The intersection of aesthetics and education offers space to understand how the study of perception, sensuous experience, beauty, and art provide the potential for learning and human emancipation. These domains have been persistently understood as necessary to cultivate democratic societies by shaping citizens’ moral, ethical, and political sensibilities. Aesthetics is often considered a dangerous and paradoxical concept for educators because it offers the means for both political transformation as well as political manipulation through disruptive, engrossing, all-consuming aesthetic experiences. In short, aesthetic experiences are powerful experiences that make one think, interpret, and feel beyond the certainty of facts and the mundane parts of existence. Aesthetics offers humans the means to heighten our awareness of self and other. Thus, the study of aesthetics in education suggests there is a latent potential that exists in learning beyond simply acquiring objective information to logically discern reality.
Defining aesthetics, a complicated task given the nature of aesthetics across disciplines, is achieved by taking the reader through three perennial debates within aesthetics that have education import: the trouble with human passions, the reign of beauty, and aesthetic thought beyond beauty. In addition, the influence of aesthetics and imagination on experience and education as articulated most notably by Maxine Greene and John Dewey offers the obvious entry point for educators seeking to understand aesthetics. Looking beyond the philosophical literature on aesthetics and education, new directions in aesthetics and education as seen in the growing literature traced through the study of cognition, behavior, biology, and neuroscience offers educators potentially new sites of aesthetics inquiry. However, the overwhelming trajectory of the study of aesthetics and education allows educators to move beyond the hyper-scientific study of education and alternatively consider how felt experiences—aesthetic experiences—often brought about when fully engaged with others and one’s environment, are sites of powerful learning opportunities with moral, ethical, and civic consequences.
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Aesthetics and Education
Jessica A. Heybach
Article
Classroom Discussions
P. Karen Murphy, Carla M. Firetto, Gwendolyn M. Lloyd, Liwei Wei, and Sara E. Baszczewski
Classroom discussions are a common pedagogical approach that involve verbal exchanges of information between teachers and students. Given their importance to teaching and learning, classroom discussions have been the focus of extensive curricular mandates and, to a lesser extent, research over the last several decades. In traditional classroom discussions, the teacher tends to be situated at the center of the discussion. This type of discussion model is commonly referred to as a transmissionary model, where the teacher transmits knowledge and understandings and often leads the discussion by posing factual questions and responding to students’ answers by giving evaluative feedback. However, productive classroom discussions are better characterized by a dialogic model with students at the center of the discussion. When students are encouraged to ask thoughtful questions, give reflective responses, and challenge each other using reasoned arguments within classroom discussions, they are more likely to become builders and owners of their knowledge. Indeed, productive classroom discussions tend to ignite students’ engagement, thinking, and understanding of knowledge across academic content areas. When adopting a dialogic model, classroom discussions can advance students’ learning by promoting their basic and high-level comprehension of literary text, reasoning, and argumentation during mathematical sense-making, scientific reasoning, and model building and even second-language proficiency and communicative competence. While the overarching aim of classroom discussions is to enhance student learning across content areas (e.g., language arts, mathematics, science, or second-language learning), the various roles that teachers assume in each of the content areas may have different emphases that align with various content learning expectations. Optimizing classroom discussions requires specific considerations of the content-focused goal, teacher knowledge of content and discourse orchestration, student instruction on classroom talk, and context of content learning. Importantly, the potential and promise of productive classroom discussions can be realized by supporting teachers’ content-specific discussion practices through sustained professional development and by supporting students through explicit instruction about discussion.
