This study compared two literacy courses for elementary teacher candidates taught by the same professor at the same university with variables held constant with one exception.It was hypothesized that teacher candidates who practiced new pedagogies with children at a designated low performing, highly diverse elementary school (Course One—Service-learning) during a highly structured service-learning experience would develop more self-efficacy and, therefore, demonstrate greater implementation of the course content than those who role played their practice (Course Two—Practice with Peers).

This collective case study explored the relationship between mathematics teachers’ beliefs and their classroom practices, namely, how they organized their classroom activities, interacted with their students, and assessed their students’ learning. Five high school teachers of ninth-grade algebra at different stages in their teaching career participated in this study.

This paper seeks to establish the parallel relevance of Lave and Wenger's Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1990) to South Africa's post-colonial legitimation of alternative sites. The South African Qualifications Authority highlights the fact that the pedagogical approach of such sites is context- and learner-centred with demonstrable socially valuable skills. The approach confronts and deconstructs the colonial marginalisation of human capital from outside ‘formal’/official institutions. It is part of the ideological framework of redressing the race and class exclusion mechanisms of artisans and others from the landscape of skills possession.

The Lewis & Clark Rediscovery Project is a technology professional development program designed to help teachers restructure teaching and learning practices in the classroom. The project also help teachers to foster technology use in the schools. Fundamental to the success of the project was the development of a model to mentor teachers in the field and to help facilitate outreach and peer mentoring of technology infusion across many districts. The authors have included in this review a description of the major Rediscovery professional development model strategies and activities, as well as lessons learned and emerging trends and movements in interactive online teaching and learning.

The utility of Lave and Wenger's social theory of learning can be evaluated through specific case studies which enhance our understanding of how education proceeds in diverse contexts. Here the author provides an ethnographic case study of the training of Caribbean-born Hindu pandits (priests) living and working in Queens, New York. In order to explicate the process by which people are moved into the social roles of “pandit-in-training” and “pandit,” the author shifts between interviewees’ words, vignettes of their actions and her interpretation of communities of practice and its relevance for mapping the education of Hindu pandits.