Abstract The purpose of this study was to describe the culturally responsive teaching practices of adult education ESOL and EAP teachers in the state of Florida. Using Ginsberg and Wlodkowski's Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching, an online survey of 17 teaching practices was developed and validated. In the survey, participants assessed how frequently they used each practice and how important they believed each practice was to their teaching on 5-point frequency scales. The sampling frame consisted of teachers from 15 colleges, 2 universities, 8 school districts, and Bay Area Regional TESOL (BART) and resulted in 134 responses. Results indicated that the most frequently used practice was "provide rubrics and progress reports to students" (M = 4.26), followed closely by "elicit students' experiences in pre-reading and pre-listening activities" (M = 4.24). The least frequently used practice was "include lessons about anti-immigrant discrimination or bias" (M = 2.51), followed by "students work independently, selecting their own learning activities" (M = 2.76). Also, results indicated that the two most important practices were "provide rubrics and progress reports to students" (M = 4.13) and "elicit students' experiences in pre-reading and pre-listening activities" (M = 4.13). Five culturally responsive teaching practices were perceived to be the least important. They were "include lessons about anti-immigrant discrimination or bias" (M = 2.58), "learn words in students' native languages" (M = 2.89), "ask for student input when planning lessons and activities" (M = 2.90), "students work independently, selecting their own learning activities" (M = 2.91), and "encourage students to speak their native language with their children" (M = 2.96). This study revealed a trend of adult education ESOL and EAP teachers' regular use of culturally responsive teaching practices. These findings add to the limited knowledge of how teachers in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous classrooms create and support a learning environment for all learners.

Although research on children's play is abundant and considerable advances have been made in young children's play, the majority of these studies have been based in western developed countries and written from adults' perspectives rather than with children. Additionally, very little research has been done on children's play with active participants from smaller developing countries. The voices of society's youngest members have been lost or are only marginally represented. The purpose of this qualitative research is to explore, understand, and describe young Jamaican children's lived play experiences as related through their eyes. The theoretical frameworks used to guide this study are sociocultural theory and narrative case study. Narrative case study focuses on a particular phenomenon and, through rich description, each participant's story relates the complexities of this phenomenon. Sociocultural theory is related to the social, cultural, and historical theory of a people and is constructed as they participate in culturally pertinent activities. The examined literature, which draws on diverse theoretical frameworks, including Vygotsky and Rogoff's sociocultural theory and Bronfenbrenner's work on socioecological theory, discusses types of play, the relationship between play and children's development, indoor and outdoor play at school, and play as perceived by children. A key theme in this literature is children's beliefs and values observed through a cultural filter. The three 5-year-old children, their teacher, and parents were purposefully selected for this single-bounded case study. The methods of data collection include video-cued interviews (VCI), a researcher's journal, and observation and field-notes. An understanding of the history of Jamaican education and its people is essential to the successful implementation of the play-based curriculum. The importance of knowing how children view their play and its manifestations and meanings is compelling to the Jamaican people and will help inform teachers, teacher education programs, parents, national and international funders, and other stakeholders as they try to fuse Jamaican culture with global elements of young children education.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2009. / Title from screen (viewed on August 28, 2009). School of Nursing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Pamela Ironside, Anna McDaniel. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-197).

Focusing on a Vygotskian theory of cultural historical psychology, this dissertation features a narrative analysis to examine the role of subjectivity and the generative potential and agency manifested in Non Native English Speaking Teachers' (NNESTs) successful development of L2 (English) fluency. My research creates another view of a Vygotskian theory by means of the imagination. Building on a cultural-historical approach, I conducted a qualitative analysis of how these teachers' pathway to fluency evolved from their Imagined Destinations. This term is defined as a goal or objective in the mind of the learner that mediates, and is mediated by, his or her lived experiences. The concept I coin as Imagined Destinations surfaced in my three initial pilot cases and took shape while working with NNES Panamánian teachers, from the analysis of online survey data with 27 of these experienced teachers, and detailed case study analyses of the language learning of eight of these teachers. These data revealed how participants dynamically create and recreate their environments through agentive roles that support the transformation of their environments to advance their goals. These transformations have implications for how subjectivity, agency, and acquisition of the target language intertwine throughout the participants' lived experiences or pathways to learning, thus providing an additional way to look at subjects and subjectivities within a Vygotskian theoretical frame. The findings also indicate that teachers' language trajectories are continuous, emergent, and the result of taking on very deliberate ecological roles in their bilingual success despite recurring salient and limiting circumstances. These findings about the centrality of Imagined Destinations in learning "smudges" the perception that societal power outweighs the dynamic and agentive roles of individuals as active molders of their lives. Finally, this dissertation also seeks to enrich scholarship by demonstrating how NNESTs use their bilingual identities built from their trajectories to bilingualism as ways to influence and inspire their own students' second language learning.