Article
Cognitive Early Education
H. Carl Haywood
Cognitive early education, for children between ages 3 and 6 years, is designed to help learners develop and apply logic tools of systematic thinking, perceiving, learning, and problem-solving, usually as supplements to the content-oriented preschool and kindergarten curricula. Key concepts in cognitive early education include metacognition, executive functions, motivation, cognition, and learning. Most programs of cognitive early education are based on conceptions of cognitive development attributed to Jean Piaget, Lev S. Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, and Reuven Feuerstein. Piagetians and neoPiagetians hold that children must construct their personal repertoire of basic thinking processes on the basis of their early experience at gathering, assimilating, and reconciling knowledge. Vygotskians and neoVygotskians believe that cognitive development comes about through adults’ mediation of basic learning tools, which children internalize and apply. Adherents to Feuerstein’s concepts likewise accord a prominent role to mediated learning experiences. Followers of Luria believe that important styles of information processing underlie learning processes. Most programs emphasize, to varying degrees, habits of metacognition, that is, thinking about one’s own thinking as well as selecting and applying learning and problem-solving strategies. An important subset of metacognition is development and application of executive functions: self-regulation, management of one’s intellectual resources. Helping children to develop the motivation to learn and to derive satisfaction from information processing and learning is an important aspect of cognitive early education. Widely used programs of cognitive early education include Tools of the Mind, Bright Start, FIE-Basic, Des Procedures aux Concepts (DPC), PREP/COGENT, and Systematic Concept Teaching.
Article
Critical White Studies and Curriculum Theory
James C. Jupp and Pauli Badenhorst
Critical White studies (CWS) refers to an oppositional and interdisciplinary body of historical, social science, literary, and aesthetic intellectual production that critically examines White people’s individual, collective, social, and historical experiences. CWS reflexively assumes the embeddedness of researcher identities within the research, including the different positionalities of White researchers and researchers of Color within White supremacy writ large as well as whiteness in the social sciences and curriculum theory.
As an expression of the historical consciousness shift sparked by anglophone but also francophone African-Atlantic and pan-African intellectuals, CWS emerged within the 20th century’s emancipatory social sciences tied to Global South independence movements and Global North civil rights upheavals. Initiated by cultural studies theorists Stuart Hall and Dick Dyer in the early 80s, CWS has proliferated through two waves.
CWS’ first wave (1980–2000) advanced a race-evasive analytical arc with the following ontological and epistemological conceptual-empirical emphases: whiteness as hegemonic normativity, White identity and nation-building, White privilege and property, and White color-blind racism and race evasion. CWS’ second-wave (2000–2020) advanced an anti-essentializing analytical arc with pedagogical conceptual-empirical emphases: White materiality and place, White complexities and relationalities, Whiteness and ethics, and social psychoanalyses in whiteness pedagogies. Always controversial, CWS proliferated as a “hot topic” in social sciences throughout the 90s. Regarding catalytic validity, several CWS concepts entered mass media and popular discussions in 2020 to understand White police violence against Black people—violence of which George Floyd’s murder is emblematic.
In curriculum theory, CWS forged two main “in-ways.” In the 1990s, CWS entered the field through Henry Giroux, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and colleagues who advanced critical whiteness pedagogies. This line of research is differently continued by Tim Lensmire and his colleagues Sam Tanner, Zac Casey, Shannon Macmanimon, Erin Miller, and others. CWS also entered curriculum theory via the field of White teacher identity studies advanced by Sherry Marx and then further synthesized by Jim Jupp, Theodorea Berry, Tim Lensmire, Alisa Leckie, Nolan Cabrera, and Jamie Utt. White teacher identity studies is frequently applied to work on predominantly White teacher education programs.
Besides these in-ways, CWS’ conceptual production, especially the notion of “whiteness as hegemonic normativity” or whiteness, disrupted whitened business-as-usual in curriculum theory between 2006 and 2020. Scholars of Color supported by a few White scholars called out curriculum theory’s whiteness and demanded change in a field that centered on race-based epistemologies and indigenous cosmovisions in conferences and journals. CWS might play a role in working through the as-of-yet unresolved conflict over the futurity of curriculum theory as a predominantly White space.
A better historicized CWS that takes on questions of coloniality of power, being, and knowledge informed by feminist, decolonial, and psychoanalytic resources provides one possible futurity for CWS in curriculum theory. In this futurity, CWS is relocated as one dimension of a broad array of criticalities within curriculum theory’s critical pedagogies. This relocated CWS might advance psychoanalytically informed whiteness pedagogies that grapple with the overarching question: Can whiteness and White identities be decolonized? This field would include European critical psychoanalytic social sciences along with feminist and decolonial resources to advance a transformative shift in consciousness.
