Integrating the ontological,epistemological, and sociocultural aspects: a holistic view of teacher education

The three aspects of teacher change – ontological, epistemological, and sociocultural – are traditionally regarded as independent. Usually only the epistemological aspect is highlighted in formal teacher education. In this paper, I argue that a holistic and interdependent view of these aspects is needed. Thus, this paper aims to explore the process of teacher learning from a holistic perspective. Through deliberative discussions and selection, 13 ‘good’ teachers were interviewed in this study. The findings indicate that there may be a two-stage pattern (the II-VA model) that describes two different sorts of teachers. The first sort refers to those teachers who developed strong identities before beginning their teaching service and who tended to have a clearer educational vision which had a direct impact on their practices and professional development. As for the second sort, the teachers’ identities were vague in their first years of teaching, but their professional identities gradually developed within the referential community with affective and professional functions. These stages imply that we should replace ‘abstract theory’ with ‘subject reflection’ in the center of teacher education. Three kinds of reflection (theory-rationale, identity-integration and vision-accomplishment) are thus identified from a holistic view of teacher change.     

Multimodal composition and assessment: a sociocultural perspective

In this article, we examine how assessment is enacted and negotiated in a school project that involves multimodal composition. The case is a project on advertisement in which lower secondary students collaboratively composed multimodal commercials about various products and topics. The theoretical framework is based on sociocultural perspectives on learning and assessment, and video data of classroom interaction are subjected to detailed analysis. The findings document the consequences of decoupling production and assessment practices. The analysis show that written texts and multimodal texts have different statuses in the project because of how they are assessed and that this has consequences for students’ participation as learners. In addition, the analysis shows how students position themselves differently towards resources that are intended to help them in summative assessment situations. We discuss issues that teachers may reflect upon when planning and executing multimodal composition in schools.     

In defence of writing: a social semiotic perspective on digital media,literacy and learning

From a learning perspective, social semiotics researchers tend to focus on the liberation latent in the multimedia options available through the new media. It is true that digital media democratise the possibilities open to the general public of a more varied and comprehensive text production than ever before, both in and outside school. Participating in this text production naturally implies a richer potential for learning. But digital technology also allows us to opt out of, and thus avoid, semiotic work. With this as the starting point, the present article sets out to highlight the pedagogical benefits associated with the written mode, precisely in an age when the digital media are making multimodal forms of expression increasingly available to us all.     

Argumentative writing: theory,assessment, and instruction

Reading and Writing - Despite the early emergence of oral argumentation, written argumentation is slow to develop, insensitive to alternative perspectives, and generally of poor quality. These...     

Writing: importance, development, and instruction

In this article, we examine why writing is important, how it develops, and effective writing practices. We situate the 5 articles in this special issue of Reading and Writing in this literature, providing a context for the contribution of each paper.     

Writing instruction for social justice: an investigation into the components of a teacher preparation course

Future teachers must notice, navigate, and address ideologies in order to counter inequities in the literacy classroom. This article presents the findings of two teacher educators who have taken up the call to critically reflect on their own underlying beliefs and discourses regarding writing instruction. Through an education design framework, they analysed important components of the course, arguing for a higher degree of visibility of the ideologies and social forces that impact writing instruction. They found that despite encouraging a fairly complex and all-encompassing view of learning to write to the future teachers in their course, the creativity discourse was present passively and the socio-political was downright absent, despite clear social justice aims in the course. They discuss how well-established discourses can serve as gateways to embed the socio-political into the course and address more granularly the question of exclusion through selected mentor texts.     

The politics of gaming in schools: a sociocultural perspective from Western Australia

This paper discusses gaming in a Western Australian school for boys. The overriding ethos of the school is supportive of the potential of ICT to better engage students and deliver enhanced educational outcomes. The school sees game-based design as at the vanguard of innovation, but also accepts its important duty of care responsibilities. Tensions were revealed between the opportunities presented by educational gaming and the perceived problem of managing student distraction, particularly the tendency for students to spend large amounts of time playing games that have little or no educational value. The paper describes the forms of gaming that emerged at the school, considering both their educational impact and propensity to detract from students' opportunities to learn. It is argued that the perceived benefits and risks of gaming are not well understood, and that powerful political forces are at play which shape school policy, teachers' pedagogy, parent perceptions and student actions.     

