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Teachers' language ideologies shape their classroom language policy-making, which in turn shapes students' opportunities to learn. Attention to language ideologies is therefore critical for teacher educators who seek to support pre- and in-service teachers in becoming pro-multilingual policymakers. This mixed methods, survey-based study explores the language ideologies and hypothetical policy-making of 134 pre- and in-service teachers at a large public university in Arizona. It employs decision tree models to examine connections between participants' demographics, their language ideologies, and their hypothetical policymaking around Spanish-English dual-language bilingual education (DLBE). Findings show intersections between current and future educators': (a) contextualized experiences, (b) ability to discuss DLBE accurately (without misunderstandings), and (c) ability to engage concretely with details of hypothetical policy making around DLBE. The study offers a unique vantage point from which to consider how pre- and in-service teacher education can inform teachers' accurate understandings of DLBE/multilingualism, language ideological stances, and stances toward linguistic diversity.

This study examines emerging efforts by three colleges of education to contribute to research use through public systems of knowledge exchange among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other education stakeholders. Often labeled "knowledge mobilization" (KM), such organization- and individual-level agendas seek to enhance, expand, and sustain engagement with educational research. Colleges of education with public KM agendas signal formal, local efforts at a time when KM remains weakly integrated within education. This study seeks to highlight the interdependent opportunities and challenges that accompany individual and organizational capacities for such change associated with KM. Findings from analysis of faculty survey responses (n = 66) suggest that progressive engagement with KM among colleges of education challenges their faculty to navigate the competing demands of knowledge production and mobilization.

This study enlists a transformative approach to mixed methods research in order to problematize what different methods can offer for expanding understandings of educator language attitudes and ideologies. Analyses consider Likert-scale survey responses and linguistic autobiography data from a sociolinguistics course in an online Educating Multilingual Learners master's degree program at a Southwestern U.S. university. A regression analysis of survey data suggests that older participants are predicted to orient more positively to linguistic diversity and participants with more teaching experience are predicted to orient less positively. Meanwhile, a discursive analysis of autobiographical essays from the oldest participants (over 45) and those with the most teaching experience (over 10 years) illuminate reflexively constructed stances, which we draw on to complicate (not necessarily triangulate) statistically significant findings. Discussion considers the methods by which we examine educators' language ideologies with implications for both research and teacher education.

This article explores faculty perspectives at three colleges of education regarding strategies of knowledge mobilization for scholarship in education (KMSE), with consideration for the opportunities and challenges that accompany individual and organizational capacities for change. Faculty surveys (n = 66) and follow-up interviews (n = 22) suggest two important trends: First, KMSE presents both a complementary agenda and a competing demand; second, barriers and uncertainties characterize the relevance of knowledge mobilization for faculty careers in colleges of education. This study empirically illuminates the persistence of long-standing challenges regarding the relevance, accessibility, and usability of research in colleges of education housed in research-intensive universities. While KMSE holds promise for expanding the reach and impact of educational research, scholarly tensions underlying these trends suggest that individual and organizational efforts will suffice only with modifications to university procedures for identifying what counts as recognizable, assessable, and rewardable scholarly products and activities for faculty careers.

This study examines the design and enactment of a secondary physics unit on electromagnetism. The unit used an educational videogame to support peer dialogic engagement in a Singapore secondary school by engaging learners with qualitative physics phenomena. As an example of game-based learning, the unit includes activities and resources that organize a recurring progression of playing and interacting around science that we term "play-centered cycles." We incorporate two complementary, qualitative analyses to consider how a recurring progression of playing with and talking about science-mediated peer dialogic engagement across two separate classes. Findings demonstrate that peer dialogic engagement occurred within each play-centered cycle for both classes but that the nature of such engagement varied across cycles and student teams. Additionally, comparative case analyses of focal teams' peer dialogic engagement illuminate how the design of play-centered cycles productively supported play and learning while also highlighting emerging tensions for sustaining dialogic engagement. Findings underscore the plausibility of this approach to fostering science learning by articulating two principles for designing science learning environments that can guide ongoing efforts to enlist videogames and play in the service of talking about and learning science.

Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relations to larger onto-epistemological questions of how we construct findings from data as well as the nature of policy. In this interpretive analysis, we synthesize a corpus of 37 peer-reviewed journal articles that bring together educational policy and analyses of discourse from varying theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to better understand the breadth and scope of how discourse is defined and operationalized in studies of educational policy, including in ways that are sometimes incommensurate with authors' stated theoretical and methodological positions. After first laying the theoretical groundwork for analyses of discourse in the field of educational policy, we then illustrate how discourse analysis is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, within contested paradigmatic landscapes. We conclude with an argument for discussions across theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms about how the concept of discourse lends itself to different epistemological vantage points on educational policy.

This study considers the discursive construction of a particular type of student in Singapore--the lowest-tracked, Normal Technical (NT), secondary school student. Shaped by meritocratic policies, educational practices, and ideologies common to many late-modern societies, students in the NT track are institutionally and individually constructed through the results of high-stakes testing regimes and essentialist views of ability. This article extends an understanding of the NT student as a widely held, deficit construction in Singapore by considering its use as an ideological label in interpersonal and institutional discourse. I consider how school leaders' and government commentaries about NT students' abilities, opportunities, and supposed characteristics provide insights about the processes through which students are recruited into institutional categories of deficit and risk--i.e. differentiated instruction, ascribed ability, and these processes' translation into educational structures and practice in the name of meritocracy. While the illustration of this phenomenon is uniquely Singaporean, implications include concerns about equity, constructions of ability, and ideologies of merit common to late modern society.

Purpose: This article presents an analysis of empirical literature on classroom assessment of students' multimodal compositions to characterize the field and make recommendations for teachers and researchers. Design/methodology/approach: An interpretive synthesis of the literature related to practices and possibilities for assessing students' multimodal compositions. Findings: Findings present three overarching types of studies across the body of literature on assessment of student multimodal compositions--reshaping educational practices, promoting multiliteracies approaches to learning and evaluating students' understanding and competence. These studies' recommendations range along a continuum of more to less structural changes to "what counts" in classrooms. Research limitations/implications: This review only considers studies published in English from 2000 to 2019. Future studies could extend these parameters. Practical implications: This analysis of the literature on assessing student multimodal compositions highlights foundational differences across studies' purposes and offers guidance for educations seeking to revise their practices, whether their goals are more theoretical/philosophical, oriented toward reshaping classroom practice or focused on ways of measuring student understanding. Social implications: Rethinking assessment can reshape educational practices to be more equitable, more theoretically commensurate with teachers' beliefs and/or include more thorough and accurate measures of student understanding. Changes to any or all of these facets of educational practices can lead to continued discussion and change regarding the role of multimodal composition in teaching and learning. Originality/value: This study fills a gap in the literature by considering what empirical studies suggest about why, how and what to assess with regard to multimodal compositions.

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students' multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students' literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

This article presents a reflexive and critical discourse analysis of classroom events that grew out of a cross-cultural partnership with a secondary school teacher in Singapore. I aim to illuminate how differences between researcher and teacher assumptions about what participation in classroom activities should look like came into high relief when put into practice. To better understand these differences, I consider the sources and outcomes of what I initially experienced as a visceral tension while observing a series of classroom events as part of a unit that our research team co-designed with a partner teacher. I consider my researcher assumptions, both initial and retrospective, and their role in shaping and sometimes clouding my analytic lens. This article considers multiple vantage points on what comes to be valued, and how, in educational research contexts. By tracing analyses across stages of research, I illustrate how observable moments in time are not phenomena unto themselves but rather are part of the ongoing, developing interpretive process. Implications speak to the importance of reflexively engaging close discourse analyses of classroom events and researchers' roles in shaping them, during and after the fact, through transparency about the recontextualization that analysis entails.

Researcher reflexivity shapes what and how we know, because the background against which something becomes a site for analysis, and through which we position knowledge about it, result from our researcher gaze. We examine here an adolescent-produced multimodal story according to three different researcher gazes across space and time. By sidestepping a singular attribution of knowing "what counts," our intercontextual analysis constructs different epistemological viewpoints on this multimodal story and contexts of its creation.