Article
Curriculum Development
Dominic Wyse and Yana Manyukhina
The word curriculum refers to the planned activities and experiences that education systems organize for students to help them achieve learning goals that are usually specified at national, school, and classroom levels. Within the realm of the discipline of education, curriculum represents a distinctive field of study in which a key debate has been about the best approaches to curriculum design and delivery. Various kinds of research, such as experimental trials, qualitative research, and comparative analyses, have been employed to analyze and attempt to optimize curricula and associated pedagogies. Philosophical thinking about the purposes of education has also been central to these debates.
An important topic in curriculum study is the extent to which learner-centered approaches, which emphasize the needs and interests of individual learners while addressing broader societal aspirations for education, are appropriate. Learner-centered curricula necessitate pedagogies that allow for differentiated, personalized, and meaningful learning experiences that can accommodate learners’ prior experiences and their interests.
Article
Deleuze Studies in Education
David R. Cole
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a French philosopher, who wrote about literature, art, cinema, other philosophers, capitalism, and schizophrenia. His wide-ranging oeuvre has begun to be considered seriously in education, because his ideas act as springboards for further elaboration and application in connected areas such as research, learning theory, early childhood education, curriculum and policy studies, and teacher education. Whilst it is impossible to track exactly how, when, and indeed if “Deleuze Studies in Education” will mature and progress to occupy a mainstream position in education, it is worth considering the influence of the French thinker as a mode of renewal and new thought. The questions that concern “Deleuze Studies in Education” therefore shift from positing thought from “the known” to “what can be done.”
Deleuze’s solo work acts a basis for new thinking in the philosophy of education. His series of philosophical studies track and develop a new philosophy, that redraws Western concepts of the subject, knowledge, learning, and thought. The intent of this new philosophy is to open up fixed Western ideas to their international and historical counterparts and to produce a way of thinking that occupies a middle ground, disconnected from the dominant, intellectual empire building that has predominantly hailed from the West.
Deleuze’s writing with the French intellectual activist, Félix Guattari (1930–1992), takes on a distinct shift and urgency away from the rewriting of the Western philosophical tradition until their last joint work called: “What is Philosophy?” and which presents a new philosophy that is sketched out in the second half of this book, and which deploys affect, percepts, concepts, and forms and functions, to move away from the ultimate horror of the present situation as they saw it: “commercial professional training.” “Deleuze Studies in Education” is deepened and reinvented through their dual work and is transformed into a mode of critical capitalist and environmental studies, which adds historical/subjective valence to how one understands current shifts in educational practice.
Lastly, the specific oeuvre of Félix Guattari, which is often less investigated and focused upon in education than Deleuze, serves as a pressing and ethical engagement with theory that can be readily applied to issues such as environmental concerns, inequality, power, and activism. Guattari’s ideas are present as a lasting aspect of “Deleuze Studies in Education” because they demonstrate many of the links to practice that Deleuze theorized throughout his philosophy.
Article
Distributed Practice or Spacing Effect
Shana K. Carpenter
The spacing effect (also known as distributed practice) refers to the finding that two or more learning opportunities that are spaced apart, or distributed, in time produce better learning than the same opportunities that occur in close succession. A number of theories have been proposed to account for the spacing effect. These include deficient processing, encoding variability, study-phase retrieval, and consolidation. According to the deficient processing account, learning opportunities that are spaced apart in time, compared to non-spaced or “massed” learning opportunities, are more likely to receive a learner’s full attention, ultimately leading to better quality learning. The encoding variability account proposes that spaced learning opportunities, because they are separated in time, are more likely to be associated with a number of different contextual cues that can benefit later memory for the information learned. Study-phase retrieval is based on the premise that retrieval benefits learning, and spaced learning opportunities are more likely than massed learning opportunities to involve retrieval of the previous learning experience. More recent evidence suggests that spacing learning opportunities across different days may benefit memory due to sleep-dependent neural consolidation processes. Research in authentic educational contexts shows that spacing benefits learning of a wide variety of materials, from basic facts to complex scientific concepts and skills. Regarding the practical question of when spaced learning opportunities should occur, the ideal scheduling of these opportunities depends upon how long the information needs to be remembered in the future, such that retention over longer intervals of time benefits most by longer spacing between repeated learning opportunities. Despite its promise for enhancing student learning, spacing can be challenging to implement in authentic educational contexts due to the intuitive notion that immediate repetition is better for learning, and the difficulties involved in setting a spaced study schedule in advance and adhering to it. To realize the full potential of spacing to enhance educational practices, future studies are needed that can measure implementation of spacing by students and teachers in real educational environments.
