Search results

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.

The author examines the experiences of learning about Japanese elementary education from the perspective of a Canadian teacher. She suggests through a year-long study in a Japanese third grade classroom that the teaching practices and philosophies underlying curricular and pedagogical decisions made by teachers are shaped by the culture and society of which schools are part, such that learning about Japanese schooling highlights the influence of social, societal, cultural, linguistic factors outside, as well as inside, school. In line with narrative inquiry research practices, the author also acknowledges her own stance as a certified elementary level teacher who was educated and certified in Canada, in contributing to shaping her analysis of teacher knowledge of her teacher participants. She argues that the process of learning about schooling in a country or culture different from the one in which an individual was educated and learned to teach, involves immersing oneself into the research context to learn about the experience from the perspective an insider. Realization of the extent to which this expansive interweaving of school and society is apparent in many aspects of schooling in Japan, in turn, reinforces the idea that this interconnection may also underlie schooling in other societies as well, such that one's experiences in one's own culture may form the foundation for understanding and interpreting knowledge gained about schooling in another culture or community. The notion of cross-cultural teacher knowledge, then, may be grounded in personal and professional experience of teaching and being taught in one's own culture.

This research paper aims to understand how givers characterise and manage their gift giving networks by drawing on attachment theory (AT). This responds to the need to illuminate the givers–receivers’ networks beyond traditional role-based taxonomies and explore their changing dynamics.

A multi-method, qualitative approach was used involving 158 gift experiences captured in online diaries and 27 follow-up interviews.

Results show that givers organise receivers into gifting networks that are grounded in a contextual understanding of their relationships. The identification of direct, surrogate and mediated bonds reflects three different dimensions that inform gift-giving networks of support, care or belongingness rooted in AT. The relative position of gift receivers in this network influences the nature of support, the type of social influences and relationship stability in the network.

This study illustrates the complexity of relationships based on the data collected over two specific periods of time; thus, there might be further types of receivers within a giver’s network that the data did not capture. This limitation was minimised by asking about other possible receivers in interviews.

The findings set a foundation for gift retailers to assist gift givers in finding gifts that match their perceived relations to the receivers by adapting communication messages and offering advice aligned with specific relationship contexts.

This study illuminates gift-giving networks by proposing a taxonomy of gifting networks underpinned by AT that can be applied to study different relationship contexts from the perspective of the giver. This conceptualisation captures different levels of emotional support, social influences and relationship stability, which have an impact on the receivers’ roles within the giver’s network. Importantly, results reveal that the gift receiver is not always the target of gift-giving. The target can be someone whom the giver wants to please or an acquaintance they share with the receiver with whom they wish to reinforce bonds.

Building on social media and destination brand-related literature, this study aims to explore World Heritage Sites’ (WHSs) brand diffusion and formation process from long-term and short-term perspectives, which includes brand diffusion, user-generated content (UGC), opinion leaders and brand events’ impact.

This study uses a mixed-method including text mining, keyword analysis and social network analysis to explore the brand formation process of four popular WHSs in Beijing, namely, the Palace Museum, Great Wall, Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven and more than 10,000,000 users’ data on Sina Weibo has been implemented to uncover the underlying social media branding mechanism.

The results show that the number of postings keeps in a stable range in most months, but, in general, there are no common rules for changing trends among the four WHSs; long-term high-frequency keywords related to history and culture account for a higher percentage; different kinds of accounts have varying impacts on information diffusion, in which media accounts lead to a bigger influence. However, more followers do not necessarily mean more interactions and most of the interaction ratio is much lower than 0.01000; brand events facilitate brand dissemination and have an impact on the creation of UGC.

This study is valuable for destination marketers to deeper understand brand diffusion and formation and provides valuable insights for developing effective destination marketing strategies.

Unlike previous studies that only concern a few parts of destination brand formation via social media (e.g. brand diffusion, brand events or opinion leaders’ impact), this study takes a more comprehensive perspective by systematically analyzing the brand formation process of WHSs on social media. By considering both long-term diffusion and short-term representative events, this study provides a more holistic understanding of the branding mechanism.