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The structures, procedures and relationships within schools both constrain and enable the ways that children and teachers can engage with the everyday ‘business’ of literacy learning. In schools and classrooms, the resources available to children, the spaces in which they work and how adults interact with them are often decided upon by others, including their teachers. In this chapter, we focus specifically on access to mobile digital resources and important spaces in the school, arguing that opportunities for children to be critical consumers and producers of text can be provided when children are afforded some control of decisions about how, where and when people, materials, tools and texts are used. Drawing from data collected as part of a larger study of learning to write in the early years of schooling, at two different schools in different Australian states, we examine two cases of ‘disruption’ negotiated by children and their teachers. We explore the potential of mobile technologies in children’s hands as key elements in changing the socio-spatial power relations around text production that usually hold in schools. These instances are explicit opportunities to study what is possible when young children and teachers work to change children’s relationships to materials, spaces and people in productive and provocative ways. We analyse the digital texts produced and the work of teachers and children to foreground digital literacies as a way to influence what goes on in their schools.

The purpose of this paper is to report the impact of an online simulation that was designed to provide pre‐service teachers with experience in dealing with complex classroom situations associated with the teaching of literacy.

A developmental approach to the research was used. This is also known as “design research” “design experiment” or “formative research” and involved four phases: analysis of the practical problem; development of solutions within a theoretical framework; evaluation and testing of solutions; documentation and reflection to produce “design principles”.

Trials were conducted with five iterations of this software. The findings reveal that the online simulation provides pre‐service teachers with time to think critically about complex classroom situations which rely on the teacher's ability to respond to children's experiences, engage with them in meaningful dialogue and negotiation as well as utilise a range of indirect instructions such as questioning, modelling and prompting.

At this stage of the research the authors are confident that the design principles operationalised, combined with access to a large pool of authentic data, helped to design a simulation that contributed to the development of pre‐service teacher understanding of the complex work of teachers.

Reports the impact of an online classroom simulation.

Preparing future teachers requires teacher educators to share both theory and its translation to best practice. Traditional approaches to this learning process include textbooks, case studies, role-play, observation, and eventually fieldwork in a classroom. Understanding what their future students need or appropriately responding to situations in the classroom is far different than the reality of teaching in schools. Although case studies provide an opportunity for perspective taking, collaboration, and developing problem solving skills in a safe environment, it is still a relatively passive experience. The use of virtual worlds to create engaging simulations offers a possibility in bridging this gap between theory and practice. The School of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University has designed a virtual world simulation to provide college students with the opportunity to be immersed in a virtual classroom setting in which they take on the roles of avatar teachers and grade school students who may require various modifications/accommodations. This chapter will discuss the design and implementation of this project. Data were collected on the students’ experiences in order to assess possible learning gains, affordances of the technology, and lessons learned for future educators who are considering the implementation of virtual world technologies.

This chapter presents two case studies to address the challenge of how students in large, diverse classes can become effectively engaged in their learning through the support of technology. Implementation of two modules in the University of Exeter Business School is explored: a first-year management module wherein students make use of camcorders and a master's module where students use wikis. Each has been important in coming to understand the inter-relationship of pedagogic processes and technology use, in particular in the context of group work. Data on student outcomes and perceptions have been collected through ongoing monitoring, individual and group reflective accounts, tutor and student-led surveys and informal verbal feedback. Overall, the use of both technologies is highly valued by most students and by the teachers, despite the many (and sometimes unexpected) difficulties associated with their management. The main benefits are in the way that they can be used to support attendance, group cohesion and quality of work, in an ethos where the importance of group work is central to learning and where individuals are recognised for what they can contribute despite the large cohort size and the many different nationalities.

The campaign for striker replacement legislation, which began in the late 1980s and had effectively ended by the mid-1990s, was the most important political battle over labor legislation since the defeat of the Labor Law Reform Bill in 1978. Striker replacement was the AFL-CIO’s top legislative priority in the early 1990s and, coming quickly after the passage of NAFTA, which labor had opposed, the defeat of its campaign solidified organized labor’s reputation for failure in legislative battles. As yet, however, the political campaign for striker replacement legislation has attracted surprisingly little attention from industrial relations scholars.