Article
Effective Self-Management Strategies
Lisa A. Rafferty and Kristie Asaro-Saddler
There are many benefits to developing self-management skills in children, especially in inclusive classroom environments; individuals with effective self-management skills who work as part of a larger team can improve not only their own overall performance but also that of the group as a whole—inside and outside of the school setting. Teaching students self-management strategies can free teacher time to focus on other essential tasks, which is especially important when working in a classroom environment with children with a variety of learning strengths and needs. Moreover, such strategies can be used to increase students’ opportunities to practice and respond to knowledge and academic skills in the curriculum, as well as support their behavioral needs.
Although there are many benefits to developing self-management skills, students with and at risk of disabilities often need explicit instruction to learn about and implement specific strategies to help develop these skills. Fortunately, teaching just a small set of strategies can have wide-ranging benefits and help students regulate many behaviors; additionally, research results suggest that people with a variety of learning strengths and needs can learn to implement and benefit from being taught self-management strategies. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to focus on such skills.
Despite these encouraging benefits, however, there are still several areas within self-management research that need to be further explored and discussed. For instance, identifying the appropriate level of teacher involvement in teaching these strategies, determining the potential differential effects of various self-management strategies on the behaviors of students embodying different characteristics, and the potential structural variability and the impact on student outcomes all require further investigation. Given these unresolved questions in the field, it is unclear as to how such variables impact students’ mastery and generalization of self-management strategies. This is especially important since it has been argued that self-management is the most significant goal of education; individuals who can effectively self-manage contribute to society in impactful and meaningful ways.
Article
Effective Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension
Meenakshi Gajria and Athena Lentini McAlenney
Reading comprehension, or the ability to extract information accurately from reading narrative or content area textbooks, is critical for school success. Many students identified with learning disabilities struggle with comprehending or acquiring knowledge from text despite adequate word-recognition skills. These students experience greater difficulty as they move from elementary to middle school where the focus shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Although the group of students with learning disabilities vary with respect to their challenges in reading, some general characteristics of this group include problems identifying central ideas of a text, including its relationship to supporting ideas, differentiating between important and unimportant details, asking questions, drawing inferences, creating a summary, and recalling textual ideas. Typically, these students are passive readers that do not spontaneously employ task appropriate cognitive strategies nor monitor their ongoing understanding of the text, resulting in limited understanding of both narrative and expository texts. An evidence-based approach to comprehension instruction is centered on teaching students the cognitive strategies used by proficient readers. Within the framework of reading comprehension, the goal of cognitive strategies is to teach students to actively engage with the text, to make connections with it and their prior knowledge, so that learning becomes more purposeful, deliberate, and self-regulated.
Texts differ in the level of challenge that they present to students. Narrative texts are generally simpler to read as these are based on a temporal sequence of events and have a predictable story structure. In contrast, expository texts, such as social studies and science, can be particularly demanding as there are multiple and complex text structures based on the relationship of ideas about a particular concept or topic. Using principles of explicit instruction, all learners, including students with learning disabilities and English language learners, can be taught cognitive strategies that have been proven effective for increasing reading comprehension. Early research focused on the instruction in a single cognitive strategy to promote reading comprehension such as identifying story grammar elements and story mapping for narrative texts and identifying the main idea, summarizing, and text structure for expository texts. Later researchers embedded a metacognitive component, such as self-monitoring with a specific cognitive strategy, and also developed multicomponent reading packages, such as reciprocal teaching, that integrated the use of several cognitive strategies. Instruction in cognitive and metacognitive strategies is a promising approach for students with learning disabilities to support their independent use of reading comprehension strategies and for promoting academic achievement across content areas and grade levels.
