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To describe the role one classroom writing community played in shaping students’ understandings of the analytical writing genre; and to discuss the impact the community had on students’ developing academic writing identities.

While research has demonstrated the impact of classroom writing communities on student writing practices and identities at the elementary level (Dyson, 1997) and for secondary students engaged in fiction writing (Halverson, 2005), less is known about the role classroom writing communities may play for secondary students who are learning to write in academic discourses. This chapter explores the practices of one such classroom community and discusses the ways the community facilitated students’ introduction to the discourse of analytical writing.

The teacher turned the classroom writing community into an authentic audience, and in so doing, he developed students’ understandings of the analytical writing genre and their growing identities as academic writers. First, he used the concept of immediate audience (i.e., writing to persuade real readers) as the primary rationale for students to follow the outlined expectations for analytical writing. Second, he used inquiry discussions around student work (i.e., interacting with other members of the writing community) to prepare students for a future audience of prospective independent school English classrooms.

By turning the classroom writing community into an authentic audience through inquiry discussions, teachers can develop students’ deep and flexible understandings of a potentially unfamiliar writing genre. Furthermore, by employing the classroom writing community as a support for moving students through moments of struggle, teachers implicate students’ expertise as academic writers, thereby facilitating their willingness to take on academic writing identities.

This chapter aims to discuss methods for promoting student engagement to counteract declining academic motivation and achievement in the contemporary setting.

In this chapter, two studies are presented that describe ways to promote student engagement in and out of the classroom. The in-class study was conducted with psychology students at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). The Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ) developed by Handelsman, Briggs, Sullivan, and Towler (2005) was used to measure student engagement. Study 2 examined the extent to which four high-impact educational practices promoted student engagement. Undergraduate UNK students who had participated in undergraduate research, learning communities, service learning, or internships were surveyed.

The results of the first study indicated that instructors can promote engagement by how the structure of the classroom (discussion classes), individuation (knowing student names and keeping class sizes small), and teacher support in the form of being responsive to student questions, encouraging students to seek assistance, and assigning effective aids to learning. The second study indicated that undergraduate research and internships were more engaging than service learning or learning communities.

These results suggest practical methods for meeting a variety of student needs, including their need for relatedness — by encouraging them to seek assistance and knowing their names, competence — by assigning effective learning aids and autonomy — by encouraging intrinsically motivating activities.

Until recently, motivation has been considered to be an individual phenomenon. Motivational theorists have accordingly conceptualised key constructs in individualistic terms and emphasised the individual origins and nature of motivation, although they have also long recognised that contextual or social factors have a significant influence on these individual processes. Recently this conceptualisation has been questioned as theorists have suggested, after Vygotsky, that motivation, like learning and thinking, might be social in nature. This idea was first suggested by Sivan (1986) more than twenty years ago but it received a major impetus with the publication of an article by Hickey (1997) eleven years later. Since that time interest in the social nature of motivation has grown as a small number of book chapters and journal articles have been published and conference papers have been presented on the topic. Although some motivational theorists remain sceptical (e.g. Winne, 2004) of this theoretical development, the inclusion of a section on sociocultural approaches to motivation in Perry, Turner, and Meyer's (2006) chapter on classrooms as contexts for motivating learning in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Educational Psychology suggests that this perspective is being seriously considered by motivational researchers. Similarly, the inclusion of a chapter (Walker, in press-b) on the sociocultural approach to motivation in the 3rd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education indicates that this approach has achieved some recognition.

Making a classroom a space that can become a place of lively discussion and interaction is a goal of many instructors, but it can be challenging to assess the extent to which classroom engagement is resulting in meaningful participation. The use of an assessment tool called classroom mapping provides a way to trace and analyze students’ interaction, performance, and involvement in a class. It maps discussions and shows feedback on what is going on; including who is talking, for how long, what subjects and instructional strategies engage which students, and what kinds of connections are being made with the students and the instructors. This chapter considers the broader implications of using technology to elevate classroom mapping from formative assessment to potential learning analytic, with particular attention to the practical, pedagogical and ethical implications of recording and mapping how students engage in their classes.

In this chapter, we explore our experiences of co-teaching an undergraduate elementary teacher education class titled, “Teaching Language Arts in FNMI (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) Contexts.” In our curriculum-making for the course, we drew on Narrative Inquiry as pedagogy, as well as on Indigenous storybooks, novels, and scholarship. We chose to work in these ways so that we might attempt to complicate and enrich both our experiences as teacher educators, and the possibilities of what it means to engage in Language Arts alongside Indigenous children, youth, and families in Kindergarten through Grade 12 classrooms. Thus, central to this chapter will be reflection on our efforts to co-create curriculum alongside of students – considered in their multiplicity also as pre-service teachers, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, etc. – in ways that honored all of our knowing and experience. The relational practices inherent to Narrative Inquiry and Indigenous approaches to education, such as the creation and sharing of personal annals/timelines and narratives, along with small and large group conversations and talking circles are pedagogies we hoped would invite safe, reflective, and communal spaces for conversation. While certainly not a tension-free process, all of the pedagogical choices we made as teacher educators provide us the opportunity to attend to the relational and ontological commitments of Narrative Inquiry, to the students in their processes of becoming, to Indigenous worldviews, and to the responsibilities of the Alberta Language Arts curriculum.

