“Finding the Joy in the Unknown”: Implementation of STEAM Teaching Practices in Middle School Science and Math Classrooms

In response to a desire to strengthen the economy, educational settings are emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculum and programs. Yet, because of the narrow approach to STEM, educational leaders continue to call for a more balanced approach to teaching and learning, which includes the arts, design, and humanities. This desire created space for science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education, a transdisciplinary approach that focuses on problem-solving. STEAM-based curricula and STEAM-themed schools are appearing all over the globe. This growing national and global attention to STEAM provides an opportunity for teacher education to explore the ways in which teachers implement STEAM practices, examining the successes and challenges, and how teachers are beginning to make sense of this innovative teaching practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implementation of STEAM teaching practices in science and math middle school classrooms, in hopes to provide research-based evidence on this emerging topic to guide teacher educators.     

Bibliotherapy and Teaching Jewish Texts: “Medicine for the Mind”

Bibliotherapy is an educational approach that attempts to engage learners in meaningful discussions about relevant, compelling, and complex issues that they confront in their lives. Bibliotherapy begins with reading and reflecting on stories that can draw participants into a process of reflection, in ways that are user friendly and non-threatening. This study examines the unique educational features of bibliotherapy, and then proposes a model for implementing this approach in teaching Jewish texts. In the study's final section, we describe a teaching unit that demonstrates how to introduce bibliotherapy into the teaching about death and mourning in Jewish schools.     

Middle School Choices for Bilingual Latino/A Youth: When the Magnet School Represents “Status” and the Neighborhood School Represents “Solidarity”

Drawing on data collected during the second year of a longitudinal qualitative study that followed over 10 Latino/a bilingual students, this article foregrounds the experiences of participants during their sixth-grade year. The principle data sources included structured and unstructured interviews with teachers and students, school observations, and weekly small-group conversations in a courtyard outside of their classrooms. We focus on the experiences of Leila, Maricela, and Esperanza who were three of the sixth-grade girls actively recruited by their teachers to attend the district’s magnet school program for their upcoming seventh grade-year instead of their neighborhood middle school. We found that much of the reasoning behind their decision-making process centered around issues of status (e.g., how the magnet school offered better academic, economic, and professional opportunities for their future) and solidarity (e.g., attending the neighborhood school with their friends and siblings). In conclusion, we problematize the very nature of these so-called educational ‘choices’ for bilingual Latino/a youth.     

School Context and Charter School Achievement: A Framework for Understanding the Performance “Black Box”

This article explores the relationship between charter school racial composition, school environments, and student achievement. We offer an original framework for understanding school context and its influence on schooling outcomes. We conclude that policymakers could better attend to the persistent educational inequality that has shaped U.S. schooling if when designing school choice plans they took account of student racial composition even in a postdesegregation environment.     

Grammar and Its Teaching: Challenging the Myths

Grammar is often misunderstood in the language teaching field. The misconception lies in the view that grammar is a collection of arbitrary rules about static structures in the language. Further questionable claims are that the structures do not have to be taught, learners will acquire them on their own,     

Pedagogy and Post-coloniality: Teaching “Education” online

The academic study of Education1 1. A capital E is used when Education refers to Education as an academic subject or discipline. A lower case e is used to refer to education as a process. View all notes (as a social, historical, and theoretical phenomenon) is complicated by the fact of our immersion in it. This paper combines Said's idea of “contrapuntal reading” with Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity to explore what happens when students on an Education course directly confront the fact of their everyday involvement in their object of study, Education. How do the questions raised by post-colonial and other critical social writers “appear” from such a position? How does the fact of our involvement complicate our theoretical or scientific knowledge of these? By means of an episodic, narrative form of writing, this paper describes a life history pedagogy for teaching a compulsory “social issues” course online to New Zealand pre-service teacher education students. As data I draw on online conversations with and between students as they engage in the production of contextualized life history interview narratives.     

