The past few years have witnessed an emergent growth of both academic and practical works on English medium instruction (EMI) teachers' professional development. This paper presents a critical analysis of 30 empirical studies on EMI teacher development in a wide range of higher educational settings from 2018 to 2022. Through a systematic process of paper selection and review, we have identified three general routes to EMI teacher development, namely: (1) formal training activities; (2) opportunities for teacher collaboration; and (3) self-initiated practices. For each route, we presented a critical appraisal of their design and implementation, as well as reported gains and challenges. Meanwhile, we also conducted a critical analysis of the methodological issues pertaining to the selected papers. Overall, we argue that EMI teacher development in higher education is largely construed as a hybrid, contested, and transformative enterprise featured by EMI teachers' constant boundary-crossing at different levels to seek professional growth in linguistic, pedagogical, cultural, and psychological domains. During this process, EMI teachers may encounter conflicted dispositions, power asymmetries, and individual contradictions. Such a process thus requires EMI teachers to rethink, reexamine, and reflect critically on their accustomed preconceptions and practices, in order to facilitate transformation and achieve sustainability in the long run. The review also presents implications for EMI teachers, teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers on effectively facilitating EMI teacher development in higher education.

As Kathleen Graves argues in her 2023 article, the belief that students learn best when teachers deliver a curriculum exactly as written is a common fallacy, based on an underlying assumption that ‘the institutional curriculum is the most important determinant of what happens in the classroom’ (p. 200). Graves stresses that, in reality, the institutional curriculum itself does not guarantee effective learning and that, instead, it is up to teachers to modify, adapt, or ‘enact’ the curriculum for it to make sense and work effectively in each unique context (p. 200). In our roles as academic writing instructors at a university in Japan, we are simultaneously teachers and curriculum developers. As such, we were drawn to this article and have examined how Graves’ ideas relate to our teaching beliefs and experiences. In this response article, we first discuss issues caused by an overemphasis on the institutional as well as on the enacted curricula. We then highlight the importance of building a program culture that invites open dialogue about how teachers creatively adapt a given curriculum in order to involve teachers meaningfully in course development.

The timing of corrective feedback (CF), alternatively called feedback timing, refers to the choice of a timepoint for providing corrections on second language (L2) errors or making comments on the appropriacy of L2 learners' verbal or nonverbal behaviors. A typical distinction related to the notion of feedback timing is between immediate and delayed feedback, but what constitutes immediate or delayed has been interpreted and defined in different ways. In one stream of research, immediate feedback is operationalized as feedback provided during a learning task and delayed feedback as feedback provided after a task is completed (Arroyo & Yilmaz, 2018*; Li Zhu & Ellis, 2016a*; Quinn, 2014*). One methodological variation in this distinction is interim feedback, which is provided after the first task is completed and before the second task is started (Li, Li, & Qian, under review). Interim feedback is relevant or possible when multiple tasks are performed. It refers to feedback provided during the interval(s) between tasks. Interim feedback is different from delayed feedback in that the latter refers to feedback provided after the task (if there is only one task) or all tasks (if there are multiple tasks) are completed and there is no further task performance following the feedback session. This way of conceptualizing feedback timing is based on the positioning of feedback during a task cycle, instead of the proximity to errors. Another way to examine feedback timing is to distinguish feedback provided immediately after an error is made and feedback delayed until a later time in the instructional cycle, such as one week later (Lavolette, Polio, & Kahng, 2015*). In this case, both immediate and delayed feedback can occur either during or after the completion of a learning task. A third way is to define feedback timing options in terms of their relation to instruction, namely whether feedback is provided immediately after explicit instruction or at a later stage after learners complete some practice activities (Fu & Li, 2022*). It should be clarified that this way of operationalizing feedback timing is markedly different from that in other studies in that it focuses on feedback's relation to instruction instead of errors. To conclude this section, it is necessary to point out that the conceptualization and operationalization of feedback timing should be reconsidered in L2 research. Feedback timing is not merely a matter of the length of interval or the distance between errors and feedback, and other parameters of the instructional system where errors occur are also involved or relevant, such as the distance between feedback and instruction, the positioning of feedback in a task cycle (such as within, after, or between tasks), and so on. These parameters are important because they contribute to the effectiveness of different timing options. Despite the variation in the operationalization of feedback timing, we argue that it is a unified construct that is theoretically justifiable, empirically examinable, and pedagogically valuable.

This paper shares a heuristic to support thinking about meaningful transformative education within the context of the contemporary environmental and social crisis. We describe the context of this work and explore the epistemological foundations for this model, which has been evolving and guiding our research and teaching and which underpins the six qualities of meaningful transformative education. The qualities are being open to alternative visions of the future and alternative approaches to education, accepting and embracing complexity, incorporating multiple types of knowledge, reorienting towards justice, developing ecological worldviews and supporting students to bring about systemic change. We also present a series of illustrative vignettes, informed by real-world practices of schools in England, which bring these qualities to life. The vignettes and subsequent discussion highlight possibilities and challenges for enacting a meaningful transformative education in schools.

Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), wrote about many aspects of education including its aims; the education of children, nations, and elites; types of pedagogy; the reform of the university; and the challenges facing educators in an era of “triumphant plebeianism.” The article examines all aspects of Ortega’s educational thought, with a particular focus on his ideas about elites and their education, drawing on writings unavailable in English, including texts not published during his lifetime. At the heart of his writing is a vision of the qualities needed to enable individuals to make what he called a “project” out of their lives along with a powerful advocacy of the non-utilitarian and Socratic pedagogies that would help achieve that vision. The article looks at the balance of radical and conservative elements within Ortega’s educational thought and its relation to earlier “progressive” thinkers, and concludes with an evaluation of his legacy.

What’s the point of going to college? Does it matter where you go? And is it worth the cost? As more Americans and people around the globe enroll in higher education, such questions are being asked with increasing frequency. Scholars have answers, yet those answers depend a great deal on the methods being used to explore the questions. Economists, for instance, bring a particular set of tools to the task, as well as a general set of assumptions and beliefs. Historians, too, come armed with the instruments of disciplinary inquiry and can end up with quite different conclusions. So what would happen if we brought them together to talk through research questions of interest to their respective academic “tribes”?

For this Policy Dialogue, the HEQ editors asked historian Bruce Kimball and economist Rob Toutkoushian to reflect on disciplinary traditions, debates over higher education finance, and what makes college worthwhile. Kimball has taught at the University of Houston, Yale University, and the University of Rochester and is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He has published several books on the history of liberal education and professional education, particularly legal education. His latest book, co-authored with Sarah Iler, is Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education (John Hopkins University Press, 2023). Toutkoushian is a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia specializing in economic theories and quantitative methods. He has served as executive director of the Office of Policy Analysis in the University System of New Hampshire and as editor of Research in Higher Education. As a scholar, Toutkoushian has published more than sixty peer-reviewed publications on such topics as higher education finance, compensation, demand, and policy analysis.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote a casual, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

This article describes the multifaceted origins and dynamics of pedagogic progressive educational ideas among Mormon educators in the Utah Territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We propose four principal avenues through which progressive educational ideas reached these Mormon educators. These include the exigencies of desert frontier living that predisposed early Utah Mormons to progressivism’s focus on practical education; the arrival of denominational schools sponsored by the New West Education Commission (NWEC), which sparked educative improvement within Mormon communities; the Pestalozzian teachings of Karl Maeser via the Brigham Young Academy’s Normal School; and the visits of eastern progressive educationalists through Benjamin Cluff’s leadership at the BYA Summer Institutes. We additionally situate nineteenth-century national perceptions of Mormon educational ideas within this more nuanced backdrop of the migration of progressive ideas to Utah. We describe unique dimensions of Mormon educational progressivism that might set it apart from educational progressivisms elsewhere, including tensions within Utah’s Mormon educative community.

The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults’ capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their communities, it has also facilitated programs for young people, including a nursery school. The Highlander Nursery School functioned as a cooperative institution that relied on the material and conceptual support of local residents, serving as a depoliticized entry point for families who might otherwise have been antagonistic toward Highlander’s pro-union and pro-civil rights agenda. This article aims to understand how the complexity of Highlander’s political vision for grassroots leadership, cooperation, and radical social change was expressed in and through the nursery school, an institution that teachers, local children, and their families worked together to sustain.

For decades, transnational knowledge circulation in relation to schooling in Ireland has been a neglected area of study among historians. This paper provides new insights through a transnational lens on primary, secondary, and vocational curriculum developments in the first decade following the advent of national independence in the country in 1922. During this period, key policy-makers largely rejected progressive educational ideas circulating internationally and promoted curricula and pedagogy in primary and secondary schools that reflected the new nation’s deeply conservative Catholic nature and nationalist ethos. While initial signs indicated that developments in vocational education might head in a different direction, ultimately, more progressive educational ideas circulating internationally were excluded from that sector as well. At all levels of the education system, the hegemony of the Catholic Church and other contextual factors resulted in traditional and conservative curricula that underpinned policy and practice until the 1960s.

The pervasive use of media at current-day festivals thoroughly impacts how these live events are experienced, anticipated, and remembered. This empirical study examined eventgoers’ live media practices – taking photos, making videos, and in-the-moment sharing of content on social media platforms – at three large cultural events in the Netherlands. Taking a practice approach (Ahva 2017; Couldry 2004), the author studied online and offline event environments through extensive ethnographic fieldwork: online and offline observations, and interviews with 379 eventgoers. Analysis of this research material shows that through their live media practices eventgoers are continuously involved in mediated memory work (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014; Van Dijck 2007), a form of live storytelling that revolves around how they want to remember the event. The article focuses on the impact of mediated memory work on the live experience in the present. It distinguishes two types of mediatised experience of live events: live as future memory and the experiential live. The author argues that memory is increasingly incorporated into the live experience in the present, so much so that, for many eventgoers, mediated memory-making is crucial to having a full live event experience. The article shows how empirical research in media studies can shed new light on key questions within memory studies.