Article
Embodied Cognition
Sheila L. Macrine and Jennifer M.B. Fugate
Embodied cognition theories are different from traditional theories of cognition in that they specifically focus on the mind–body connection. This shift in our understanding of how knowledge is acquired challenges Cartesian, as well as computational theories of cognition that emphasize the body as a “passive” observer to brain functions, and necessary only in the execution of motor actions. Historically, mental representations within the brain were typically considered abstractions of the original information (i.e., mental representations). Accordingly, these amodal (disembodied) theories provided the knowledge used in cognitive processes, but did not reflect the original sensorimotor states themselves. In contrast, Embodied cognition provides a starting point to advance our understanding of how perceptual, sensorimotor and multisensory approaches facilitate and encourage learning throughout the lifespan. Derived from embodied cognition, embodied learning constitutes a contemporary pedagogical theory of knowing and learning that emphasizes the use of the body in educational practice. Embodied learning approaches scientifically endorse and advance sensorimotor learning, as well as offer potentially useful tools for educators. This article begins with a discussion on the historical progression of embodied understanding in the disciplines of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, with a focus on how embodied cognition differs from traditional models of cognition. Empirical evidence from varied field domains (e.g., reading, handwriting, STEM fields, haptic technology, mixed reality, and special education) are presented that show how embodied learning increases and facilitates learning and memory. Discussions within each content area draw upon embodied principles and show why the reviewed techniques facilitate learning. Also discussed are examples on how these principles can be further integrated into educational curriculum, with an eye toward the learner as a unified whole.
Article
Emotion and Teacher Education
Alberto Bellocchi
Emotion research in teaching and education more generally is a well-developed field of inquiry, offering suggestions for initial teacher education course development and practical suggestions for improving the working lives of teachers and schoolchildren. In contrast, emotion research in teacher education is an emergent and expanding area of inquiry. Preservice teachers, or university teacher education students, have unique emotional demands given that their teacher identities may still be in formative stages and their school-based practicum may not present the full complement of emotional experiences that full-time teachers encounter daily and for extended periods of time. Some specific objectives of past research in teacher education include explorations of preservice teachers’ emotions; preparing preservice teachers for the emotional demands of the job; developing understandings about the interplay between teacher–student relationships or social bonds, emotions, and learning; and addressing the strong emotions associated with practicum for preservice teachers, school-based teacher educators, and university-based teacher educators. A diverse range of theories are available for investigating emotion in preservice teacher education. This range presents different ways of conceptualizing what emotions are considered to be, stemming from disciplines including sociology, philosophy, psychology, critical studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and neuroscience. In addition to canvassing theories and traditions, dominant approaches to the study of preservice teacher emotions are addressed including early investigations, which relied on single self-report research methods to the more complex and dynamic multimethod and multitheoretical studies that have emerged in recent years. Suggestions are made for fruitful future lines of inquiry of preservice teachers’ emotional experiences and needs. Teacher attrition and burnout, particularly in the early years, continue to be vexing international problems. Research into preservice teacher emotions and emotion management are two important areas of inquiry that could address the related problems of burnout and attrition. Emotion management is also linked to social bonds, and better understandings of these connections are needed in the context of preservice teachers’ experiences and learning during practicums and within university courses. A focus on enacted classroom and staffroom interactions offers great scope for novel research contributions. Better understandings of structural conditions affecting emotions and preservice teachers’ learning are needed that include the bridging of macrosocial structural factors influencing work conditions with microsocial interactions in classrooms, staffrooms, and during parent-teacher interactions. New research adopting contemporary theories of emotion and methods is needed to explore preservice teacher identities. Combining this focus with the aforementioned lines of investigation into burnout, attrition, social bonds, and connections between macrostructural and microinteractional aspects of teaching and learning presents a third line of novel research. Guiding questions to prompt these and other lines of investigation are offered.
Article
Epistemology and Learning in STEM Education
Andrew Elby
STEM students’ personal epistemologies—their views about what counts as knowledge and knowing in mathematics, science, and engineering—influence how they approach learning and problem-solving. For example, if algebra students conceptualize “knowing algebra” as knowing how to manipulate symbols and numbers to solve particular kinds of problems, they are likely to approach learning as mastering procedures, not as making sense of why those procedures work. By contrast, consider a student who conceptualizes “knowing physics” as having a qualitative understanding that makes sense to her. When studying, she might practice and reflect on the relevant problem-solving approaches, not just to master procedures but also to understand how those problem-solving approaches make sense in terms of underlying concepts.
