Muskrat theories,tobacco in the streets,and living Chicago as Indigenous land

In this paper, we aim to contribute to ongoing work to uncover the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments and explore lessons learned from an urban Indigenous land-based education project. In this project, we worked to re-center our perceptual habits in Indigenous cosmologies, or land-based perspectives, and came to see land re-becoming itself. Through this recentering, we unearthed some ways in which settler colonialism quietly operates in teaching and learning environments and implicitly and explicitly undermines Indigenous agency and futurity by maintaining and reifying core dimensions of settler colonial relations to land. We describe examples in which teachers and community members explicitly re-engaged land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a land-based environmental science education that enabled epistemological and ontological centering that significantly impacted learning, agency, and resilience for urban Indigenous youth and families. In this paper, we explore the significance of naming and the ways in which knowledge systems are mobilized in teaching and learning environments in the service of settler futurity. However, we suggest working through these layers of teaching and learning by engaging in land-based pedagogies is necessary to extend and transform the possibilities and impacts of environmental education.     

Dare to Dream: New Venture Incubator for Older Adults

The purpose of this article is to describe a project that aims to foster active aging through entrepreneurial activities among older adults. The project establishes the feasibility of implementing an intervention program that assimilates the concept and capabilities of entrepreneurship among older adults and supports them while launching new ventures. A 12-meeting training program was provided to the selected participants followed by continuing support through a tailor-made incubator. The pilot experiment selected a group of retirees who sought work and had no previous entrepreneurial experience. Of the 22 participants in the intervention program, 15 (70%) actually started a microenterprise based on their previously formulated ideas and past work experience and encouraged by participation in the program. Fostering older adults’ entrepreneurial activities has value much further than fulfilling individual needs because it provides benefits to the welfare of the community as well as to the economy. The pilot experiment suggests that this type of intervention program is feasible and warrants further studies.     

The New Books

Raymond Spottiswoode's Focal Encyclopedia of Film and Television: Techniques (Hastings House, $37.50)

Eli L. Levitan's An Alphabetical Guide to Motion Picture, Television, and Videotape Production (McGraw-Hill, $24.50)

Ronald Brown's Telecommunications: The Booming Technology (Doubleday, $5.95)

Peter Hillson's Photography: A Study in Versatility (Doubleday, $6.95)

Dale Minor's The Information War (Hawthorne, $6.95)

Nicholas Johnson's, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (Atlantic, $5.95)

Allen E. Koenig's Broadcasting and Bargaining (University of Wisconsin Press, $8.00)

Verne Edwards' Journalism in a Free Society (W.C. Brown, $6.95)     

PLATO: An Automatic Teaching Device

PLATO?a teaching machine developed during the past nine months at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois?is a device for teaching a number of students individually by means of a single, central, high-speed general-purpose digital computer. Each student is provided with his own keyset and television display. The keyset enables the student to control the sequence of materials presented to him by the machine, as well as to transmit to the computer answers to its questions. The computer communicates to each student by closed circuit television. It selects slides and writes or erases sentences and diagrams on a storage tube. These two outputs are superimposed and displayed on the student's television screen. Not only are textual materials presented to each student at a rate determined by that student, but the computer frequently poses questions. The student's answers?which may take the form of numerals, algebraic expressions, or words and phrases ?are judged by the computer without revealing the correct answer to the question. Supplementary material is presented by the machine upon request for any question which the student finds difficult. The computer keeps detailed records of each student's progress through the material. Though a two-student version of PLATO is now in operation, the paper describes in detail an earlier one-student system. The system has been used to present a variety of subject matters, ranging from mathematics to topics in French grammar.     

Drama activities as ideational resources for primary‐grade children in urban science classrooms

In this study we explored how dramatic enactments of scientific phenomena and concepts mediate children's learning of scientific meanings along material, social, and representational dimensions. These drama activities were part of two integrated science‐literacy units, Matter and Forest, which we developed and implemented in six urban primary‐school (grades 1st–3rd) classrooms. We examine and discuss the possibilities and challenges that arise as children and teachers engaged in scientific knowing through such experiences. We use Halliday's (1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press) three metafunctions of communicative activity—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—to map out the place of the multimodal drama genre in elementary urban school science classrooms of young children. As the children talked, moved, gestured, and positioned themselves in space, they constructed and shared meanings with their peers and their teachers as they enacted their roles. Through their bodies they negotiated ambiguity and re‐articulated understandings, thus marking this embodied meaning making as a powerful way to engage with science. Furthermore, children's whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing this imaginary scientific world, as their teachers helped them differentiate it from the real world of the model they were enacting. Their bodies operated on multiple mediated levels: as material objects that moved through space, as social objects that negotiated classroom relationships and rules, and as metaphorical entities that stood for water molecules in different states of matter or for plants, animals, or non‐living entities in a forest food web. Children simultaneously negotiated meanings across all of these levels, and in doing so, acted out improvisational drama as they thought and talked science. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 302–325, 2010     

Teachers “in the making”: Building accounts of teaching

In this paper, mentoring practices during internship in teacher education are identified as boundary activities between schools and universities. By using the notions of common places and accounting practices, the emerging discourses of student teachers and mentors in a Norwegian school are explored to expand our understanding of how conceptual, practical and contextual resources are used to construct justified accounts of experiences. The results of this study indicate that during internship the student teachers learn ways of seeing, representing and talking about their experiences that are deemed relevant within the school's practice, using and transforming resources accordingly.