This study examines students' experiences using letter writing designed as a socio-cultural-based tool for critical friend work to promote dialogue and critique of their self-study teacher research projects. It seeks to understand their diverse experiences to inform future practice and contribute to the knowledge base of critical friend work in…

Student psychology--how the classroom looks and feels from the perspective of the student--can powerfully affect motivation and learning, and experiments are increasingly showing that even brief interventions to change psychology can boost achievement over months or years. When paired with other structural reforms, social-psychological…

In this paper the authors explore the heuristic potential in the image of the teacher-as-stranger and use it as a frame for reflecting on teacher change and growth. Drawing on the sociological figure of the stranger, they conduct a qualitative study of a sample of teachers who are not only strangers in a metaphorical sense, but who, because they…

A number of recent studies suggested that visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) occurs spontaneously when viewing either a human body or an action by an agent. However, it remains unclear whether VSPT is caused by the observation of an (potential) action or occurs because the observer infers from certain cues that another mind is present…

To address anti-immigration sentiments revealed by preservice educators, the authors conducted a workshop using a "critical-aesthetic praxis." The purpose of the workshop was to create a praxis (Freire, 1970;1998) of critical aesthetics (Carey, 1998) in which preservice teachers engaged in a series of aesthetically grounded experiences…

Online role plays, as they are designed for use in higher education in Australia and internationally, are active and authentic learning activities (Wills, Leigh & Ip, 2011). In online role plays, students take a character role in developing a story that serves as a metaphor for real-life experience in order to develop a potentially wide range…

This article discusses five generally accepted reasons to use data as a part of an educator's ongoing professional practice. Of course, there are many other more specific reasons one might look at data, but these five cover the overarching need in an educational setting. The five major purposes for using data are: (1) To enhance understanding and…

"These families must be so sad. I just wonder what they do and if they have any type of normal life." "I am not sure how I will work with parents. I think they probably look to the school for a lot of help." These quotes were taken from preservice teachers' papers early in their teacher education program, in which they were asked to describe what…

New technologies can dramatically change the way people live and work. Jet engines transformed travel. Television revolutionized news and entertainment. Computers and the Internet have transformed just about everything else. And now small video cameras have the potential to transform professional learning. Recognizing the potential of this new…

Qualitative differences in social interaction style exist "within" the autism spectrum. In this study we examined whether these differences are associated with (1) the severity of autistic symptoms and comorbid disruptive behavior problems, (2) the child's psycho-social health, and (3) executive functioning and perspective taking skills. The…

Pronoun reversal, the use of "you" for self-reference and "I" for an addressee, has often been associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and impaired language. However, recent case studies have shown the phenomenon also to occur in typically developing and even precocious talkers. This study examines longitudinal corpus data from two…

Although teacher education programs across the country are currently under significant review and reform, little attention is paid to the importance of Indigenous principles that could inform or transform them. Attention to Indigenous principles such as those presented in this paper can, we believe, serve to decolonize teacher education, offering…

Although people can take spatial perspectives different from their own, it is widely assumed that egocentric perspectives are natural and have primacy. Two studies asked respondents to describe the spatial relations between two objects on a table in photographed scenes; in some versions, a person sitting behind the objects was either looking at or…

In most research on the early ontogeny of sympathy, young children are presented with an overtly distressed person and their responses are observed. In the current study, the authors asked whether young children could also sympathize with a person to whom something negative had happened but who was expressing no emotion at all. They showed 18- and…

This study investigated the use of a narrative-based language intervention program for teaching perspective-taking skills to students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The participants consisted of 18 students between the ages of 9 years 7 months and 12 years 2 months (M = 10:8) who had a diagnosis of an ASD. Students received 500 minutes of…