Entre 2005 y 2010 cerca de 1.4 millones de inmigrantes mexicanos regresaron a México. Aunque las razones de su regreso varían, es innegable que hay una creciente tendencia en lo que ahora es conocido como migración de retorno (MATT, 2014). Esta investigación cualitativa, tiene como propósito identificar características del desarrollo de lenguaje (español e inglés), el desarrollo social y el capital académico de los estudiantes con experiencia educativa previa en los Estados Unidos de América y que están inscritos en las escuelas de Sonora. Estudiantes y padres de familia que por un periodo de tiempo vivieron en ese país y ahora residen en tres distintas ciudades de la entidad dan su testimonio y, junto con el de los profesores se analizan las implicaciones educativas de esta migración de retorno bajo la perspectiva del transnacionalismo. Se busca volver visibles a estos estudiantes que cada vez adquieren mayor presencia en nuestras aulas, a través de la valoración de su capital social y académico y hacer propuestas educativas pertinentes acorde a sus necesidades multiculturales. Se reconocen las particularidades propias de esta región Sonora-Arizona, permiten por sus características geográficas, económicas y sociales, generar un enfoque enriquecido de redes transnacionales en favor del fortalecimiento de la identidad, el desarrollo económico y social. (Between 2005 and 2010 about 1,4 millions of people of Mexican immigrant returned to Mexico. Although their reasons are different, it is undeniable a growing tendency in what nowadays is known a return migration (MATT, 2014). This research aims to recognize qualitatively the social and language (Spanish and English) development, along with the academic value in students in Sonora who have had previous schooling experience in the United States of America. Students and parents who lived for a period of time in the US and now they live in three different cities in Sonora are some of the participants. Through their testimonies along with teachers this research explains the process of return migration to Mexico linked to the approach of transnationalism. The study focuses in making visible the increasing presence of these students in Mexican schools by giving value to their social and academic capital, as well as introduces educational proposals that are suitable to the student’s multicultural needs. The geographic, economic and social characteristics of the Sonora-Arizona region allows and generates a focal point abundant of transnational networks that favors the enrichment of identity, social and economic development.)

The study investigates the rise of online platforms that support teacher-to-teacher knowledge mobilisation. The adoption of the interpretative approach focuses the investigation on how the online platforms, their resources and the learning opportunities they provide are conceptualised by teachers in relation to their broader teaching practice, workplace culture and professional learning. The study is framed by two overarching research questions. (1) What is the nature of the knowledge being shared and reconstructed by teachers in Internet-mediated knowledge mobilisation? (2) What is the nature of the learning arising from teacher-to-teacher Internet-mediated knowledge mobilisation? The study employs a multiple case-study design to investigate two United States based online platforms, which facilitate teacher-to-teacher knowledge sharing. Twenty teachers from across the two cases were selected to participate in the study. A qualitative methodology was utilised. Teachers participated in an individual, face-to-face interview. In the two months following the initial interview teachers completed a weekly journal log detailing their engagement with the platform. Upon the completion of their journal logs, teachers participated in a follow-up interview via Skype. To help to contextualise the individual teachers within the broader case and to enrich their personal stories, observations of the platforms occurred throughout the data collection period. The study proposes a new theoretical model for how to conceptualise Internet-mediated knowledge mobilisation, the knowledge that is produced and the learning that occurs through the reconstruction process. It emphasises the connection between offline and online contexts and the role the platforms play in breaking down the boundaries between teachers' school-based practice and online resources and learning opportunities. The framework encapsulates the combining of the individual and their contexts of action, together with the platform and the information and knowledge it contains, to determine and shape the operation of the knowledge reconstruction process and the learning that transpires. Internet-mediated knowledge mobilisation facilitates the development of teachers' personal, practical knowledge by providing insight into the instructional practice of teachers and exposing teachers to new ideas and perspectives, which support the expansion of their propositional structures and episodic knowledge. Access to relevant, teacher-created materials increases the efficiency and effectiveness with which teachers can undertake elements of their practice, while also promoting learning through participation in work-based tasks. Individualism emerges as the dominant mode of engagement and learning in the study, with individual teachers regulating not only how and when they engage but also determining the outcomes they construct from their actions. The Internet, as a knowledge mediator, opens up new possibilities that are not available in teachers' offline contexts. It not only breaks down boundaries between teachers, but it also collapses boundaries between the various settings of teachers' professional practice and learning, effectively merging the offline and online contexts of teachers' work. The dual contexts of the platforms offer specific affordances that help to shape teachers' engagement, while also acting to promote new learning processes that do not exist in offline knowledge mobilisation.