My study explores the characteristics of remote performance feedback that professional examiners working in the Oxford, Cambridge & RSA (OCR) awarding body communicate to each other. Drawing on sociocultural theories, I argue that this interaction possesses learning potential because between-professional communication supports the development of participants’ reasoning through the alignment of culturally appropriate collective thinking. My data consists of 991 feedback messages that were captured during two examination sessions (between May and July 2014, and between May and July 2015). These remote interactions (either email or telephone) involved three senior examiners and 27 examiners. These feedback interactions have an important quality assurance function as they help to ensure that the examiners carry out marking practices to an agreed standard. My research explores two interlinked research questions: ‘What are the characteristics of examiner feedback?’ and ‘What are the characteristics of effective examiner feedback?’ For the first research question I develop a methodology that extends the Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (SCDA) approach developed by Neil Mercer; I call this approach Augmented Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (ASCDA). My methodology allows me to investigate the features of interaction at both a particular and a general level, and clusters my analysis into four specific feedback discourse themes: feedback content, the development of discourse over time, evidence of joint intellectual action within feedback, and the impact of feedback. In order to address the second question I hypothesise that effectiveness relates to how feedback features support or undermine examiners’ common ground building. I synthesise the findings from these analyses to consider the lessons for examiner practice in particular, and for other professional feedback practices more generally. Taken together, these analyses suggest that feedback-giving is an intellectually challenging process. My analyses also suggest that this complexity involves the participants establishing and maintaining an Intermental Development Zone through their feedback communication, and that this entails them manipulating discourse features whilst simultaneously attending to a variety of contextual features of the professional environment.

abstract: Few would argue that teacher effectiveness is a key lever in education reform and improving the overall quality of public education, especially in poor and working class communities. To that end, the importance of supporting and developing beginning teachers is of utmost importance in education, thus requiring deep understandings of the process of learning to teach. Yet, most conceptions of teacher learning struggle to capture the social, cultural, and historical context of teacher learning, particularly in understanding how learning and the production of knowledge is situated, active, and complex. One example of this limitation comes from the field of research on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and its importance in developing effective beginning teachers. This study characterizes beginning teachers' production of PCK within a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) framework. This study finds that the teachers produce PCK mostly based on their own individual experiences and reflections, receiving little assistance from the structures intended to provide them with support. The self-produced PCK is uneven, underdeveloped, and relies on teachers to use their sense of agency and identity to navigate dissonant and unbalanced activity systems. Over time, PCK production remains uneven and underdeveloped, while the individual teachers find it more and more difficult to bring balance to their activity systems, ultimately resulting in their exit from the activity system of teaching in their district and school. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2012