We propose a novel method for repurposing online course discussion posts to explore educators' language ideologies. Drawing on asynchronous discussion posts from a subset of 30 educators enrolled in an online, masters-level, sociolinguistics-for-educators course at a US Southwest university, we "smooth" posts into a dialogue resembling a focus group discussion, a method we are terming a fabricated focus group (FFG). The topic of the discussion forum was defining "Standardized English" (SE), allowing us to observe nuances of participants' ideological stances, positioned and juxtaposed to one another within a constructed dialogue. Online discussion forums offer a unique tool for researchers/educators to generate a context for student stance taking and reflexivity, which can raise educator's critical consciousness. FFGs can help us to represent educators' varying ideological positions and provide direction as instructors of such courses attempt to foster more tolerant, democratic, and empowering attitudes toward cultural and linguistic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives--Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies--and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate these two perspectives' methodological tensions, I present an analysis of selected recent literature from both approaches and then analyze these tensions further as they emerge in two empirical studies published in this journal illustrating each approach. Despite the fact that SFL and Situated Literacies share some underlying theoretical assumptions and are sometimes drawn upon in concert by scholars, I illustrate how they differ in their treatment of multimodal texts and practices--as well as their methodologies--research design, data collected, analytic methods, and possible implications. This article thus seeks to outline the respective contributions of SFL and Situated Literacies to ongoing research on multimodality in literacy and writing studies and to encourage a conversation across theoretical and methodological borders. (Contains 3 tables and 2 notes.)

In this paper we examine the complex relationship between dynamics of group talk and students' ideologies of learning. Through an interactional analysis and thematic coding of group talk, this study details barriers to collaboration in a digital storytelling workshop with primary-aged youth in Singapore. Drawing on 25 h of video-recorded data, we tease out participants' orientations to the activity of jointly authoring digital stories in order to highlight how ideologies of learning shaped group talk and bore connections to the larger social context in which participants interacted. Specifically, by considering context and cultural norms alongside group talk, we highlight the discursive processes that shape learners' participation in and learning through group talk. Findings speak to youths' socialization into norms and expectations about learning activities, which serve as the conceptual link between group talk and our claims about ideologies of learning and their impediment to collaboration.

This article explores an out-of-school digital storytelling workshop at a Singapore community center and how it was shaped by ideological clashes between differing definitions of literacies and learning. We unpack circulating ideologies of language learning in light of our attempts as workshop designers and facilitators to foster openings for youths' creative authoring practices. We develop a framework for examining stakeholders' negotiations of design efforts across what we call intended, authorized, and lived layers of a design dialectic. Our analysis details some of the ideological tensions between our own and institutional ideologies of literacies and language learning, as well as how these competing constructions positioned us as transgressors amidst circulating orientations to school in the workshop. This study has implications for curricular design, exploring and critiquing agendas of agency, and deconstructing discourses of literacies and learning. (Contains 2 tables.)

Digital storytelling involves the creation of short, personal narratives combining images, sounds, and text in a multimedia computer-based platform. In education, digital storytelling has been used to foster learning in formal and informal spaces worldwide. The authors offer a critical discussion of claims about digital storytelling's usefulness for supporting various types of learning and conceptualize it as a context rather than a tool. Drawing on examples from digital storytelling workshops, their research team has designed for Secondary English classrooms in Singapore, the authors discuss the role that digital storytelling as an interactive digital media (IDM) context can have in shaping youths' opportunities to be active authors and participants in a media production culture, which is a growing focus of education across the globe. Wrapped up in ideals of 21st century learning, digital literacies, and new media lies a dual mandate to resonate with and draw upon youths' everyday media practices as well as foster critical thinking dispositions, and the authors offer brief recommendations to these ends as they relate to digital storytelling-as-context and the learning sciences.

This study introduces performative identity as a lens for understanding student participation in discursive classroom routines and potentials for fostering student agency and enhanced learning. We argue that student negotiation of performative identities can facilitate productive transformations of individual and group trajectories. This study illustrates the transitions that one student group makes as they engage a conventional classroom reflection activity across four weeks. The group leverages this recurring activity to enact a range of positions relative to each other and the normative discourses invoked by the activity. Using interactional evidence, we demonstrate how performative identities lead to the group engaging routine activities in authoritative and agentive ways. We further argue that examining group participation in light of performative identity productively frames opportunities to learn relative to institutional genres of schooling and what counts as knowledge. (Contains 2 tables and 8 footnotes.)