Group work is commonly recommended as a student-centred instructional strategy which may enhance learning. Research in this area has predominantly used controlled interventions focusing on unproductive teacher assistance or specific strategies of doing group work to be applied by teachers. On the other hand, teachers’ own understanding and uses of group work in classrooms have been under-researched. Drawing on cultural-historical theory, this study scrutinises how and why teachers use group work, and how their enacted understanding is related to the broader contexts of teaching. The present study consists of four teachers of English in two secondary schools in Hong Kong to discern their rationales for and implementation of group work. The analysis delves into the dynamics within the activity of teaching, which comprise the interrelations between teachers' biographies, their purposes for group work in classrooms and what was expected from these teachers within the school practices. The Vygotskian perspective taken by this study entailed an inquiry into the teachers' intentional actions in everyday teaching. Each teacher was interviewed at the outset and end of the school-based fieldwork for their learning backgrounds and beliefs about teaching. In between these interviews each of them was observed in 15 lessons involving group work and undertook five to six stimulated recall (SR) interviews. These lesson video-recordings provided the stimuli for the SR interviews for probing the teacher’s pedagogic decisions while orchestrating students in small groups. The data was analysed by deploying concepts from cultural-historical theory, particularly two organising frameworks developed within the approach. One is a pedagogic sequence proposed by Edwards (1995; in press) as a descriptor to categorise the teachers’ purposes for and actions in group work. The other is an adaptation of Hedegaard's (2012) planes of analysis for identifying the various motives and demands in the multi-layered setting of teaching where group work was located. Group work as a pedagogic tool displayed the intra- and interpersonal dynamics in the activity of teaching. The findings indicate that the teachers' historically-constructed identities as learners of English oriented their intentions for group work and beliefs about teaching the subject. How the schools mediated societal expectations on teaching and learning had a considerable bearing on the teachers enacting their understanding. These institutional objectives and demands in practices created sets of opportunities for group work in the classrooms. The analysis thence was sited at the interface between the teachers' personal pedagogies and the multi-faceted social structure reflected in how education policy was mediated differently in different school contexts. The implications for teacher development are discussed.

This study explores the motivations, perceptions, and imagery of beginning teachers in Lebanon. It foregrounds the importance of ‘images’ as potentially useful conceptual tools for understanding the developing identities of beginning teachers. The research consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews in which student-teachers are encouraged to reflect on their own and other people’s views and perceptions about teaching. The thesis places the students-teachers’ personal portraits of teaching within broader cultural-historical representations of teachers in Lebanon and examines how the student-teachers deal with such representations while still in training. The core research questions focus on the participants’ motivations as well as the underlying cultural, social, and political factors that influence their views and perceptions about teaching. The research questions were designed to explore the various images of teachers and teaching that the students draw on in their personal portraits. Biographical information as well as students’ experiences at the time of training were explored for this purpose. The findings suggest that student-teachers’ developing identities emerge through their identification with competing images and representations of teaching and teachers. These images cut across various contexts, temporalities, and imagined settings in the student-teacher portraits, linking personal, educational and professional experiences. Many of the images synthesized large amounts of experiences and knowledge about teaching and contained gendered, religious, affective and interpersonal dimensions. Finally, the thesis offers a new way of conceptualizing images. This study hopes to help teacher education programs gain greater insight into beginning teachers’ thinking, motivations and developing identities.

