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This study explores the personal transformation process experienced by future bilingual educators enrolled in a graduate school of education that is committed to rigorous, collaborative, innovative, and transformational research. The majority of these preservice (PST) and novice teachers (NT), largely White, monolingual women, has little direct knowledge about or experience with teaching culturally, linguistically and ability diverse students. Educational researchers have long emphasized the importance of providing PST and NT graduate students with opportunities to analyze and reflect on their personal theoretical beliefs concerning teaching standards and methods of student learning. Additionally, it has been determined that teacher educators must communicate the necessary theoretical foundations to provide their students with a starting point for analyzing their emerging teaching philosophies, the goal being the development of their new visions of reform-minded practices and innovative techniques of teaching. Data indicated that all the PSTs entered the program with images of teaching that were related to their earlier classroom experiences as students, and that, during their 2-year tenure in the graduate school of education, teaching internship, and master's-level coursework, most experienced professional and personal epiphanies.

This special issue assembles an international group of scholars to explore emerging connections between comics studies and narrative theory-two fields which, until the last five to ten years, have developed largely in parallel, without much cross-fertilization or even interaction. The signs of this new convergence of scholarly interests and research practices are unmistakable. Recent meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Society for the Study of Narrative have increasingly featured papers and sessions on the intersections between scholarship on narrative and research on comics and graphic novels. Further, recent publications have featured narratologically oriented work by analysts of graphic narrative, including Jeanne Ewert's and Erin McGlothlin's path breaking studies of Art Spiegelman's Maus, Pascal Lefèvre's analysis of "Narration in Comics" in the inaugural issue of Image [&] Narrative, Teresa Bridgeman's work on bande dessinée, and Richard Walsh's discussion of "The Narrative Imagination across Media" in Modern Fiction Studies' special issue on "Graphic Narrative" (2006). In Francophone scholarship, there is a longstanding tradition of studying comics using semiotic concepts, which are part of the foundation for contemporary narratology.

Digital mediation is central to how children and youth grow up in the global North and in much of the global South today. In taking account of this situation, of late researchers have tended to draw on a sociology of the child in conjunction with an examination of how digitization is changing the experience of childhood itself. This article also begins by tracking key social, economic and cultural changes in young people's lives. We then link these changes to the immersive media life many children around the world are living today, and note the worries this raises among parents, educators and others. To conclude, we identify the paradox of participation that is shaping children's digital culture and forcing researchers and others to reconsider the relationships between consumerism and civic life.

Vocabulary researchers have established that multiple aspects of word knowledge need to be mastered in order for a learner to truly know a word. Teachers, however, seem to follow the commonsense view that equates learning words with learning meanings, and to mostly ignore other aspects of word knowledge. This study seeks to discover whether the same is true of textbooks. The vocabulary activities in nine General English textbooks at three proficiency levels were analysed and each activity's focus on one or more of nine aspects of vocabulary knowledge noted.

This paper describes a long-term research seminar, developed in 2001 by Hertz-Lazarowitz at the University of Haifa (UH). The goal of the seminar was to involve students in a meaningful, experiential and cooperative-interactive learning environment, based

For a very long time, the process of schooling and the research on that process were thought of as above or beyond politics. The myth of a politics-free schooling was exposed beginning with the social movements of the 1960s. The myth of educational resear

The focus of this article is the conceptualization of a critical anticolonial social science that places ethics and concern for others at the forefront, while at the same time challenges the will to know others that so dominates social science research as

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of

The increasing number of higher degree research students from China in the universities of multicultural Australia as elsewhere has added to the mounting interest in pedagogies of postgraduate supervision. This paper explores the proposition that efforts

Traditionally, educational researchers and practitioners have focused on the development of youths' critical understanding of new media as one key aspect of digital literacy ( Buckingham, 2003; Gilster, 1997). Today, youth not only consume media when browsing the Internet and sharing information on social networking sites, but they also produce content when contributing to blogs, designing animations, graphics, and video productions ( Ito et al., 2009).

There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that proponents of evidence-based education unknowingly promote a colonial discourse and material relations of power that continue from the American-European colonial era. I posit that this colonial discourse is evident in at least three ways: (1) the discourse of civilizing the profession of education, (2) the promotion of colonial hierarchies of knowledge and monocultures of the mind, and (3) the interconnection between neoliberal educational policies and global exploitation of colonized labor. I conclude with the decolonizing implications of revealing some of the colonial vestiges in educational policy, research, and neoliberal reform

"This paper reports on classroom-based research that was designed to monitor the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in a teacher-guided collaborative online learning context to encourage students' critical response to literary texts. The study investigates the premise that an ICT project where children read books and then use email communication to exchange responses with other learners will support critical thinking. Videos of classroom observations, journals and rap sheets were analysed for individual students' levels of critical awareness. Improvements in critical thinking were measured using linguistic analysis. Teachers and students were also interviewed for attitudes to technology use related to learning. Although there were gains in critical thinking, there was little student engagement with technology. The discussion problematises the integration of technology in the classroom through a repositioning of collaboration in a blended learning context known as book raps."

