Abstract
An ongoing challenge for instructional and syllabus designers and teachers and facilitators who seek to implement these curricula is finding and maintaining an appropriate balance between differing learning and teaching styles. Differences in cultural and language backgrounds, previous learning and teaching experiences, and the personal characteristics of learners and teachers create an extremely complex milieu at the intersection of learning and teaching in contemporary educational contexts. This chapter explores this issue through an analysis of three different data sets: the experiences of male Saudi nursing students at an Australian university; the role of children, parents and peers, and the natural environment as educators in an alternative school context; and the interaction between a teacher and student in an Australian senior secondary art classroom.