We discuss an educational development approach to embedding academic literacies instruction within disciplinary curricula. This developmental, embedded approach contrasts with the generic, extracurricular, study-skills approach adopted in many universities. Learning Commons partners at York University, including librarians, writing instructors, and learning skills counsellors, collaborated with educational developers in the York Teaching Commons to design a program for course instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) who seek to improve their students’ academic literacies. This program includes interactive workshops focusing on strategies to facilitate the redesign of courses and assignments so as to give explicit attention to process-related practices and abilities involved in library research and writing. The academic theory underpinning this program is outlined along with its key content elements. We also describe how the program draws on SPARK (Student Papers and Academic Research Kit), an online resource, created by the York Learning Commons under a Creative Commons license with the goal of helping students succeed with written academic assignments. Feedback from instructors and TAs support that the program has played an important role in helping them to question their assumptions and redesign their teaching practice.

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Only a few years following the publication of Democracy and Education, from May 1919 to July 1921, John Dewey traveled and lectured in China. He arrived an already famous American psychologist, philosopher, and educator; but over the course of the years after his departure, that fame diminished, turning to infamy in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be somewhat restored in recent decades. The changing attitudes of the Chinese to Dewey and his ideas are associated with the changing, and often tumultuous, cultural and political context for education in China from the time of his visit through the following century. Hu Shi and Tao Xingzhi, PhD students of Dewey at Columbia University, were prominent Chinese educators who adapted Dewey's educational concepts to the Chinese environment, and their work continues to influence educational debate in China today. While there is desire among many contemporary educators for educational reforms that would be in line with Dewey's principles, there are equal or greater pressures for maintaining systems focused on examinations and memorization.

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