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The purpose of this study was to explore how my gradually growing teacher knowledge has changed and shaped a new interpretation of the same interview data through those years of learning and teaching in different cultural contexts, and furthermore, to deeply understand how the shift of teacher identity impacts the comprehension of Schwab's (1973) commonplaces theories. Through the interview data, I shared students' and teachers' experiences in a new culture and lay alongside my own stories as an international student, a teacher, and a researcher. This research reveals the perceived future needs consist of teachers' higher English proficiency, more classes on professional communication skills courses, more opportunities for professional instructors' professional development, more ESL teacher assistance, scaffolded instruction within mainstream classes, and a better educational atmosphere. The investigation process itself was important but more important was whether or not the discussions and results provided useful information to the community. Having an overall outlook of commonplaces is as essential as the curriculum design. This dialectical shift caused me to investigate the balance among Schwab's commonplaces and the findings will contribute to the future developments in curriculum design as a researcher. Upon reflection, I utilized this research by investigating the equilibrium between the four common places and the current curriculum as well as comparing all the stakeholders' perspectives to the common places identified within the target curriculum.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.

This chapter examines the difficulties teachers currently face while attempting to teach toward more justice, more equity, and more healing in an increasingly challenging political climate. The author explores how Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been used by activists and politicians on the far right to shut down good faith debates about what students should learn about race in America and in the teaching of American history. The author suggests how progressive educators and teacher educators can best respond in this political moment and reclaim the debate over our shared values of freedom, justice, and democracy.

This chapter presents a critical reflection on delivering a lecture on the impacts of colonialism to a cohort of predominantly white, undergraduate students in the UK. This chapter provides an overview of the lecture, including its key content and how it built on a wider programme of learning. It then discusses student reactions to the lecture content, reviews the literature on teaching sensitive subjects, highlights what pedagogues in Higher Education (HE) can learn from this literature, and explores both teacher and student positionality. The chapter concludes that pedagogues in HE should pursue the teaching of sensitive subjects and not ‘give in’ to student discomfort. Not creating the conditions to discuss such issues in learning spaces ultimately sides with existing structures of power and privilege in HE that should be challenged. However, strategies need to be put in place to overcome students’ fears of discussing sensitive subjects. These strategies include pedagogues building up trust, facilitating open dialogue, and reflexively exploring positionality. These present both students and teachers with the opportunity to recognise and transform their own biases, perceptions, and attitudes to facilitate deeper and more democratic learning; and challenge existing structures of privilege in HE that benefit more powerful groups.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

In this chapter, we explore a form of young people’s activism taking place in a central societal institution and a central forum in the lives of young people – school – that we conceptualise as ‘active equity’. We present three cases from northern Finland: reindeer herders smashing potatoes, immigrant youth requesting a key and young people lying on sofas during breaks between lessons. We suggest that these acts, in the contexts in which they took place, were an unrecognised form of social action for equity undertaken by young people. We argue that the concept of active equity helps examine the assertion of rights and claims for justice by children and young people. In each case we present, young people make visible an inequity in their contexts: the reindeer herding way of life was overlooked in school, asylum-seeking or refugee immigrants were excluded from the main school building, and non-high-performing young people were excluded from comfortable areas during lessons. These, in turn, linked to broader societal inequities in Finland, a country commonly known for its equality. In school, young people are commonly viewed through intersecting discourses of democracy and education. In both discourses, they are commonly positioned as learners rather than speakers. Through active equity, young people subtly imprint themselves on the scene of education in new ways. For this reason, their acts of active equity remain typically either unrecognised or seen as oppositional in school.

Toward the construction of a new paradigm in teacher education in a globalized and digitalized society where it is intended to value knowledge and teacher professional development sustained by collaboration and cooperation, training policies and models based on technology-enhanced active learning will be required. This chapter aims to analyze the dimensions that can affect these training models within a new educational paradigm, at the level of professional development and increase of technological skills, collaborative processes for the creation of communities of practice, and promotion of active learning that contribute to innovative hybrid environments and transformative learning. In the Covid-19 post-pandemic, it is crucial to study and mobilize the experiences developed in the educational field exploring how these can be harnessed to build this new educational paradigm. This work aims to contribute with a reasoned reflection and insights concerning learning models and methodologies in teacher education that contribute to transformative active learning. Focusing on the link between preservice and in-service teacher education, the interrelation among teacher education and evaluation, and the construction of innovative technology-enhanced learning environments, for instance through the active training model.

Using an ecological model of child participation and drawing on newsletter data from schools across the United States of America (USA), this chapter statistically explores five state factors linked with school protests against gun violence: (1) children’s neighbourhood opportunity; (2) race/ethnicity; (3) voter preference for either a Republican or a Democratic president; (4) child participation policies; and (5) gun laws/violence/ownership. The chapter explores factors linked to both student participation in protests and student nonparticipation in protests that take place at their schools. Three factors were found to be associated with participation and nonparticipation: children’s neighbourhood opportunity, voters’ preference, and participation policies. Findings suggest that Democratic-voting states, mediated by education opportunity, predict the frequency of student protests against gun violence. In Republican-voting states, where education opportunity does not mediate the frequency of school protests, students still organised and participated in protests but to a lesser extent. In addition, states with high overall children’s neighbourhood opportunity and voting student education board members are highly likely to have non-protesting students in schools with protests. The chapter presents five conclusions from these results for the positive and negative exercise of child participation rights and considers what further multilevel explorations can be done to further test the framework employed for this analysis.