From expectancy-value theory to situated expectancy-value theory: A developmental,social cognitive,and sociocultural perspective on motivation

Eccles and colleagues’ expectancy-value theory of achievement choice has guided much research over the last 40+ years. In this article, we discuss five “macro” level issues concerning the theory. Our broad purposes in taking this approach are to clarify some issues regarding the current status of the theory, make suggestions for next steps for research based in the theory, and justify our decision to call the theory Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT). First, we note how visual representations of the model make it appear static, linear, and monolithic, something that was not intended from its inception. Second, we discuss definitions of the major psychological constructs in the model, focusing on our and others’ elaboration of the task value component, particularly the “cost” component. In this section we also discuss research on the development of expectancies and values. Third, we discuss the often-neglected middle part of the model focused on how individuals understand and interpret their own performance as well as the many messages they receive from different socializers regarding their activity participation and performance. In the fourth section we discuss the situative and culturally-focused aspects of the model, stressing the impact of the situation and cultural background on children’s developing expectancy and value hierarchies. The fifth issue (one that we mention in several of the previous sections) concerns the importance of understanding the development of individuals’ hierarchies of expectancies of success and subjective task values and how they relate to performance, choice, and engagement.     

Scaffold instruction at the workplace from a situated perspective

This article proposes the need to address scaffold instructions from a situated learning perspective. Based on an empirical study of how apprentice bakers learn their trade, it is claimed that studies of learning at the workplace yield important insights into our understanding of scaffold instructions. Seen from the perspective of the apprentices, scaffold instruction represents access to more responsibility in practice, it supports their identities as future bakers and they learn bodily know-how. When scaffold instruction failed, it was often in relation to situations where the apprentices were placed in marginal positions in the community of practice or in relation to a central workplace situation.     

Transition planning and writing instruction: the effects of a brief intervention

This study used a multiple probe design across behaviours to determine if four high school students with learning disabilities could plan post‐school transition goals using a modified GO 4 IT … NOW! intervention while learning essential paragraph and essay writing skills. The results of this study indicate a functional relationship between the intervention and increased writing skills needed for high‐stakes testing and increases in students' knowledge of transition planning. During baseline, students produced extremely short essays and did not include essential paragraph elements. After instruction, students wrote longer compositions and included more details, and paragraphs contained more paragraph elements. All participants increased essay quality during the intervention as measured by the rubric used to evaluate end‐of‐instruction writing prompts.     

Text writing from a Vygotskyan perspective: A sign-mediated operation

Many studies have analysed the text written at school by pupils as a final product. Fewer are those which are based on the production process itself. What happened in the student’s mind between the time of reading the subject to do and that of writing the final text? There is an intermediate step between these two moments: the rough copy. During a research on rough copys of 15 to 16 years old, submitted to the production of an historical text, we could establish two kinds of rough:

- some of them present a written structure similar to the final work (complete sentences, linear structure). In this case, the rough copy is a prototype of the final version, including deletions and mistakes.

- the other present a totaly different structure: predicative language, structures like lists, tables or arborescent structures, utilization of non conventional signs thought by the pupil. Some of these caracteristices have been attribued to the inner language by Vygotsky. The syntatical similarity of inner speech and writing on rough copy come from the identical functions of these two languages, which are speech in and for one self.

     

Teaching a new science and technology course: A sociocultural perspective

This study inquires into the influence of subject communities on the practice of secondary school teachers as they teach a new science and technology course that crosses traditional subject and department boundaries. The study focuses on two teachers from different professional communities—a science teacher and a technology teacher—who were teaching an applied physics course that was piloted in British Columbia. Interview and observational data were collected that illuminate the classroom practices and perspectives of the two teachers. As the teachers taught the course, they both changed their normal teaching practice. Their respective new practices, however, were different in important ways even though they both started with the same course outline, textbooks, and laboratory materials. We interpret these differences in the teachers' practices using sociocultural practice theory and argue that the differences can be understood in terms of the influence of their different professional communities which are shown to provide the backdrops against which the teachers developed their approaches to the course. Recommendations are made that encourage using the subject community as a unit of analysis in educational change studies and using sociocultural practice theory as a theoretical perspective for thinking about educational change and making policy decisions. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach, 35: 777–789, 1998.     

