Mother-child play of maltreating and nonmaltreating families was analyzed when infants were 12 months old (Time 1), and 2 years old (Time 2), as a context to examine children's developing cognitive and social skills. At Time 1, infants from abusing families demonstrated less independent and more imitative behavior during play than did infants from…

Play is widely acknowledged to be an integral part of human development and children with autism often experience substantial delays in the development of play behaviors. This review updates older reviews by covering the last 10 years of research targeting functional and symbolic play in children with autism. The review differs from other reviews…

There has been little recent discussion about Skinner's utopian vision as presented in Walden Two. Organizational Behavior Management could revitalize interest in this topic through its discussion of Behavioral Systems Analysis. A brief review of utopian thought and Walden Two is provided. Four recommendations are offered to improve the viability…

In this article, the author uses Gary Saul Morson's concept of sideshadows to attend to the multiplicity of narratives that occur in a third-grade classroom. The author advocates for experiential learning in order to make more visible to teachers children's internal thinking within language arts, especially English-language learners. Additionally,…

Socio-dramatic play (SDP) creates a zone of proximal development in which optimum cognitive development occurs. To participate successfully in this kind of play children and their partners must create shared meaning, or what is referred to in the socio-cultural literature as intersubjectivity. Based on intersubjectivity and SDP, this study…

Children seem to naturally gravitate to particular interests, be it sports, the arts, or any of a myriad of other pursuits. Their area of interest seems an integral part of who they are so that they seem to have been "born that way." Even when a child is challenged--physically, cognitively, behaviorally, emotionally--their essence still seems to…

This paper explores ways in which student-teachers in the Lifelong Learning sector are able to draw on fictionalised accounts of their own teaching practice experiences in order to gain a clearer understanding of their models and expectations of professionalism, and of how they, as individuals, locate their current position within the profession…

In this literature review, we examined 30 years of play-literacy inquiry through a quantitative lens in order to identify, assemble and summarize studies of sufficient methodological strength to form a corpus of research that encourages meta-analytic thinking. First, a multi-phase search of the literature was conducting yielding 192 studies that…

Works of art, whether modern or classical, can provide students with vehicles for communication. Whether a painting ignites a student's imagination while listening to a story or transports him into a cultural or historical situation portrayed by the artist, using art in educators' thematic units can double their chances of having students…

Teaching Spanish at the K-5 level is a passion of mine, and the author would like to share some of the practical applications that she finds most rewarding and effective. She has found enthusiastic response to the creation of detailed language learning kits that are rooted in storytelling, but expanded to include home-made board games,…

The following article describes the Asperger syndrome (AS), an autism spectrum disorder, including an explanation of the main difficulties involved, especially with regard to social interaction, communication and imagination. In addition, specific examples help provide a more concrete understanding of the topic. Based on the principal explanatory…

When children write plays, their wishes, fears, and secrets face an audience. An audience is not a do-gooder making nice. It is not an authority figure with a grudge against one's race or class. When it laughs at the jokes or applauds, it can be trusted. It is saying this play--and by extension its author--fits into the world on its own terms. In…

When students take a stance on authentic social issues in their English classrooms, they have the opportunity to imagine their world as otherwise. Along with attention to other intellectual skills and civic skills, educators should prioritize the development of imagination, as it is "crucial" if students are to "project and embrace a vision for…

In this paper, we maintain that sociologists should deliberately teach social responsibility as a means of fulfilling the promise that C. Wright Mills envisioned. A key aspect of the sociological imagination includes a sense of social responsibility, but that aspect is best learned through a combination of experience and academic knowledge.…

Most people think of the arts in education as a way of teaching arts skills, and in times when the emphasis is on achieving literacy and numeracy (necessary, but not sufficient, educational goals) the arts can often be seen as "fringe." This article makes the case that study of artworks in the service of developing perceptive and…