School–University Action Research: Impacts on Teaching Practices and Pupil Learning

The aim of this article is to describe a design and implementation of a school–university action research project about teaching and learning biology and mathematics in primary school. Nine teachers in grades 1 to 6, in collaboration with two researchers, were using content representation (CoRe) in learning study (LS)-inspired cycle as pedagogical tools when planning, implementing, and reflecting on lessons and pupil learning. By using pre- and post-tests, the teachers acquired knowledge about pupil subject-specific knowledge and learning. Some examples are given on how the tools in the project influenced the teaching practices and pupil learning. This research design brought together university and school practitioners to work collaboratively in a professional learning community, which developed teaching and learning in biology and mathematics.     

“At Sea”: Reversibility in Teaching and Learning

An equal-armed balance at equilibrium—the bar is horizontal—tips into disequilibrium upon displacing a weight. Equilibrium is restored by reversing that move—putting the weight back where it was, or doing the same on the other side. Piaget adopted the idea of equilibration to describe how the intellect, in relating to the world, develops. Equilibrium arises as: our mind adjusts its structures in response to the outer world (accommodation), so our internalized views can take in this outer world (assimilation). That is the process Piaget calls equilibration. Upon undergoing disequilibrium, the intellect employs these equilibrating moves, changing its structures in the process. When the intellect resolves a disturbing problem no matter how it is encountered, the intellect tries to reverse the disturbing feature: how did the familiar situation get to this disturbing one; how might that change be reversed? These equilibrating processes are encouraged as means of teaching and learning in this paper’s math and science examples. The clinical interviewing methodology of Piaget and Inhelder, as adapted by Eleanor Duckworth in the research pedagogy of clinical exploration in the classroom, provides the neutral, safe conditions requisite for these learners and teachers in undergoing disequilibrium, struggling with uncertainty, and constructing new understandings. In beginning to teach through exploration, the author and an undergraduate experimented with free fall motion. Experiencing disequilibrium, the student reconstructed her understanding of time as concurrently continuous and divisible. Seeking to enact methods of Piaget and Duckworth while engaging her, the teacher also experienced disequilibrium.     

Reflections on “Science Teaching and the Nature of Science”

Science &; Education -     

Teaching for identities, writing between the “we” and the “I” paradigms

Circumscribed by the culture of collectivist and Confucian traditions, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education in China has defaulted to an impersonalized provision and delivery. Much of teaching and learning is to assimilate individuals into a group identity. This epistemological model can be detected in learning outcomes, e.g., preferential use of ‘we’ over ‘I’, lack of authentic self-identity in student EFL writing, etc., and is characterized by ubiquitous rote learning. In this paper, we adopt a biographical approach to the teaching of stories expressed as personal narrative as part of the research framework. This is also applied to critical curriculum and pedagogical reforms that help students to write across their extant cultural constraint, enabling them to make a conceptual leap in understanding the difference between the collective, and the individual identities, of the “we” and the “I”. Once this conceptual awareness has been achieved, the individual viewpoint can be elicited and articulated in student writing of narrative accounts. Biographical narrative accounts of personal experience are found to have a creative and self-actualizing force in forming the individual’s identity, using his/her original voice. The findings suggest that EFL writing curriculum and pedagogy in the new era can be a useful strategy to empower students and EFL teachers to teach and write between the “we” and the “I” paradigms, and expand their ontological capability and flexibility through pedagogical effect.     

A Sticky Business? Exploring the “and” in Teaching and Learning

This article takes as its focus the “and” in discourses of teaching and learning. Drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that the “and” signifies a complex, sticky relationship between teaching and learning, and that we can radicalise our conception of “and” to bring forward a range of different discourses. The argument suggests that those critiques of discourses of teaching and learning which argue for an alternative discourse of pedagogy can be supplemented by the radicalising of the “and”. I am therefore proposing the possibility for different forms of immanent and transcendental critique in relation to contemporary debates about teaching and learning. And that there is significance in the apparently insignificant?…

In real life people fumble their words and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what people say. I find that kind of speech fascinating but it seems writers never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page. (Christopher Guest, Theatre Director)     

School Admissions after the School Standards and Framework Act: Bringing the LEAs back in?