This dissertation study examines the experiences of four Latina/o pre-service teachers (PSTs) as they learn about teaching mathematics for understanding (TM4U) and integrating a child's out-of-school mathematical knowledge and experiences during instruction. Studying the knowledge and experiences of Latina/o PSTs is necessary because PSTs from minoritized backgrounds have particular insights about teaching diverse students that can inform the learning experiences of other PSTs. This study investigates the prior experiences and beliefs about mathematics instruction the Latina/o PSTs (and those from minoritized backgrounds) bring as they begin their mathematics methods semester and how they leverage their experiences as they learn to teach mathematics to diverse students. Teaching mathematics for understanding is one way that teachers can support children's understanding of mathematics (Kilpatrick et al 2001). Teachers who integrate children's out-of-school mathematical knowledge and experiences in their practice draws upon multiple existing frameworks--the basic premise being that children come to school with mathematical knowledge and experiences that helps them learn mathematics in school (Gonzalez, Andrade, Civil, & Moll, 2001; Greer, Mukhopadhyay, Powell, & Nelson-Barber, 2009). My study looks at the experiences of Latina/o PSTs as they learn to help children leverage their out-of-school knowledge and experiences to understand mathematics. Data sources included four individual interviews, relevant methods assignments and audio transcripts from methods course discussions, and observational notes from the PSTs' field experience classrooms. The study found that PSTs leveraged their prior experiences as English Language Learners to support linguistically diverse children learn mathematics. Based on their prior experiences, some of the PSTs were more sensitive to the needs of marginalized children learning mathematics. The study found that the PSTs leveraged their experiences as diverse learners to think about the ways teachers could connect in-school mathematics to children's out-of-school mathematical knowledge and experiences. Yet the findings suggest that PSTs still need more experience articulating how exactly children's out-of-school experiences can help children understand mathematics. Implications of this study speak to how the beliefs and prior experiences of PSTs from minoritized backgrounds can inform how future teachers are prepared to teach mathematics to diverse students.

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

The centralised control over curriculum framing and pedagogy, the generally poor quality of teaching with little sensitivity to children’s sociocultural environment; and very high drop out rates, even at the primary school level, are some of the challenges facing school education in many of the regions of India. However, one of the successful approaches to these challenges has been the Digantar school system, working in rural communities. The study is based in one Digantar School in Rajasthan and employs concepts derived from the Vygotskian tradition to interrogate the methods employed in Digantar school system. The study took Edwards’ (2010a, 2011, 2012) idea of common knowledge and Hedegaard’s (2008, 2012, 2013) idea of institutional demand in practices as conceptual lenses through which to investigate the components of the pedagogical practices that help Digantar teachers to align the motives of the school with those of the child in classroom activities. In doing so it analyses the institutional practices that lead to the development of common knowledge that in turn facilitates how teachers engage pupils as learners. Data were gathered over six months and comprised around 120 hours of school-based video data together with interviews and detailed observations with teachers and community members. Data were gathered in classrooms, teacher meetings, meetings between parents and teachers and at school-community meetings. Analyses focused on the construction of common knowledge and the use made of it by the school to achieve a mutual alignment of motives between the practices of the school with the community and the families. The study has revealed that teachers’ engagement with the knowledge and motives of other teachers and community members helped to create common knowledge, i.e. an understanding of what mattered for each participating group, which facilitated teaching-learning in the school. The analysis also points towards a form of democracy, which enhances children’s participation in their learning. It was found that building and sharing of common knowledge and creating a socially articulated ‘space of reasons’ (Derry 2008) produced a pedagogical model that engaged children in creating their social situation of development, seeking and recognising the curriculum demands being placed on them.

