English and geography: common ground? From Planet Earth to Pigs

What does a sense of space and place bring to the interpretation of a literary text such as Pigs by Les Murray? What does an English subject perspective add to work in geography on documentary texts such as the BBC wildlife series Planet Earth? This article is an outcome of our collaboration as teacher educators involved in the initial training of English and geography teachers. We start with Planet Earth because we want to highlight a popular text worth viewing from different subject perspectives. In many ways the process reflects the type of interdisciplinary understanding required to address ecological issues. We take the examples of English and geography, tracing the etymologies of these separate disciplines and considering the common ground between them. The potential of this approach for subject development is modelled through analysis of Pigs, a poem by Les Murray.     

Links between early rhythm skills, musical training, and phonological awareness

A small number of studies show that music training is associated with improvements in reading or in its component skills. A central question underlying this present research is whether musical activity can enhance the acquisition of reading skill, potentially before formal reading instruction begins. We explored two dimensions of this question: an investigation of links between kindergartners’ music rhythm skills and their phonological awareness in kindergarten and second grade; and an investigation of whether kindergartners who receive intensive musical training demonstrate more phonological skills than kindergartners who receive less. Results indicated that rhythm skill was related to phonological segmentation skill at the beginning of kindergarten, and that children who received more music training during kindergarten showed improvement in a wider range of phonological awareness skills at the end of kindergarten than children with less training. Further, kindergartners’ rhythm ability was strongly related to their phonological awareness and basic word identification skills in second grade. We argue that rhythm sensitivity is a pre-cursor skill to oral language acquisition, and that the ability to perceive and manipulate time intervals in sound streams may link performance of rhythm and phonological tasks.     

But what about the fish? Teaching Ted Hughes' Pike with environmental bite

In this article the potential of a creative connection between ecocriticism and nature poetry is raised in the context of teaching Ted Hughes' poem Pike. I consider how an ecocritical approach can open up the text to environmental debates comparing this with an example of a lesson based in a literacy strategy model. The paper argues for stronger attention to pupils' experiences of the environment through a more open and interdisciplinary approach to teaching poetry. More widely, I assess the prospects for English to contribute to critical understanding about the environment and animals.     

Building community bonds,bridges, and linkages to promote the career readiness of high school students in the United States

The career readiness of high school students has been a longstanding issue that has received renewed attention in recent years. To document an approach to promoting career readiness in the United States, we conducted an exploratory case study of a distinguished information technology career academy. Using the premises of capital building as a frame of reference, we found a community who viewed career readiness as a form of investment in human capital development. As such, a network of business partners collaborated with academy staff in providing school- and work-based learning opportunities for academy students. This approach was complemented by an emphasis on the development of social capital with social bonds, bridges, and linkages in place to sustain the network identity and development.     

Evaluation of a collaborative multimedia conflict resolution curriculum

This article describes the development and evaluation of STARstreams, a pilot effort to utilize videos and online discussions in a conflict resolution curriculum that acknowledges the inherent socio-personal aspects of conflict. The STARstreams curricula includes a set of video-based scenarios depicting conflict situations and potential resolutions to those conflicts, a web-based conferencing system for cross-classroom discussion of the scenarios, and a handbook to guide teacher implementation of the curriculum. These materials were evaluated in a 2-week field trial with four geographically diverse 5th and 6th grade classrooms. The experimental STARstreams curriculum was well-received by participating students and teachers, engendered extensive participation in online discussions about the scenarios, and had a statistically significant effect on measures of social problem solving, self-efficacy toward conflict resolution, and perceived value and satisfaction with the materials. The overall program and its development are described; classroom experiences, online discussion, and quantitative outcome measures are presented; and implications for future efforts are discussed.

What Do Students Gain by Engaging in Socioscientific Inquiry?

The question of what students gain by engaging in socioscientific inquiry is addressed in two ways. First, relevant literature is surveyed to build the case that socioscientific issues (SSI) can serve as useful contexts for teaching and learning science content. Studies are reviewed which document student gains in discipline specific content knowledge as well as understandings of the nature of science. SSI are also positioned as vehicles for addressing citizenship education within science classrooms. Although the promotion of citizenship goals seems widely advocated, the specifics of how this may be accomplished remain underdeveloped. To address this issue, we introduce socioscientific reasoning as a construct which captures a suite of practices fundamental to the negotiation of SSI. In the second phase of the project, interviews with 24 middle school students from classes engaged in socioscientific inquiry serve as the basis for the development of an emergent rubric for socioscientific reasoning. Variation in practices demonstrated by this sample are explored and implications drawn for advancing socioscientific reasoning as an educationally meaningful and assessable construct.