Writing instruction in kindergarten: examining an emerging area of research for children with writing and reading difficulties

This review examines the literature on how to teach kindergarten children with reading and writing difficulties how to write. Specifically, research on handwriting instruction, spelling instruction, and composition writing is discussed. Due to the limited number of empirical studies on writing that included kindergarten students with diagnosed reading and writing difficulties, selected studies conducted with the full range of kindergarten children, as well as studies conducted in the early elementary grades, are presented to highlight future directions for research.     

Journal Writing and Learning: Reading between the structural,holistic, and post-structural lines

This paper explores the use of journal writing for providing adults with the opportunity of reflecting on their learning. The article examines the author's own experiences teaching students on an undergraduate part-time degree evening course where journal writing was an important component. Three understandings of journal writing are compared using examples from students' journal entries. They are characterised as structural, holistic, and post-structural positions, respectively. Structural approaches to journal writing claim benefits in enabling the learner to manage her/his own subjectivity with a view to finding an “objective truth”. An holistic approach, while “useful”, attempts to synthesise multiple ways of knowing and presents a false sense of completion and inclusion. The post-structural view positions the learner intertextually in a processual learning context where the text the student writes is driven by other discourses. Here, the student/journal writer is constituted by discourse but not necessarily determined by it because the strategies of reflexivity and deconstruction are available. This last position draws on the sociology of interpretative biography and narrative theory. The implications for assessment and the ethical dimensions of privacy and disclosure of student journals are examined also.     

Phonemic awareness,spontaneous writing,and reading and spelling development from a preventive perspective

This study examined the nature of the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading and spelling development and focused particularlyon the development of early self-directed writing. The spontaneous writing attempts of 44 first-graders were followed on 6 test occasions from the start of grade 1 (7 years) until the middle of grade 2. The children were divided into 2 groups, one group (N = 21) with a high level of phonemic awareness on entry into grade 1 (HPA) and one group (N = 23) with a low level on entry (LPA). The connection between level of inventedspelling used in the self-directed writing and later reading andspelling achievement in grades 1 and 2 was investigated. The results showed remarkable differences between the two groups. Level of invented spelling at Time 1 was highly predictive of both reading and spelling achievement at the end of grades 1 and 2, but only for the HPA group. With Time of Mastery regarding phonemic spelling as the independent variable and reading and spelling at the end of grade 2 as the dependent variable, regressions analysis indicated strong direct effects of early phonemic spelling upon later reading and spelling development, but only for the LPA children. The two groups showed different patterns of development in learning to read and spell during grades 1 and 2.     

Teachers' Adequacy of Subject Knowledge in Primary Science: Assessing constructivist approaches from a sociocultural perspective

In recent years, increasing emphasis has come to be placed, both by researchers and by policy‐makers, on the adequacy of primary teachers’ subject knowledge of science. Within research, this emphasis has been linked to the rise of constructivist ideas about the significance of establishing children’s prior conceptions of scientific concepts for effective teaching. In this article I examine two constructivist approaches to teachers’ adequacy of subject knowledge within UK research on primary science education. In each case I provide a critique of the assumptions they make about the nature of knowledge and how it develops. I do this from a sociocultural perspective, which views knowledge and learning as necessarily situated within communities of practice. My aim is to assess the implications of this perspective for understanding teachers’ adequacy of subject knowledge.     

以构建和谐社会的视野探索高校思政工作

以建构和谐社会的宏大目标，紧密结合互联网给当前高校思政工作带来的机遇和挑战，重新审视和定位高校思政工作，并在此基础上，提出了当前高校思政工作的主要策略：要以积极的态度直面互联网络，以科学的态度审视大学生的个人需求，以求实的态度创新高校思政工作。     

Historical argument writing: the role of interpretive work,argument type,and classroom instruction

Reading and Writing - This study examines whether and how five novice history teachers incorporated writing into their instruction. We analyzed observations, student writing, teacher feedback and...