Although mathematics, engineering, and science differ, certain dimensions or aspects of students’ epistemologies are common across the STEM disciplines. These dimensions include to what extent students: (a) view knowledge as factual and procedural versus conceptual and heuristic, (b) view learning as acquiring separate pieces of knowledge versus linking those pieces into a coherent whole, and (c) think they can make sense of what they are learning by relating it to their own informal knowledge, experiences, and ways of thinking. Crucially, the epistemological views a student exhibits in a course are not necessarily a hardened personality trait or belief. A student might exhibit different epistemological views in different contexts, based in part on how the class is taught. Indeed, common STEM classroom cultures and structures can inadvertently invite students to adopt epistemological views that support superficial learning. Furthermore, broader cultural narratives, most notably the trope that mathematics and mathematical sciences can be understood only by people with innate talent, influence students’ epistemological views, again favoring those associated with superficial learning.
Additional epistemological issues arise in integrated STEM units and lessons. In such lessons, mathematics, science, and engineering are “de-siloed,” often in the context of understanding and/or addressing a local or societal problem. However, unless STEM lessons are carefully crafted, students can experience the “problem” as little more than a motivational hook to engage them in mathematics and science business as usual. In that case, students might adopt the same epistemological views as they do in a siloed mathematics or science course. By contrast, when students frame the STEM lesson as an authentic engineering design challenge or attempt to understand an issue in which they learn and/or apply mathematics and science as needed to understand and/or address the challenge, students are more likely to view their learning as sense-making, drawing on multiple streams of both formal and informal knowledge.
Article
Evidence-Based Practices for Teaching Learners with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders
Jessica Whitley
Students identified with emotional and behavioral disorders (E/BD) comprise a diverse group in terms of academic, social, emotional, and behavioral strengths and needs. Identification and diagnostic criteria and terminologies vary widely across and within many countries and school systems, resulting in a complex research base. Estimates of prevalence range from 4 to 15% of students meeting criteria for an emotional and/or behavioral disorder or difficulty. Approaches to teaching learners with E/BD have shifted since the turn of the 21st century from an individual, deficit-focused perspective to a more ecological framework where the environments interacting dynamically with the learner are considered. Research increasingly demonstrates the benefits of multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) where the needs of most students can be met through universal preventative and whole-class approaches. Students who do not find success at the first level of supports receive increasingly specialized services including intensive, wraparound services that involve partners beyond school walls. MTSS are common across North America and beyond and are typically focused on externalizing behaviors; positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) is the most prevalent multi-tiered system currently being implemented. Since the mid-2000s, efforts have been made to focus on academic as well as behavioral goals for students, often through the inclusion of response-to-intervention approaches. Comprehensive strategies that combine academic and behavioral support while drawing on learner strengths and relationship-building are successfully being adopted in elementary and secondary settings. Approaches include social and emotional learning, mindfulness, peer-assisted learning, and a range of classroom-based instructional and assessment practices that support the academic, social, and emotional development of students with E/BD.
Article
Evidence-Based Practices in Special Schooling
David Mitchell
Increasingly, around the world, educators are being expected to draw upon research-based evidence in planning, implementing, and evaluating their activities. Evidence-based strategies comprise clearly specified teaching methods and school-level factors that have been shown in controlled research to be effective in bringing about desired outcomes in a specified population of learners and under what conditions, in this case those with special educational needs/disabilities taught in special schooling, whether it be in separate schools or classrooms or in inclusive classrooms. Educators could, and should, be drawing upon the best available evidence as they plan, implement, and evaluate their teaching of such learners.
Since around 2010 there has been a growing commitment to evidence-based education. This has been reflected in:
1. legislation: for example, the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act in the United States, which encourages the use of specific programs and practices that have been rigorously evaluated and defines strong, moderate, and promising levels of evidence for programs and practices;
2. the creation of centers specializing in gathering and disseminating evidence-based education policies and practices, brokering connections between policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers; and
3. a growing body of research into effective strategies, both in general and with respect to learners with special educational needs.
