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The purpose of this paper is to seek answers to questions on how equity of information literacy and learning outcomes have evolved with the ongoing advances in technologies in teaching and learning across schools. The authors’ report on a five-year long bring your own device (BYOD) journey of one school, which was one of the earliest adopters of one-to-one learning devices in New Zealand.

Using a socio-cultural ecological lens for analysis, a longitudinal study has investigated aspects of how digital/information literacy, computer self-efficacy, and nature of technology usage are transforming school and classroom curriculum practices.

Findings of this study reveal a significant shift in social and academic boundaries between formal and informal learning spaces. One-to-one learning devices provide the link between school and home, as students take more ownership of their learning, and teachers become facilitators. Curricula changes and proper technological support systems introduced in the school structures have given agency to students resulting in greater acceptance of the BYOD policy and extensions to learning beyond formal classroom spaces. Digital divide amongst learners has evolved beyond equity in access and equity in capabilities to become more inclusive, thereby paving the way for equity in learning outcomes.

This study has been conducted in a school which is located in a relatively high socio-economic region. To achieve a more holistic view, there is a need for further studies to be conducted in schools from low socio-economic communities.

This paper adds to the existing literature by sharing teacher reflections on their use of innovative pedagogies to bring changes to classroom curricular practice.

Teachers across the globe have been called upon to employ evidence-informed practices to guide instructional decision-making. Using a social regulation/cohesion matrix and institutional theory analytic lens can help illuminate the barriers and enablers shaping teachers' efforts to use evidence in different policy contexts. In the US, there is social cohesion with respect to public schooling as well as a high degree of regulation with respect to accountability. In this chapter, we closely examine the work of a teacher team in a California middle school that we studied for four years using case study methods. While teachers on this team shared an interest in evidence use and were open to trying research-based practices in their own classrooms, doing so consistently was challenging. The teacher team's use of evidence to inform practice was shaped by three themes. First, several capacity-building opportunities provided teachers with support for drawing on research-based practices as well as eliciting student thinking as a form of evidence on student learning. However, lack of cohesion across these opportunities functioned as a barrier to effective implementation of strategies. Finally, a strong focus on accountability ultimately constrained the team's ability to consistently use evidence to inform daily practice. Lessons for policy and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform policies legislated, created, implemented and regulated by national, state and local governments. Yet, Big-P policies are not the only policies enacted in literacies classrooms. Rather, little-p policies or teachers’ local, personal and creative enactments of their values and expertise are also in play in daily classroom decisions. Little p-policies are teachers doing their best in response to their students and school contexts.

Adapting elements of discursive analysis, this interpretive inquiry is designed to examine textual artifacts, situated alongside classroom events and particular local practices, to explicate what teachers’ policymaking enactments regarding time and curriculum look like across three distinct contexts. Using three elementary classrooms as examples, this paper provides analytic snapshots illustrating teachers’ policymaking to solve problems of practice posed by state and school policies for curriculum, and for use of time at school.

The findings suggest that teachers ration (aliz)ed use of time in ways that enacted personal politics, to prioritize children’s personal growth and well-being alongside teachers’ values, even when use of time became “inefficient.” An artifact from three focal classrooms illustrates particular practices – scheduling, connecting and modeling – teachers leveraged to enact little p-policy. Teachers’ little p-policy enactment is teacher agency, used to disrupt temporal and curricular policies.

This framing is valuable because little-p policymaking works to disrupt and negotiate temporal and curricular mandates imposed on classrooms from the outside.

The various levels of research support undergirding effective practices are outlined. Evidence supporting specific programming, service delivery models, and curricular interventions, and a subset of research-based classroom strategies for talented learners is reviewed. Trends and innovations for effective practices in the future are suggested.

The author of this paper aims to reflect on the past 14 years of English education in the USA and the resulting effects of state standards and standards implementation on secondary English teachers.

Controversy surrounding standards implementation often includes balancing the struggle between teacher autonomy and district-mandated curriculum. The journey described here includes four roles in education: first, an undergraduate in a teacher education program at a state university; second, a classroom teacher learning to create pacing guides based on the standards; third, a graduate student writing a dissertation about standards implementation; and, fourth, a teacher educator who works with pre-service and practicing teachers.

Educators at all levels must determine how to best navigate standards to help students succeed in the classroom, and what teaching practices must endure even in the face of increased standardization.

Lack of curricular autonomy and few teacher-centered professional development opportunities during early standards implementation experiences led the author to understand the importance of a workshop model of standards implementation for teachers. In addition, strong support for reading and writing workshops in the secondary English Language Arts classroom is also provided, including the specific Common Core Standards met during these classroom activities.

Leadership educators seek to understand how they can better develop leadership among their students through formal and informal course experiences. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduate students perceive reasons for changes in their leadership practices, after completing a personal leadership education course. The course focused on the five exemplary practices of college students. As part of the course, students completed the Student Leadership Practices Inventory (S-LPI) as a pre and post assessment. A qualitative content analysis of 107 undergraduate student reflections from multiple sections of a leadership course was conducted to examine students’ perceptions of what influenced their change in scores on the S-LPI assessment. Students perceived that the curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities of the course (including the high-impact service-learning project) affected their change in score for the leadership behavior(s) they intended to focus on throughout the semester. Students whose scores did not increase for the leadership behavior they chose to focus on still experienced leadership growth and development but attributed their growth to different items: their growth was in a different leadership behavior than intended or they developed a greater understanding of the five practices which affected their self-assessed score.

