Section archive - Theories & Approaches

The author has been inspired by Gloria Ladson-Billings' article which described what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality. However, this article offers the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative. The author believes that this alternative embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.

This article examines whether a popular innovation for increasing human capital in the teaching profession—competitive college scholarships for teachers— is effective. The authors show that one large and long-standing merit-based scholarship program (a) attracts teacher candidates who have high academic qualifications; and (b) yields graduates who teach lower performing students, although not as challenging as the students of other beginning teachers.

This article sheds new light on the relationship between theory and practice through an analysis of empirical findings recorded in a subject-oriented action research project. In this article the author is asking whether findings from the project are pointing towards pedagogical approaches possible to categorize on a meta-level, and in which way these detected approaches shed new light upon the relationship between theory and practice in teacher education.

The authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules. The authors outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy. The authors pay particular attention to what happens when disparate actors join together to perform policy-directed tasks.