Students’ interactions can be an influential component of students’ success in an interactive learning environment. From a participation perspective, learning is viewed in terms of how students transform their participation. However, many of the seminal papers discussing the participationist framework are vague on specific details about what student participation really looks like on a fine-grained scale. As part of a large project to understand the role of student participation in learning, this study gathered data that quantified students’ participation in three broad areas of two student-centered introductory calculus-based physics classes structured around the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) philosophy. These three broad areas of classes were in-class learning activities, class review sessions that happened at the beginning of every class, and the informal learning community that formed outside of class time. Using video data, classroom observations, and students’ self-reported social network data, this study quantified students’ participation in these three aspects of the class throughout two semesters. The relationship between behaviors of students’ engagement in various settings of an active learning environment and (a) their conceptual understanding (measured by FCI gain) and (b) academic success in the courses as measured by exam scores and scores on out-of-class assignments were investigated. The results from the analysis of the student interaction in the learning process show that three class components, viz. the Review Session, Learning Activities, and Informal Learning Community, play distinct roles in learning. Students who come in the class with better content knowledge do not necessarily participate more in the learning activities of active learning classrooms. Learning Communities serve as a “support network” for students to finish assignments and help students to pass the course. Group discussions, which are facilitated by students themselves, better help students in gaining conceptual understanding. Since patterns of students’ participation do not change significantly over time, instructors should try to ensure greater participation by incorporating different learning activities in the active learning classroom.

Today’s medical faculty members are faced with different challenges than their predecessors in teaching tomorrow’s physicians. Medical faculty members are now expected not only to be medical content experts, but also expert educators. The majority of the professional development activities available to them, however, are still focused on biomedical knowledge or the improvement of clinical practices. This article explores a faculty development project at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Family Medicine (DFM) aimed at improving teaching skills through the online sharing of video teaching tips created by DFM faculty members. Guided by the W(e)Learn Framework, a validated theoretical framework for the design and evaluation of online learning resources, a mixed-methods case study was designed and executed to investigate the impact of this faculty development project on the medical educator learning community. Data from the survey (N=33) and interviews (N=10) were analysed and relevant themes were identified and discussed in the context of the literature. Survey participants responded positively towards the project, finding the tips to be useful, enjoyable, and to have the potential to stimulate knowledge sharing between colleagues and within a learning community. Interview participants corroborated the survey results and additionally reported positive aspects to their colleagues being tip presenters; to the videos being concise; and to the tip videos being accessible anywhere and at any time via the Internet. Issues and concerns with organizational integration and support, as well as with integration into a curriculum were also reported by interview participants. Recommendations were then provided for improving the project as well as suggestions to support the development of similar online professional development resources based on the study findings. Finally, future directions for related research were suggested and other areas of research interest were identified.

Prejjem is a style of guitar music that is practiced in the Maltese islands and its diaspora as part of the għana folksinging tradition. Although għana has been studied by a number of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, sociologists and linguists, its guitar aspect has been almost entirely overlooked by academia. Emerging in Malta over a century ago, prejjem is analogous to the guitar component of flamenco or fado. It, too, is a complex improvised guitar tradition that serves to accompany and complement a vocal tradition and which simultaneously exists as a separate instrumental ensemble practice. Guitarists maintain a close-knit association with the għana community, but they also engage in a set of activities and behaviours with one another that are unique to their position within it. In this thesis, I examine both the social and musical attributes of prejjem and its communities of guitarists, employing a range of methodologies and theories drawn from a number of disciplines to reveal the totality of the practice as it exists in Malta and its diaspora (specifically Australia). Drawing extensively upon ethnographic fieldwork research that I have undertaken in Malta and Australia, I explore the material culture of prejjem, its musical forms, its history, its performance environments, the sociability of its participants and the means by which performers develop musical ability. These topics are bound together as a holistic investigation into how knowledge about prejjem exists in the għana community, how social factors shape the forms of this knowledge and, most importantly, how this knowledge is transmitted and transformed as it passes between members of this community.