This article aims at the understanding of specific spaces where entrepreneurship education (EE) happens – inside and outside the classroom.

Building on frameworks such as formal versus non-formal entrepreneurial education and institutional versus non-institutional actors, this research applies structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore which spaces entrepreneurs attended as undergraduate students. Going beyond intentionality, the authors collected data from 175 respondents in Brazil, all of the respondents are entrepreneurs whose companies are at least one year old.

Results demonstrate that student-led activities are as important as institutional ones when training future entrepreneurs, while specific in-classroom activities feature the lowest impact among the institutional ones.

Sample size and characteristics could impact the generalization power, but, since the results fit within research criteria, researchers can benefit by reflecting over new research horizons, going beyond classroom studies and understanding the university as an ecosystem of learning interventions.

Results can be useful to university managers when designing institutional policies, fostering a diverse set of undergraduate experiences towards entrepreneurship training.

Although current literature has focused on classroom education, researchers have been pointing out the need of stepping out of the classroom, analyzing other spaces such as student-led movements, co-curricular programs and more.

This chapter provides a synthesis of the research project which investigated whether or not the most recent mathematics curriculum reform has reached the classroom and influenced classroom practice and student learning in the mainland China. Three types of evidence for change as a result of the curriculum reform were examined. These included the beliefs and perceptions of teachers about learning and teaching mathematics, the cognitive features of learning tasks and of classroom interaction that were implemented in classroom, and student learning outcomes. Two groups of elementary math teachers and their students participated in the study. One group had participated in the reform implementation in classroom for several years, and the other group had used the conventional curriculum when the project was conducted in 2005. About 150 videotaped class sessions were analyzed from 58 classrooms of the two groups. Survey methods were used to probe the changes in the beliefs and perceptions of teachers about teaching and learning mathematics. The student learning outcomes were assessed for three times with multiple measures of mathematics achievement. Findings of the project provide the converging evidence that the curriculum reform has resulted in some of the expected changes. Reform teachers were more likely to hold a dynamic view of mathematics and to indicate the importance to provide students the learning opportunity to hypothesize, to proof, and to communicate in learning mathematics. The reform classrooms used more learning tasks with higher cognitive demands. The teachers in the reform classrooms asked more questions that required students to describe procedures leading to their answers and the students in the reform classrooms raised more questions in learning mathematics. Students of the reform classrooms showed to have achieved a relatively more balanced development in different cognitive areas of mathematics achievement.

The purpose of this study is to examine five Secondary English Language teachers’ perceptions and practices of multiliteracies teaching in the context of a decade after multiliteracies was introduced into the English Language syllabus in Singapore.

Adopting a case study approach, the authors observed 12 multiliteracies lessons taught by the five teacher participants across three secondary schools. The classroom data included field notes and video-recordings of the lessons. The authors also conducted pre-lesson and post-lesson interviews with the teachers to understand their beliefs and the rationale behind their classroom practices. The video-recordings of the lessons and audio-recordings of the interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic coding.

The authors identify an essentialising of multiliteracies to the skills of viewing and representing with multimodal texts, as well as a sense of uncertainty amongst the teachers towards the teaching of multiliteracies. In terms of practices, the authors observed an attempt to connect with the students’ life-worlds through the use of authentic materials, but often only in service of language learning. The authors also highlight the constraining influence of assessment on shaping multiliteracies learning. The findings of this study resonate with the conclusions that some of the earlier studies reported on teachers’ perceptions and practices of multiliteracies teaching. This resonation suggests perennial issues and challenges which remain unresolved.

This study is limited by the number of participants as well as the selected lessons the authors observed. The schools, while selected because they were considered as mid-range public schools in Singapore, were also not representative of all Singapore schools. As such, the authors acknowledge that the generalisability of the findings from this study is limited.

The issues raised in this study resonate with the findings from previous studies both from Singapore and around the world. The persistence of these concerns over time and space that remain unresolved demands attention and concerted action from policymakers, curriculum developers and education researchers, to address the challenges in multiliteracies teaching and learning.

This study was conducted a decade after the launch of the English Language Syllabus 2010, which first incorporated multiliteracies into the curriculum. This study examines the teachers’ perceptions and practices in relation to the policy intent. The implications from this study are relevant to educators interested in integrating multiliteracies in the literacy curriculum internationally.

Illustrated through ethnographic data drawn from a case study of a full-day kindergarten in Ontario, Canada, this chapter argues for an approach to inclusive curriculum that places the ethical relation at the center and promotes children’s rights through opportunities for multimodal communication. Theoretically, this case drew on multimodal literacy and ethical curricula. The study used ethnographic tools such as class observations, semi-structured interviews, and collection of children’s work. Findings indicate that responsive, ethical curricula through multimodal pedagogies were intrinsically inclusive of all children’s funds of knowledge and encouraged children to become curricular informants and take control of their choices of meaning making.