning fallacies that are routinely present in critical discussions, debates, and other forms of argumentation. The present study considers several possible influences on an ability to identify and analyze…

This work aims to analyse the specific contribution of social abilities (here considered as the capacity for attributing knowledge to others) in a particular communicative context. 74 normally developing children (aged 3;4 to 5;9, M=4.6) were given two Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, which are considered to assess increasing complexity levels of…

Narrative inquiry in English education comes in many shapes and forms--tales of classrooms and communities, didactic argu-stories, postmodern pastiches, open tales with O. Henry endings--but the heart of the enterprise is research in the form of story or, in other words, exploring the world by telling a story about it. In many such tales, all of…