Even so, in most countries there is a significant gap between what researchers have found and the educational policies and practices implemented by professionals. Moreover, some scholars criticize the emphasis on evidence-based education, particularly what they perceive to be the prominence given to quantitative or positivist research in general and to randomized controlled trials in particular.
In putting evidence-based strategies into action, a five-step model could be employed. This involves identifying local needs, selecting relevant interventions, planning for implementation, implementing, and examining and reflecting on the interventions.
Article
Factors to Consider while Teaching Early Numeracy Skills in an Inclusive Education Setting
Sheri-Lynn Skwarchuk
Developing numeracy skills from the beginning of one’s school career predicts academic achievement and correlates with life satisfaction in adulthood. For these reasons, all students should be afforded a strong early numeracy foundation. In school, teaching practices supporting diverse learners in mathematics should consider individual developmental capabilities and a growth mindset. Students should also be supported by a pedagogically knowledgeable and strengths-based collaborative team and accurate and ongoing assessment practices. With such supports, students may be afforded maximum opportunities to develop solid early numeracy skills, continue their development of conceptual and calculational knowledge in school mathematics coursework, and minimize anxieties regarding mathematics learning.
Article
Learning in History
Liliana Maggioni and Emily Fox
At first glance, learning in history might be characterized as committing to memory sanctioned stories about the past. Yet a deeper consideration of this process opens up several questions about the specific features that make the generation of shared knowledge about the past possible and meaningful. Some of these questions regard the very object of such learning: What makes specific aspects of the past historically significant? What relations among people, events, and phenomena are especially salient in fostering understanding of the past? Another set of questions regards the affective and cognitive traits and abilities that characterize a successful learner in history. Researchers from different countries have worked at the intersection between history, history education, and educational psychology, and have investigated how experts and novices address historical questions on the basis of sources provided to them, identifying certain differences in their strategy use, their ability to contextualize information gleaned from the sources, their use of prior knowledge, and their ideas about the nature of historical knowledge and historical evidence. Researchers have also studied the influence that learners’ epistemic beliefs, school curricula, pedagogical practices, testing, and classroom discourse may have on student learning in history. By their variety, these studies have illustrated the complex nature of learning in history and evidenced several tensions among educational goals and between these goals and educational practices in the 21st century.
Article
Managing Behavior or Promoting Engagement?
Jeff Thomas
Classroom behavior management has consistently been recognized as a central issue of importance in staff well-being, student success, and school culture. For decades, theories and models on how best to “manage” the behavior of students for a productive classroom have showed an increasing trend away from teacher-controlled reactive approaches to misbehavior toward more student-centered strategies to prevent misbehavior. Focusing on managing student behavior, either reactively or proactively, is coming at the problem from the wrong direction. The student behaviors that most affect teaching and learning in our classrooms are low-level disruptive, or “disengaged,” behaviors. These disengaged behaviors are best understood as indications of a student’s weakened affective or cognitive engagement with school. Schools wishing to have less disengaged behaviors need to refocus their lens on these behaviors, from how to “manage” them to how to strengthen targeted areas of engagement. This has direct implications for reforming classroom practices as well as school polices on behavior management.
Article
Peer Tutoring and Cooperative Learning
Keith J. Topping
Both peer tutoring and cooperative learning are types of peer assisted learning; they involve people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers helping each other to learn and learning themselves by teaching. Peer tutoring usually involves pairs of students, one in the role of tutor and the other as tutee, with the more able or experienced member helping the other to learn material which is new to the tutor but not to the tutee. By contrast, cooperative learning is usually done in small groups of perhaps four students, often of mixed ability. The group works toward a consensus on a problem. Because it is easier to dominate or hide in a group, roles are often assigned to each group member.
Earlier perspectives tended to use the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky, perhaps with some consideration of Bandura and Dewey. Chi, King, and Graesser have been prominent in more recent work. However, a theoretical perspective is offered that integrates these elements with more practical issues.
