Learning Identities Education And Community

This book offers a case study of children and young people as they live, study and work within the contexts of their families, educational institutions and informal activities. The study explores how 'learning identities' are forged through complex interplays between young people and their communities.

This book presents a theory of learning that starts with the assumption that engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we get to know what we know and by which we become who we are. The primary unit of analysis of this process is neither the individual nor social institutions, but the informal 'communities of practice' that people form as they pursue shared enterprises over time. To give a social account of learning, the theory explores in a systematic way the intersection of issues of community, social practice, meaning, and identity. The result is a broad framework for thinking about learning as a process of social participation. This ambitious but thoroughly accessible framework has relevance for the practitioner as well as the theoretician, presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic.

This book explores the development of the first cohort of students to complete a new Bachelor of Education in English language teaching in the United Arab Emirates, theorizing the students' learning to teach in terms of the discursive construction of a teaching identity within an evolving community of practice.

This book explores the reflective potentialities offered by analyses of teachers’ professional learning narratives. The book has a specific focus on narratives on professional learning and professional identities emerging from different contexts and gives a deeper understanding of successful teachers’ narratives globally. Diverging from universally standardized constructions of idealized teacher identity and professional learning, the book provides analyses of a diversified set of cases with detailed descriptions of each teacher’s idiographic and professional context to gain a deeper understanding of situated professional identities. With contributions from a range of international backgrounds, it shows teachers of various age groups, subject areas and curricula contribute their narratives to help readers reflect on different trajectories toward becoming a teacher. These narratives provide insight into and a deeper understanding of the conditions and complex processes that being a "successful" teacher involves within these case studies, providing a useful contribution to the field of teacher education. Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching: International Narratives of Successful Teachers will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students of teacher education and international and comparative education.

Presents a broad conceptual framework for thinking about learning as a process of social participation.

This practitioner-focused guide to creating identity-safe classrooms presents four categories of core instructional practices: Child-centered teaching ; Classroom relationships ; Caring environments ; Cultivating diversity. The book presents a set of strategies that can be implemented immediately by teachers. It includes a wealth of vignettes taken from identity-safe classrooms as well as reflective exercises that can be completed by individual teachers or teacher teams.

Recent work on education, identity and community has expanded the intellectual boundaries of learning research. From home-based studies examining youth experiences with technology, to forms of entrepreneurial learning in informal settings, to communities of participation in the workplace, family, community, trade union and school, research has attempted to describe and theorize the meaning and nature of learning. Identity, Community, and Learning Lives in the Digital Age offers a systematic reflection on these studies, exploring how learning can be characterized across a range of 'whole-life' experiences. The volume brings together hitherto discrete and competing scholarly traditions: sociocultural analyses of learning, ethnographic literacy research, geo-spatial location studies, discourse analysis, comparative anthropological studies of education research and actor network theory. The contributions are united through a focus on the ways in which learning shapes lives in a digital age.

The main idea of the book is to contribute to a broader understanding of learning, identity and diversity by presenting actual research findings that were retrieved from classroom settings and related social practices. Learning is to a large extent an ongoing social process as both students and their teachers learn by being part of shared social practices through social interactions that facilitate learning gains. Sociocultural research shows that the organization of schooling promotes or restricts learning, and is a crucial factor to understand how children from a diversity of backgrounds profit from instruction. This is a first urgent issue to be considered by teachers and teacher education in our socio and culturally diverse society. A second issue is the on-going debate about learning as a process that involves the construction of identities in schools and classrooms, and in the transitions between school and home practices. Last but not least, since school practices can be addressed from the perspective of diversity and special educational needs an on-going discussion about optimizing pedagogical approaches is of main importance to allow maximum educational effectiveness. Our potential audience for this book are researchers, post-graduate students in education and psychology, teachers, teacher education, other academics and policy makers.