This study contributes to positioning theory by approaching the discursive and material mediation of classroom positioning from an integrated micro-, meso-, and macro-social perspective. I propose an analytic framework that unpacks the lived and ideological resources for positioning and their social and curricular implications for understanding classroom interactions. By highlighting the always mediated, yet locatable ways we organize meaning and understanding, I demonstrate how acts of positioning construct ideological categorizations of persons and activity at the macro-scale and lived interactions at the micro-scale. Analyses of small-group classroom interactions highlight how teacher formulations of goals and objectives, affordances of curricular tools, and patterns of participation together mediate opportunities to learn by positioning students as "kinds." I specifically take up how these "kinds" gain meaning through acts of positioning and mediating resources, influencing how different ways of participating are recognized and valued across interactions. (Contains 7 figures.)

The goal of this article is to examine different conceptions of identity and different processes of identity negotiation to make visible the implicit and explicit links between social practices and perceived risk, equity, and opportunities to learn for linguistically and culturally diverse students. The authors discuss analytic frameworks for the study of identity as a socially constructed, locally situated, and culturally reified construct, and they focus on how the empirical study of identity in educational contexts has contributed to different theoretical and practical uses of the term. The authors begin by discussing the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological issues related to the broader concept of identity as a basis for understanding the negotiation of linguistic and cultural identities. As such, they focus on the negotiation processes of linguistically and culturally diverse students because their identities are often marked as being nonnormative or "other," in ways that provide salient insights into what is at stake when identity is connected to learning. They then review how linguistic and cultural identities are associated with the different ways in which minority status and risk have been socially constructed in the literature on identity and educational practice and performance. Following that, they engage in a review of empirical literature on the negotiation of linguistic and cultural identity as it relates to risk, minority status, and academic performance. This discussion highlights the persistent challenges associated with navigating categories and normativities, such as linguistic practices, race, class, gender, and ability, in the context of diversity and the attendant issues of access, equity, and risk that accompany perceived salient social differences. Finally, they present recommendations and considerations for future research and practice. (Contains 2 notes.)

This study details an innovative approach to coordinating and enhancing multiple levels of assessment and discursive feedback around an existing multi-media curricular environment called Astronomy Village[R]. As part of a broader design-based research programme, the study analysed small group interactions in feedback activities across two design cycles. The goal of this analysis is to develop an understanding of the ways that a situative approach to assessment and practise supports learning. Findings demonstrate ways that student and teacher engagement in collaborative activities support and constrain meaningful understanding, which we consider in terms of a trajectory of participation in and across conversations and written assessments, as well as individual learning gains on formal classroom examinations and standards-oriented external tests. Analyses of complementary formulations of domain concepts--discourse practises and assessment performance--suggest that participation in social forms of scientific engagement supports both learning and subsequent performance in more formal contexts. We suggest design principles for integrating the formative functions of discursive feedback with the summative functions of traditional assessment, through participation in different forms of science discourse(s). (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures, and 1 note.)

As an example of design-based research, this study refined an assessment strategy for simultaneously enhancing inquiry-based learning and supporting achievement on conventional assessment measures. "Astronomy Village[R]: Investigating the Universe[TM]" is a software program designed to engage secondary science students in authentic and inquiry-based learning over core topics in astronomy. The software was enhanced with a 20-hour curriculum and three levels of assessment to ensure successful inquiry experiences "and" high-stakes achievement. The first year implementation of Astronomy Village[R] yielded significant gains on a curriculum-oriented exam but not a standards-oriented test, and provided useful design insights that were integrated into the second year implementations. Significant gains were obtained on the test during the second year as well. It is expected that many existing inquiry-oriented science curricula might be similarly enhanced, and is suggested that a large-scale effort to do so might have a lasting impact on science education.

Questions of how speech style is racially identified have pervaded linguistic research and public concern for decades. However, the types of evidence used in linguistic studies on this topic often restrict application outside of the discipline. Particularly, the dichotomy between privileged linguistic 'expert' interpretations of perceptions and lesser valued 'lay' reactions to speech raises methodological issues for application. This article discusses alternative methodologies for analyzing how race functions as a linguistic category in evaluative interactions. While linguistic studies often treat race as an unproblematic category attached to speakers, this study proposes a discursive approach that (re)considers how speech becomes 'racialized' in lay discourses of difference. Framed by a methodological approach that problematizes epistemological formulations of race, speech, and researcher knowledge, I offer evidence of a discursive approach's applied usefulness through examples from Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) of one interviewee's racial evaluations of speech. I argue that inclusion of a discursive approach to better understand racial speech evaluation promotes application of linguistic research by offering evidence that existing approaches cannot by nature of their epistemological tenets and methodological focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]