This paper introduces the special issue.

This article discusses what a virtues orientation might offer in terms of understanding and fostering good listing in educational contexts.

This article analyzes interpersonal listening, distinguishing between a cognitive (thinking) type and a noncognitive (empathic, feeling) type. Both have important roles in teaching and learning.

This article explores compassionate listening as a creative spiritual activity. Such listening recognizes the suffering of others in ways that open up possibilities for healing and transformative communication.

This article is about reverence, and listening reverently as teachers and educational leaders. The authors argue that reverence is central to the kind of teaching and leadership we need in today�s schools and that listening is one of the prime activities of reverence. Thus, they argue that reverential listening is a key component of effective teaching and leadership.

Taking up an issue explored by John Dewey, Austin Sarat, and Walter Parker, as well as many others, I continue my study of the conditions under which people choose to listen to a perspective that challenges their own beliefs.

The author argues that the practice of speaking and listening to �strangers� is at the heart of democratic citizenship education and, further, that schools are fertile sites for this communicative work because they possess three key assets�problems, diversity, and strangers�alongside a fourth: curriculum and instruction.

This article describes several of the possible interpretations for student silence in classrooms and suggests that an understanding of the meanings of silence through careful listening and inquiry shifts a teacher�s practice and changes a teacher�s understanding of students� participation.

This article argues that listening inevitably involves attention to the social identities communicated through speech, exploring how one high school student was socially identified in a classroom across an academic year.

In this article, we examine the common activity of pretending to listen and argue that thinking about it carefully reveals some important insights into the practice of listening more generally. Then we turn to the question of pretending to listen in the context of teaching: Is it always inappropriate? Is it even avoidable? Does it sometimes serve valuable purposes? Is it sometimes �good enough�?

Teach For America (TFA) graduate students evaluated their method course instructors significantly lower than did traditional students on an end-of-semester student evaluation instrument. This prompted faculty researchers to investigate how to best meet the needs of these alternatively certified teachers. Implications include suggestions for restructuring teacher preparation programs to best meet the needs of TFA first-year teachers, whose work impacts some of the highest needs students in the country.

This article provides perspective on laws mandating openness in higher education, describes differences in the laws across states, and reports on select findings from a study that we conducted on the impacts of the laws on public colleges and universities nationally. The article seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature on information policy and its uses in society—in this case, how the public information laws of state governments influence the climate of data access and decision-making in public higher education.

As education librarians seek to collaborate with preservice teacher preparation programs, they need to apply informatics principles to optimize the library’s ultimate impact on student achievement. Specifically, education librarians need to examine several levels of information processing systems: student, faculty, program, institution, and government entities. Furthermore, education librarians need to identify the conditions or environments of these information systems because the infrastructure, available resources, and knowledge base all impact student learning.

This article calls for the creation of a subdiscipline within the field of education entitled education informatics. Education informatics is the application of technology to discovering and communicating education information.

Open access is a mode of publication that limits or removes payments, fees, licensing, or other typical requirements for access to research publications or related materials. This article describes open access in more detail, examines its impact on the field of education research, and identifies information management problems that may currently inhibit adoption.

This article discusses user information behavior though analysis of demographic factors, academic disciplinary characteristics, and the nature of educational research. Understanding elements of user information behavior will inform the development of a system of education informatics.

This concluding article identifies the numerous policy implications of education informatics that are revealed by the other articles in this issue. The design of information systems, the advancement of education informatics, and strategies for anchoring it in within constantly changing technologies are discussed.

This paper introduces the special issue.

This paper describes the educational knowledge domain as having a community structure (form) based in relations of production (authoring) and consumption (referencing), and a cognitive structure (content) based in relations of ideas and concepts. We propose developing an online interactive system whereby the vast array of available knowledge artifacts can be mined for information reflective of these networks, and which can be visualized, measured, and explored over time. Building on the ideas of online communities, network visualizations, e-commerce, and advanced search engines, Scholar Practitioner Information Networks for Education (SPINE) not only facilitates access to education information resources, but also allows the community to view multiple sources of information in a relational context.

This article describes the collaborative theory-building process used by a diverse creative team of academics, artists, teachers, and undergraduate students to develop a model to teach about race and racism through storytelling and the arts.

This study examines the understandings of two White affluent students attending an elite private high school about the differences in educational experiences between low-income and affluent students. This article explores the ways in which students with schooling and life advantages actively construct privilege as a dimension or aspect of their identity.

Using a qualitative methodology, this study examines the relationship between a professional development effort centered on teaching history through a cultural encounters approach, and the history teaching practice of 21 teachers. Findings demonstrate that the participants’ conceptual frameworks toward history, grounded in their own professional knowledge and teaching expertise, were important factors in how they reconceptualized their views of curriculum.

Through an instrumental case study of the International Academic Programmes Office (IAPO), this article examines the practices of internationalization at the University of Cape Town from 1996 to 2006. The office’s struggle to balance internationalization and national transformation illuminates the tensions and contradictions inherent in the field of international higher education globally.

This study examined the affects on students of exposure to two types of background knowledge about a problem case that involved a disconnection between a foreign college professor and her students.

This article examines the difference in cultural flexibility, or the propensity to move across different cultural and social peer groups and environments, between black and white students enrolled in either majority-minority or majority-white schools. Results show associations among race, self-esteem, academic and extracurricular placement, and cultural flexibility by school context.