The purpose of this research was to understand the role of district leadership better in the implementation and development of professional learning communities. This investigation was a mixed-methods analysis of the perceptions of a school district's support in the implementation of professional learning communities (PLCs) at the school level. Additionally, in this study, I examined how the PLC framework supports systemic school improvement, using Hord's definition of the five dimensions of a professional learning community. A PLC literature review informed the study. A school district of approximately 14,000 students, and a high school of 2,219 students was selected as the population sample. One hundred high school staff members and 20 central office administrators completed the PLCA-DS of Professional Learning Community Assessment-District Support, developed by Olivier, Huffman and Cowan, to measure both school and district level personnel's perspectives regarding the district's role in the implementation of PLCs at the school level. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with district personnel as well as school leadership and professional campus based staff, which played integral roles in the development of professional learning communities. These roles include the school principal, assistant principal, liaison and other staff who are working collaboratively at the school and district levels to support PLC implementation. The investigation results indicated the importance of leadership and culture throughout this change process and critical to school improvement as evidenced by the study of District A and High School A1.

Die Nutzung von Social Media ist für Mitarbeiter längst zur Alltagsroutine geworden und drängt immer stärker in die Unternehmen und ihre Personalentwicklungsmaßnahmen (Gori & Robes, 2015). Aktuelle Forschungen von Franken & Franken (2015) zeigen deutlich, dass sich zukunftsorientierte Unternehmen verstärkt auf praxisorientiertes, in Arbeitsprozesse integriertes und computergestütztes Lernen fokussieren, um an die individuellen Bedarfe der Mitarbeiter angepasste Weiterbildungsmaßnahmen direkt am Arbeitsplatz zur Verfügung zu stellen. Dies führt zu einem zunehmenden Verschmelzen von Lern- und Arbeitsprozessen. Dabei sind Unternehmen mit einer ausgeprägten Lernkultur mit einer höheren Wahrscheinlichkeit innovativer, produktiver, liefern eine höhere Qualität und haben eine höhere Wahrscheinlichkeit, zu Marktführern in ihrer Branche zu gehören (Mallon, 2010). Wesentlicher Bestandteil dieser Lernkultur sind florierende, virtuelle, hochvernetzte unternehmensinterne Lern- und Wissenscommunities, in denen Kollaboration und Kooperation dominierende Arbeitsprinzipien sind. [... Einleitung]

The importance of family involvement is highlighted by findings that parents’ behaviours, beliefs and attitudes affect children’s behaviour in a major way. The Family Maths programme, which is the focus of this study, provides support for the transformative education practices targeted by the South African Department of Education by offering an intervention which includes teachers, learners and their families in an affirming learning community. In this study participating parents were interviewed to investigate their perceptions of the Family Maths programme mainly in terms of their engagement, enjoyment and confidence levels. The major themes and ideas that were generated in this study include the development of positive attitudes, parents and children working and talking together, and the skills exhibited by Family Maths facilitators. These findings are analysed within the parameters of complexity science and the pre-requisite conditions for developing a complex learning community, viz. internal diversity, redundancy, decentralized control, organised randomness and neighbour interactions.

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Creating a community of learners with and among students in a collaborativeclassroom environment provides the keystone for developing the skills necessary forsuccess in the 21st century. Some preservice teachers envision that community building can enhance the learning experience for them and their students and want to learn and employ the necessary strategies. This study examined whether such a desirous group of novice teachers could identify the key factors they believed comprise community building and could successfully establish a community of learners during their first full year of teaching, supported by participation in a collaborative inquiry group. Four novice teachers met monthly throughout their first year for two-hoursessions during which they discussed and examined various aspects involved inestablishing their classroom communities. They created and shared artifacts designed to promote a caring, respectful relationship between them and their students as well as among the students themselves. These novice teachers discussed the challenges inherent in helping students with differing sociocultural, language, and behavioral needs bond with one another. They also supported each other in dealing with the myriad of necessities and constraints involved in implementing a start-up classroom. During the final session, group members synthesized what they believed constituted the essence of community building. They also elaborated regarding the areas of success they had achieved during their initial year of teaching. Finally, the members identified that participation in a collaborative inquiry group had supported their first-year experience. The group judged their overall experience as productive and successful. The researcher’s perspective was somewhat different from the other groupmembers. Difficulties identified in the process were using collaborative inquiry as themethod to gather data for a dissertation while endeavoring to act as an equal groupmember, requiring in-depth analysis of novice teachers who had not previouslyparticipated in action research and were still in the early stages of developing theirpractice as well as the tendency of novice teachers who had experienced the samepreservice program to employ groupthink rather than to challenge one another’sstatements. Further research should study collaborative inquiry as a method employed throughout preservice programs.

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