How do teachers’ attitudes and beliefs impact how HIV/AIDS education is implemented in Kenyan schools for the deaf? How do these attitudes and beliefs reflect how teachers think about Deafness? While there is extensive literature exploring in-school HIV/AIDS-related education in East Africa, there are few studies focusing on segregated schools for the deaf. There are also few studies exploring how educators think about Deafness as culture in this region. Western Kenya offers a useful site for the exploration of these topics with mandated, in-school HIV/AIDS curriculum and a high density of schools for the deaf. Related research also argues that teachers’ attitudes and beliefs and the politics of schooling are useful in exploring socio-cultural constructions of Deafness. While previous studies have argued that “Deaf-friendly” HIV/AIDS education is not occurring in this region, this study found examples in these schools. Data from this study also revealed that this education was shaped by the beliefs and attitudes teachers held about sexuality, and Deafness and sign language. Furthermore, this study found that these attitudes and beliefs revealed underlying beliefs about Deafness that illustrate a range of constructions within this group of teachers. This study spanned 15 weeks of fieldwork gathering data through interviews, questionnaires and observations with 81 participants. Data focused primarily on interviews and questionnaires with 43 teachers in three segregated schools for the deaf in the Nyanza and Western provinces. There were 8 Deaf teachers who participated from these school sites supplemented by an additional 24 Deaf participants working in schools across Kenya to balance data. This study found that while the nationally-mandated HIV/AIDS course curriculum was not implemented in these schools, there was a significant presence of “embedded” and informal HIV/AIDS education. Teachers had a range of feelings about this education, some of which were unique to teaching Deaf children and children using sign language. They also reported how “Deaf stereotypes” shaped how they approached and implemented this education. In some cases these beliefs and attitudes simply heightened preexisting concerns about HIV/AIDS education in similar ways to parallel studies of “regular” schools in this region. However the most striking conclusion from this research was that the presence of “Deaf culture” and the use of sign language among the student population changed the way teachers approached, implemented and reflected upon this education in unique ways not seen in “regular” schools. Interviews also showed that some teachers rationalized their approach to this education because they felt that the Deaf were “different” in certain ways, especially in terms of sexuality. These conclusions are helpful for those in HIV/AIDS education, Comparative and International Education, Disability Studies, Deaf Studies and Medical Anthropology.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore and describe how bilingual programmes are organized and implemented within the unique linguistic and socio-economic case of Qatar. Specifically the thesis explored bilingual programs offered by two types of primary schools in Qatar: international schools and independent schools. Qatar launched a new initiative for educational development in 2001 but with hardly any research linked to these changes. The study was positioned within a qualitative interpretive tradition drawing on elements of ethnography and grounded theory as tools of methodology. However, quantitative methods were also incorporated within the design. The research design is structured within two main phases: phase one included statistical analysis of secondary data investigating three variables: average teaching time in the first and the second language, students’ and teachers’ nationality. Phase two utilized a multi-case study design. One school from each type was examined in depth over a period of nine weeks. Data were collected by means of school documents, interviews, and non-participant observation of English and Arabic classes. The first phase made an initial impression of the model of bilingual education followed by international and independent schools compared to bilingual typologies found in the literature. The analysis of the two cases examined revealed various differences across the two types. Findings reveal that the international school followed a partial immersion type of programme while the independent school followed a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) type of programme. The study reveals that the Qatari bilingual schools context was one of heteroglossia, with three codes in operation: Modern Standard Arabic, Colloquial Arabic dialects and English. Findings reveal that teachers and students in the international school adopt a strict separation policy between the two languages following a monoglossic belief. Language teachers and students in the independent school were found to apply a flexible language policy inside English and Arabic classes. The study revealed a gap between claimed programme features and implementation of these features. An absence of a clear language policy in the schools was also a main finding relating to the practice of these schools. In light of these findings, adopting a clear and explicit language-in-education policy should be a priority for policy makers in Qatar. The study revealed how the diglossia situation in Qatari schools is unique and therefore schools must be aware of the languages at the disposal of students and teachers. Schools must also concentrate on developing academic language skills needed for success in L2 schooling.

This research project conducted an in-depth, qualitative assessment of vocational education and training (VET) teachers’ perceptions of pedagogic innovation, with an emphasis on obstacles and supporting factors. The main research question was: “How do teachers’ roles and perspectives shape innovation processes in VET and what does this imply for the development of teaching and learning practices?” Three clusters of subsidiary questions were derived around thematic foci: ‘perceptions and concepts’, ‘documentation of practice’, and ‘dynamics, limitations, and lessons for innovation’. Based on analytical strategies derived from grounded theory, two phases of interviews – the first with ten experts and the second with 62 VET practitioners at 20 colleges – were conducted in England, Germany, and Austria, with a focus on full-time VET (Further Education Colleges, Berufskollegs, and Berufsbildende Mittlere und Höhere Schulen) in the 16-19 age range. Classroom observation preceded semi-structured, 30 to 60 minute interviews with teachers. The study builds on previous research and existing frameworks such as Lipsky’s concept of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ and Flyvbjerg’s ‘critical cases’. However, it fills a gap in the literature by focusing on practitioner perceptions, motivations, professionalism, autonomy, work contexts, and own learning in relation to pedagogic innovation, whilst tracing relevant connections to educational policy, college management, and societal influences. Teachers are shown in multiple roles as inventors, designers, and implementers of innovation, facing nine categories of obstacles. Those include limited time and budgets, bureaucracy and lack of autonomy, problems with project planning and execution, and issues related to lack of support. In addition, this study provides a comparative investigation of practitioners’ interpretations of key terms (‘pedagogy’, ‘didactics’, ‘innovation’), revealing differences between England on the one hand, and Germany and Austria on the other, based on different degrees of autonomy and innovative focus. Based on such findings, the study details recommendations for college leaders and policy makers for facilitating pedagogic innovation, placing each in their respective national contexts.