Section archive - Theories & Approaches

Alignment is a means for understanding the degree to which different components of an educational system work together to support a common goal. Alignment research is one method to demonstrate that state organizations, districts, and schools send a consistent message to teachers and students about what is required. The authors (1) discuss the importance of alignment for facilitating proper assessment and instruction, (2) describe the three most common methods for evaluating the alignment between state content standards and assessments, (3) discuss the relative strengths and limitations of these methods, and (4) discuss examples of applications of each method.

In this paper, the authors’ goal is to explore how teacher candidates are inclined to think through issues of content and pedagogy, the cultural backgrounds of their students, and the values driving their moral reasoning. The authors provide a heuristic that organizes dispositions around three domains - intellectual, cultural, and moral. The authors use a small sample of teacher candidate journal entries to ground the discussion of each disposition domain. The authors offer recommendations for how teacher education programs can provide opportunities for prospective teachers to consider their dispositions and to identify how their dispositions influence teaching decisions.

After a description of home education, Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) is applied to the situation of home educators who join a neighbourhood home education group, a community of practice. This paper is based on an empirical study undertaken in aid of understanding the learning process of parents as they strive to become ‘home educators’. Data comes from thirty-four in-depth interviews of home educating parents who had been home educating for more than three years.

In this article, the authors describe a cosmopolitan orientation toward the place of values in human life. The authors argue that a cosmopolitan outlook can assist people in engaging the challenges of being thrown together with others whose roots, traditions, and inheritances differ. The authors show that cosmopolitanism illuminates how people everywhere can retain individual and cultural integrity while also keeping themselves open to the larger world. The authors examine three arts, or artful methods, that can fuel this orientation. The authors show how these arts can be cultivated continuously through education.