Esta é uma pesquisa quanti-qualitativa de estudo de caso que parte de princípios da teoria sociocultural aplicada à área de Aquisição de Segunda Língua (SL) e Língua Estrangeira (LE) e estudos de Informática na Educação a fim de investigar os efeitos da mediação de um agente pedagógico (AP) com estratégias de mediação específicas na aprendizagem colaborativa de inglês como LE em um ambiente virtual. A partir do aporte teórico desenvolvido, a metodologia desta pesquisa envolveu não só a elaboração e a aplicação de uma sequência de atividades de uso da tecnologia em tarefas colaborativas, mas, principalmente, no desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta AP integrado a uma ferramenta de mineração textual capaz de fazer intervenções nas discussões de textos em língua inglesa em uma sala de bate-papo. O contexto da pesquisa constituiu-se de uma turma de 25 estudantes de graduação em Letras/Inglês de uma universidade federal da região sul do Brasil. Primeiramente, os alunos responderam a um questionário que visou estabelecer o perfil desses aprendizes quanto ao uso da língua e da tecnologia. A coleta de dados se deu durante 6 encontros no laboratório de informática, em que os aprendizes realizaram em grupos 5 tarefas colaborativas de discussão de textos com a mediação do AP. Após as tarefas, os alunos responderam a questionários que buscaram investigar a sua percepção sobre o uso do AP na realização das tarefas e em sua aprendizagem. As interações, o uso das funções do AP e os dados dos questionários foram analisados em busca de indícios da mediação do AP no processo de aprendizagem. Com esses resultados, buscou-se contribuir na área de Informática na Educação para a pesquisa sobre o impacto de agentes pedagógicos na aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras, sugerindo soluções para melhorar a educação apoiada por computador. Na área de Aquisição de SL/LE, pretendeu-se, ainda, trazer novos dados sobre estudos de tarefas colaborativas através da investigação da interação com o AP como um novo elemento para a comunicação mediada por computador na aprendizagem de línguas. / This is a quanti-litative case study that parts of theory sociocultural principles applied to Second Language (SL) and Foreign Language (FL) Acquisition and studies in Computers in Education in order to investigate the effects of a pedagogical agent's (PA) mediation with specific mediation strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) collaborative learning in a virtual environment. From the theoretical framework developed, the methodology of this research involved not only the development and application of a sequence of activities using technology in EFL collaborative tasks, but mainly in the development of a PA integrated into a textual mining tool capable of doing interventions in reading discussions in a chat room. The context of the research consisted of a class of 25 graduate students in English Language and Literature in a federal university of southern Brazil. First, students answered a questionnaire that aimed to establish the profile of these learners in the use of language and technology. Data collection took place over 6 classes in the computer lab, where students did reading discussion collaborative tasks in English in a chat tool with the mediation of the PA. After the assignments, students responded to questionnaires that sought to investigate their perceptions of the role and use of the PA in carrying out the tasks and in their learning. The task interactions, the use of the PA's functions and the data from the questionnaires were analyzed in search of the PA's mediation on students' learning and motivation. With these results, the present study was intended to contribute to the field of Computers in Education for the research on the impact of PAs in FL learning, suggesting solutions to improve Computer Supported Education. In the area of SL/FL acquisition, this study aimed to bring new data on studies of collaborative tasks by investigating the interaction with the PA as a new element for computer-mediated communication in language learning.

Qatar’s education system has recently been subjected to a process of deep structural reform. One of the beliefs which underpins this reform is the assumption that learner-centred pedagogy is more effective than traditional teacher-centred pedagogy. However, there is limited empirical evidence from a Qatari classroom context regarding the effectiveness of using learner-centred pedagogies. This lack of empirical evidence extends to the teaching of English as a foreign language. This study employed Vygotskian sociocultural theory as a lens to investigate the effects of working collaboratively on learners’ longer-term performance of two grammatical structures, the simple past passive and the present continuous passive, as well as the cognitive processes involved. Interventionist dynamic assessment was used to quantify the linguistic performance of male Arabic undergraduate EFL learners (N = 52) three times (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest) over a 12-week period. In-between the pretest and the posttest, six form-focused treatment tasks were administered. The experimental group (n = 20) completed the treatment tasks collaboratively; the comparison group (n = 16) completed the treatment tasks individually; and the control group (n = 16) did not complete the treatment tasks. In addition, the genetic method was employed to trace the linguistic development of four participants in the experimental group. These four participants were audio-recorded as they collaboratively completed each treatment session. Mood’s median test (Mood, 1954) found a pretest to posttest statistically significant difference (M = 7.70, df = 1, p = 0.01) between the performances of the experimental and control groups for the structure of the simple past passive which is moderate to large in size (Cramér’s V = 0.46). However for both target structures, no statistically significant difference was found between the experimental group and the comparison group, suggesting that the treatment condition of working collaboratively was not more effective in promoting learners’ linguistic development than the treatment condition of working individually. Additionally, the descriptive statistics revealed high levels of individual variation. Of the four participants who were audio-recorded, the journey of one learner is presented. This data was analysed using a microgenetic approach with LREs (Swain and Lapkin, 1995, 1998, 2002) as the unit of analysis. The microgenetic analysis shows how working collaboratively provides learners with access to a shared cognitive space. Within this space, they can employ language as a cognitive tool to access other-regulation from their peers and deploy their own self-regulatory strategies. The experience of an individual was explored within the context of the linguistic gains made by the collective to whom he belongs. Thus, even though the statistical analysis of the results suggests that working collaboratively is not more effective in facilitating learners’ linguistic development than working individually, the process of language learning has been connected to the outcome of language learning through the results of the descriptive statistics and the microgenetic analysis. This study contributes to a better understanding of: the types of pedagogies that may be effective in a Qatari undergraduate context, why collaborative learning can be effective, how knowledge which is initially social can take on a psychological function, and how the Vygotskian sociocultural methodologies of the genetic method and dynamic assessment can be integrated into an SLA design.