"This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances - especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultural protocols that have moved far beyond legal provisions for protecting intellectual property. Experiments with new digital tools attempt to understand and balance the role of photographs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. However, cultural protocols rely significantly upon representations of "remote" Aboriginal communities in northern Australia that emphasize difference and reify practices that may in fact be fluid, and overlap with Western values. In the aftermath of colonialism, photographs are important to Aboriginal communities, especially in southern Australia, not merely as an extension of tradition, but also in the context of colonial dispossession and loss. As a form of Indigenous memory the photographic archive may address the exclusions and dislocations of the recent past, recovering missing relatives and stories, and revealing a history of photographic engagement between colonial photographers and Indigenous subjects."

"Greater China is used in this article to refer to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Macao. While a holistic approach is adopted to present and compare the rapid spread of English and development in English language education in these geographically close, and sociopolitically, culturally and economically interrelated but hugely different societies, an emphasis is placed on mainland China owing to its size and diversity of its population. Through describing and juxtaposing English language use and education, this article unfolds the stories of the spread of English in these societies in the past few decades. It draws on the research data and discussions included in the author's recent book English language education across Greater China, with evidence and findings from other recent publications. On the basis of these discussions, this article critiques the frequently cited models and notions used to describe the spread of English in post-modern societies. It argues that there is a need to come up with new conceptual models in order to catch the essence of the phenomena in the contemporary societies."

"ABSTRACT: Over the last three decades scholars promoting the world Englishes paradigm (WE) have worked towards establishing a more positive attitude towards international varieties of English. However, despite the best intentions of Western linguists working in this field, there is an obvious imbalance between the developed and developing world in many contexts of English language education. Educators and teachers in many Outer Circle and Expanding Circle contexts face difficulties in terms of conditions, facilities, and resources very different from those of Western institutions. Academics in developing societies have parallel difficulties in publishing research, both in journals and in books with international publishers, while local options for publishing are often restricted. This paper suggests a number of ways in which linguists and other scholars might begin to engage with a range of issues related to 'developmental world Englishes'"

"Educational programs designed to bridge the digital divide for girls often aim to increase girls' technological literacy. However, little research has examined what aspects of technological literacy are highlighted in these programs. In this article, I provide a case study of a video game design workshop hosted by a girls' advocacy organization. Through observations, interviews, and analysis of program materials, I look at how the organization conceptualizes technological literacy as contributing to gender equality. I compare this conceptualization to how technological literacy was taught in the classroom. Finally, I draw on situated learning theory to help explain how girls responded to the class. In the end, both the organization's limited notion of how technological literacy could increase gender equality as well as gender and race differences between the teachers and the girls influenced girls' participation in the workshop."

"Through the example of a Danish reform of educational plans in early childhood education, this paper analyses the emergence of a new pedagogical desire related to administrative educational reforms promoting accountability, visibility and documentation. Two arguments are made: first, it is argued that the changes in administrative practices during the last decade constitute a transformation, but also a reproduction of relations between knowledge and governing that goes back to the big expansion of the welfare state. Second, it is argued that these relations between knowledge and governing are not restricted to the administrative practices, but are part of education and its humanistic legacy as well. As such, the administrative demand of documentation becomes possible and recognisable through its reproductive elements. Elements that are constituted in a transformative conjunction in which the 'professional nursery teacher' is produced as a reflective daily researcher, who outlives her pedagogical desire as an analytical care for the optimisation of the 'learning child'."

"This article contends that the effectiveness of Postcolonial Studies in the Brazilian Academy is inseparable from an understanding of the singularity of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, responsible for the ethnic and cultural formation of the country and for many of the forms taken by its social and economic development, from colonial and monarchic days to the present. Since postcolonial criticism illuminates and is illuminated by the cultural production of the past and present, in the comparison and confrontation of the different colonial systems and their aftermath, Postcolonial Studies may substantially contribute to the research on identity and other crucial issues-in the Brazilian case, notably the problematic of the so-called minority discourses, native cultures and the Afro-descendant legacy vis-à-vis the European heritage."

"The development of individuals' digital skills has received much attention as a remedy for digital inequality. Although some researchers favor courses and guided learning for skills development, others propose learning by trial-and-error. Unfortunately, studies examining the value of the so-called "do-it-yourself approach" for the development of digital skills remain lacking. One difficulty lies in the vicious circle of lack of skill leading to infrequent Internet usage and vice versa, which limits the value of cross-sectional data for assessing the impact of this approach. We present longitudinal data on a random sample of Internet users in a Dutch city, which show that more frequent Internet use leads to more digital skills, but not the other way around. However, contrary to expectations about the potential of trial-and-error learning to reduce inequality, results also suggests that this approach is not always more beneficial to the "have-little" as compared to the "have-more." The only inequality-reducing effect of this approach is that that older users profit more from it than younger users do."

"In assessing the various forms of welfare capitalism, normative political philosophy typically draws on two major philosophical traditions - republicanism and liberalism, invoking either equality and the public good or, alternatively, individual autonomy as normative criteria for evaluation. Drawing, instead, on Critical Theory as a tradition of social philosophy, I advance a proposal for assessment of the types of welfare capitalism conducted as 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Normative criteria thus emerge within a diachronic dimension of social transformation, which in turn grounds the comparison among synchronic types of capitalism. This ultimately enables a research agenda for the operationalisation of a normative analysis of capitalism within which social justice is gauged by the degree of voluntary employment flexibility - a key factor in the distribution of life-chances in the early twenty-first century."