Public education in the United States is White, middle class, and urban/suburban normed. However, in the past decade, national population trends show an increase in minority populations, particularly in the southeastern United States. This trend has resulted in a cultural mismatch between teachers who are not trained in strategies that are responsive to the needs of a diverse student population. Novice teachers in a rural school district in eastern North Carolina participated in a study to examine the degree to which they were prepared to successfully interact with their culturally diverse student populations through the lens of culturally relevant classroom management (CRCM), based on their training at either historically White (HWIs) or Black (HBCUs) postsecondary institutions. As part of this larger study, we found that teachers trained at HWIs, although well-intentioned, enter the classroom far less prepared than their HBCU-trained counterparts. However, for both groups of novice teachers, intercultural interactions earlier in their lives seem to have a greater influence than institutional effects on effective, culturally relevant classroom management practices.

The first community college, Joliet Junior College, was founded in 1901 by William Rainey Harper, an early president of the University of Chicago as a means of providing an associate degree for students (Geller, 2001). As with many higher education institutions of that period, enrollment was limited to a select group. With the introduction of the G. I. Bill after World War II, community colleges began to thrive in the United States as more servicemen began to pursue training. Researchers suggest that community colleges have evolved through various stages: extension of secondary schools, junior colleges, community colleges, comprehensive community colleges, and now learning community colleges (O'Banion, 1997; Tillery & Deegan, 1985). Consistently, the public community college has at the core of its mission a focus on access – open admission regardless of ethnicity, gender, or social economic status. This open admission policy contributes to the attractiveness of community colleges for many students, particularly adults and women. They were designed to meet students at their individual point of entry and help to prepare them for the workforce or transfer to a Baccalaureate degree granting institution (Lanni, 1997). They offer flexible course scheduling, lower educational costs, smaller classroom settings, and more intimate contact with faculty and staff members than many of the larger universities (Lundberg, 2003; Ness, 2003). Additionally, they provide occupational training for individuals seeking to increase employability skills, as well as educational opportunities for underprepared students in a diverse environment.

This paper is about extraordinary performance in organizations. Our specific focus is unusual. We examine a context with which many readers are deeply familiar, the public school classroom. We consider the work of highly effective teachers and generate a framework of hypotheses about how they get extraordinary results. These hypotheses may contrast with the reader’s assumptions of what a public school teacher does. The framework may therefore provoke insights about how to create and lead high performing organizations in other contexts.

According to Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, whose best-known contribution to critical thought is his theory regarding hegemony, education “serves a directly important function in maintaining hegemony…[for] [i]t is a vehicle by which consensus is maintained and the knowledge of the ruling bloc (the majority ruling class) is legitimated” (Gross, 2011, p. 66). Although Gramsci's theoretical work was initially situated within the Fascist-dominated Italian legislature in which he aimed to understand how the ruling class maintained power over the proletariat (oppressed groups), his concept offers a lens through which social critics have been able to understand the prevailing superstructures of power in Western capitalist societies. This chapter, therefore, relies on Gramsci's theories to develop an argument (and writing pedagogy) regarding the democratic ability of the historically Black college and university (HBCU), for I contend the HBCU, particularly its first-year composition classroom, is a space where students can practice and propel democracy, thus countering the hegemony that insists on oppressing Black and Brown people.

While the HBCU, as defined by the 1965 Higher Education Act, is a by-product of the superstructure and is thusly grounded upon and legitimated by what bell hooks terms “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” therefore functioning as institutionalized spaces for constructing and maintaining hegemony, HBCUs, explains Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in his 2016 Democracy in Black, are “institutions that both cultivated their (Black folks') civic capacities and served as a space to transmit values that opposed the value gap” (p. 125). In other words, Black folks have had to create “safe spaces” like the HBCU, to exist in their full humanity within an oppressive America whose white citizens devalued their being, and therefore, their American citizenship. Although the HBCU is legitimated by the hegemony, the HBCU, I argue, remains a space where the democracy America has yet to realize can be learned and practiced, especially if teachers, particularly within first-year composition programs, employ counterhegemonic curriculums and practices like the AfriWomanist approach to teaching I offer here.

This chapter begins with an overview of the concept of intercultural competence and its fundamental role in our global society. Using examples of inquiry-based learning (IBL) methods as a means to provide interdisciplinary pedagogies that foster learners’ intercultural competence development, this chapter examines innovative approaches to respond to this global community need in the academic context. With a review of interdisciplinary IBL methods, the chapter centers on the following three principal areas: (1) role of IBL and service-learning (SL) in the development of intercultural competence within an interdisciplinary framework, (2) practical examples of how the author implements IBL using cooperative learning strategies and SL into humanities courses that consist of students from various disciplines ranging from health to political sciences for intercultural competence development, and (3) challenges and benefits of SL programs as forms of IBL.