In general, both peer tutoring and cooperative learning “work”— in a wide range of curricular subjects and with a wide range of ages. Given the appropriate form of organization, cognitive gains ensue for both helpers and those who are helped. This is not the main research issue, which is exploring how and why these practices work, in order to improve effectiveness. There are several meta-analyses (a statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies) which are relevant, and beyond this, key individual papers of specific importance are highlighted.
Over the years, we have become wiser about some of the key issues. In peer tutoring, same-ability tutoring has appeared in recent years, sometimes reciprocal, and we need to know under what conditions it works. Cooperative learning has issues regarding the most effective roles for group members and how these integrate with student ability and personality. There has also been much recent work in online peer tutoring which raises different issues. The existing literature is well-developed since these are not new methods. Future research should include more tightly defined studies focusing on more minor variables of context and organization.
Many teachers will say they use both peer tutoring and cooperative learning, but very often they overestimate how often anything like good practice takes place. Simply putting students together and hoping for the best will not do, although it might have mild effects. Teachers using these methods need to be clear about what organizational parameters are vital in their context with their type of peer assisted learning. These features then need to be maximized in practice and an eye must be kept on implementation fidelity throughout. Education administrators need to organize professional development for teachers which is thorough, including initial instruction and practice followed up by support and monitoring in the classroom.
Article
Problem-Based Learning
Sofie M. M. Loyens, Lisette Wijnia, Ivette Van der Sluijs - Duker, and Remy M. J. P. Rikers
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional method, with roots in constructivist theory of learning. Since its origin at McMaster University in Canada, PBL has been implemented in numerous programs across many domains and many educational levels worldwide. In PBL, small groups of 10–12 students learn in the context of meaningful problems that describe observable phenomena or events. The PBL process consists of three phases. The first is the initial discussion phase in which the problem at hand is discussed, based on prior knowledge. This initial phase leads to the formulation of learning issues (i.e., questions) that students will answer during the next phase, the self-study phase. Here, they independently select and study a variety of literature resources. During the third and final phase, the reporting phase, students share their findings with each other and critically evaluate the answers to the learning issues. A tutor guides the first and third phase of the process. PBL is based on principles from cognitive and educational psychology that have demonstrated their capacity to foster learning. More specifically, four principles are incorporated in the PBL process: (a) connection to prior knowledge, (b) collaborative learning among students, but also among teachers, (c) gradual development of autonomy, and (d) a focus on the application and transfer of knowledge. Research on the effects of PBL in terms of knowledge acquisition shows that students in traditional, direct instruction curricula tend to perform better on assessments of basic science knowledge. However, differences between PBL students and students in direct instruction classrooms on knowledge tests tend to diminish over time. There is, however, a lack of controlled experiments in this line of PBL research. Directions for future research should focus on combining the best of both direct and student-centered instruction, explore the possibilities of hybrid forms, and investigate how the alignment of scale and didactics of an instructional method could be optimized.
Article
Science Fiction as a Basis for Global Curriculum Visions
Noel Gough
Most Anglophone curriculum scholars who participated in the reconceptualization of their field during and since the late 1960s are likely to acknowledge the generativity of Joseph Schwab’s landmark essay, “The practical: a language for curriculum,” in which he argues that effective curriculum decision-making requires the anticipatory generation of alternatives, reasoning that such decision-making neccesitates that there be available to practical deliberation the greatest possible number and fresh diversity of alternative solutions to problems. For this reason, the literature and media known generically as SF (an initialization that encompasses not only science fiction but also many other “sf” terms) are generative resources for the anticipatory generation of global curriculum visions. From its 19th-century archetypes in the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, to its 20th- and 21st-century manifestations in multimedia franchises focused on space travel and exploration (Star Trek, Star Wars), genetic modification and mutation (X-Men, Spider Man) and artificial intelligence (AI, Ghost in the Shell), SF consistently demonstrates that imagined and material worlds are always already so entwined that they cannot be understood in isolation. In their exemplifications of the arts of anticipation, SF texts across a wide variety of media exercise the speculative imagination and exemplify conceptual tools for understanding and negotiating the global milieux of contemporary curriculum theorizing and decision-making.
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