Fostering communities of teachers as learners: disciplinary perspectives

Education research in learning and teaching has alternated historically between periods in which subject matter disciplines were used as the organizing framework for investigation and implementation, and other periods in which the content areas nearly disappeared in favour of a quest for generic principles of instruction that could transcend disciplinary boundaries. There are few examinations of how these factors interact in the context of specific classroom- and pedagogy-centred school reform. The papers that follow in this issue of FCS examine this issue through the lens of the pedagogic reform, 'Fostering a Community of Learners'. This introduction outlines the key characteristics of this reform and describes the main issues in subsequent examinations of teachers learning to implement 'Fostering a Community of Learners' in science, social studies, English language arts, and mathematics.