abstract: This qualitative study investigates the experiences of ten focal youth who came to the United States as refugees and were placed in Structured English Immersion (SEI) programs in Arizona high schools. The educational language policy for Arizona’s public schools (during the 2014-2015 school year) mandates SEI include four 60-minute classroom periods devoted to reading, writing, grammar, oral English exclusively. Students in SEI thus have restricted access to the full-range of general education courses required for graduation, as well as limited opportunities for social interaction with peers enrolled in the “mainstream” curriculum. The study investigates how youth understand and navigate the school language policy, practices and discourses that position them, and specifically seeks to learn how being identified as an “English Language Learner” interacts with youth’s construction of academic and social identities. Adopting a critical sociocultural theory of language policy (following McCarty, 2011), employing ethnographically-informed research methods, and using social-positioning as an analytic lens, I aim to learn from an emic youth perspective and to amplify their voices. Eight Somali and two Iraqi students took part in two individual in-depth interviews; five students participated in a focus group; and all engaged in numerous informal conversations during 22 researcher site visits to an ethnic community-based organization (ECBO) and a family apartment. Narratives recounting the participants’ lived experiences in the socio-cultural context of high school provide powerful examples of youth asserting personal agency and engaging in small acts of resistance to contest disagreeable positioning. The findings thus support the conceptualization of youth as creative producers of hybridity in response to their environments. This work also confirms the perennial significance of social categories and “othering” in high school. Though the institutional structure of separate classrooms and concomitant limited access to required courses hinder the study participants’ academic progress, the youth speak positively about the comfort of comradery and friendship in the shared safe space of the separate SEI classroom. The dissertation concludes with participants’ recommendations for educators, and the people refugee youth interact with in the context of high school, to improve refugee youth’s experience. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2016

Tidigare studier har visat att det inte alltid finns ett samband mellan användning av IKT i undervisningen och positiva inlärningsresultat. Det är en fråga om hur lärare använder IKT i sin undervisning, vilka kompetenser läraren har och vilka tekniska förutsättningar som finns på skolan. Syftet med denna studie var att fördjupa kunskapen om hur lärare använder IKT i sin matematikundervisning i årskurs 4–6, samt vilka förutsättningar dessa lärare har för att bedriva matematikundervisning med IKT. Studien baserades på kvalitativa intervjuer med lärare och “utvecklingsledare” samt observationer av lärare. Resultatet bearbetades utifrån TPACK-modellen och diskuterades även utifrån ett sociokulturellt perspektiv. Resultatet visade att lärarna använde sig av IKT i matematikundervisningen på olika sätt där en undervisningsmetod som förekom var elevarbete i par med datorer, något tidigare forskning lyft fram som framgångsrikt. Studien indikerade även att goda tekniska förutsättningar ledde till en ökad IKT-användning bland eleverna. / Previous studies have shown there´s not always a connection between the use of ICT in teaching and positive learning outcomes. It's a matter of how teachers use ICT in their teaching, the teacher´s competence and the technical conditions. The aim of this study was to widen the knowledge about how teachers use ICT in their mathematics education in grades 4–6, and what conditions teachers have for implement ICT in their education. The study was based on qualitative interviews with teachers and “development leaders” and observations of teachers. The result was processed with the TPACK framework and also discussed from a sociocultural perspective. The result showed that teachers used ICT in various ways, were a teaching method that occured was students working in pairs with computers, which previous research have proved to be successful. The study also indicated that good technical conditions led to increased ICT use among students.