Historically, LEAs were responsible for the local planning and provision of schools. They 'mattered' because their organisational strategies and admissions policies contributed to the structure and equality of opportunities for families and children in their administrative areas. Some moved ahead with comprehensive schools earlier and faster than others, and some retained selection. Alongside admissions policies, these activites in turn shaped and reproduced the extent to which local schools were socially segregated. LEA capacity to shape the local school system was always constrained by the existence of the faith-based 'voluntary' schools sector and was further diminished, post-1988, by self-governing grant-maintained (GM) schools. The 1998 Schools Standards and Framework Act brought LEAs back into the admissions arena. In this paper we examine LEAs' admissions policies and the extent to which these regulate local patterns of socio-economic segregation between schools. In this study we draw on a sample of 74 LEAs to explore these issues. Our findings point to some interesting paradoxes, most notably the fact that the most commonly used criterion in the allocation of students to places, catchment areas, is likely to create and sustain socio-economically segregated patterns of secondary schooling because these are linked in complex ways to residential segregation. We also show that selective education is strongly associated with high levels of stratified schooling and that voluntary and specialist schools also contribute to local patterns of school segregation.     

Use of the “Tree” Analogy in Evolution Teaching by Biology Teachers

This work discusses the use of Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’ as a didactic analogy and metaphor in teaching evolution. It investigates whether biology teachers of pupils from 17 to 18 years old know Darwin’s text ‘Tree of Life’. In addition, it examines whether those teachers systematically employ either the analogies present in that text or other analogies between the tree and evolution, and whether they adopt a specific methodology for teaching with analogies and metaphors (A&M). The academic training of teachers regarding use of A&M is review briefly. A diagnostic study was carried out with biology teachers in a public school in the town of Contagem in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. The data were obtained through direct observation, questionnaires and a focus group. The teachers pointed out in the questionnaires that some details of Darwin’s analogy are utilized as a resource. However, analysis of the data indicates that the ‘Tree of Life’ text is not known or utilized in class. At the same time, the teachers state that they use aspects of the tree as a didactic resource to teach evolution and that its use facilitates the learning of content. The teachers have little knowledge of specific methodologies of teaching with analogies and metaphors, revealing that their training is incomplete in this area.     

Drop Out and “Disconnected” Young Adults: Examining the Impact of Neighborhood and School Contexts

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) this study compares if and how neighborhood effects on the likelihood to drop out and be “disconnected” from school and work in young adulthood change when schools are taken into account. As widely documented, I find that neighborhood socioeconomic status is associated with dropping out, but this effect is mediated by schools with high numbers of Latino or Black students. I find neighborhood socioeconomic status is not associated with being disconnected, yet, attending schools with high numbers of Black students is. This research draws attention for the need to account for neighborhood and school effects simultaneously to better understand contextual effects and to more carefully conceptualize how neighborhood and schools work together to produce these outcomes disproportionately impacting racial and ethnic minorities.     

Mentoring “Inside” and “Outside” the Action of Teaching: A Professional Framework for Mentoring

This study seeks to contribute to the research on mentored induction by investigating the practices mentors employ in their work with new teachers in two high-need, high-poverty urban elementary schools. Informed by Schwille’s (2008) temporal framework of “educative” mentoring practices occurring “inside” and “outside” the action of teaching, this study investigated the range of practices mentors employed, new teachers’ perceptions of the practices, and if the practices contributed to new teachers’ professional learning. Participants included six new teachers and two induction mentors. Results indicate that “inside” and “outside” mentoring practices are complementary and should be conceived as assisted performance and judiciously selected to promote productive changes in new teachers’ practice. Recommendations for mentoring programs are provided.