Teaching is an interactive process as teachers respond to diverse interests and needs of learners, alongside the changing demands of education systems. Giving teachers the opportunity to develop competence in creative teaching may enable them to prepare and improvise teaching to maximise learning. A package to foster creative teaching through…

Good musical education has been shown to have benefits across the curriculum but its delivery in schools is still extremely variable. Part of the problem is that many primary teachers lack skills and/or confidence to offer engaging music programs. In an attempt to find possible solutions to this problem we ran a pilot program of a short series of…

This article addresses migrant children's entries into new education systems from the vantage point of musical participation. Through an ethnographic study of one Norwegian primary school, it investigates what scope for musical participation is available to newly arrived migrant children in a dedicated introductory class, and how their engagement…

The nature of education has changed significantly in Poland recent years based on the rapidly changing reality of political, social and professional life and greater emphasis has been placed on a communicative model of teaching which has required the development of new sets of skills or competences by teachers. In this study research on the…

The author argues that general education teacher candidates must learn to "­re-start" art to empower them with the skills needed to realize art's promise within their future classrooms. Entry/exit surveys completed by candidates ­revealed that an art methods course corrected misconceptions about the nature of creativity and improved…

This paper addresses an important task teachers face in class: the identification and support of creative and high-achieving students. In particular, we examine whether primary teachers (1) have acquired professional knowledge during teacher education that is necessary to foster creativity and to teach high-achieving students, and whether they (2)…

This article explores whether or not there is a more effective way to develop and present portfolios to make them more meaningful and usable in the hiring process. An example of a pilot ePortfolio, with an accompanying three to four-minute introductory reflective video highlighting the pre-service teachers' beliefs about education, was shown to 15…

Despite it being the second decade of the 21st century, there still exists a range of definitions of what a 21st century learning environment is. This can be troublesome for teacher educators as we strive to prepare teachers for environments we can't clearly describe. In order to describe a 21st century learning environment, we developed an IC Map…

This report captures the variety of music education research between 2012-2014 and covers a range of topics and events such as the International Society for Music Education (ISME) 2012, Australian Society for Music Education (ASME) 2013 and Australian and New Zealand Association for Research in Music Education (ANZARME) 2014.

Many schools are now moving towards a more creative curriculum and a topic approach in their teaching. Setting science in a real, meaningful context can capture children's imagination, while offering opportunities for teaching skills in maths, ICT, literacy, technology or art. In science, the teacher may know the expected outcome, but the children…

Teachers play a crucial role in the development of primary school students' creative potential in either a positive or a negative way. This paper aims to draw attention to in-service and prospective teachers' conceptions of creativity and answer three main research questions: "What are the teachers' conceptions and implicit theories of…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2015, taking place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from 2 to 4 of May. Psychology, nowadays, offers a large range of scientific fields where it can be applied. The goal of understanding individuals and groups (mental functions and behavioral…

Community engagement has been used for many years to enhance and strengthen teacher education courses, preparing student teachers with real life learning experiences as they work with community groups in mutually beneficial projects. This research examines a community engagement project that involved 13 undergraduate creative arts students who…

This study examines six teachers' responses inside and outside of their classrooms to increasingly mixed messages about how they should develop the literacy of California's youngest and most at-risk students. While they must develop highly developed knowledge and skills to teach literacy in linguistically diverse classrooms, they must also adhere…