This paper reported an exploratory study that examined secondary school students' understanding of collaborative discourse in a computer-supported knowledge building environment in characterizing and scaffolding their engagement in productive online discourse. The participants were thirty-eight secondary school students in a visual arts course. A…

The barriers to school attendance that affect young Aboriginal people in Australia are diverse, immense and well documented; however, except for a handful of studies, Aboriginal students' voices receive no platform for policy makers to hear them. In this paper, we present results from yarning circles about barriers to school attendance conducted…

An open classroom climate, one where diverse opinions and discussion of social and political issues are welcome, promotes civic development among youth and fosters critical consciousness. Critical consciousness, defined as the capacity to recognize societal inequity along with the motivation and action taken to challenge such inequity and promote…

This article explores the ways some adolescent African American girls engage with urban fiction, a genre often maligned as "trash" literature. This project sought to understand the appeal of the genre as well as adolescent African American girls' perceptions about the texts. Based on findings, which suggest that participants are engaging…

This paper reports on the design and enactment of an instructional strategy aimed to support students in constructing scientific explanations. Informed by the philosophy of science and linguistic studies of science, a new instructional framework called premise--reasoning--outcome (PRO) was conceptualized, developed, and tested over two years in…

Two groups of students, one on the Atlantic coast and one on the Pacific coast think about and discuss their own experiences with and perceptions of public education. They were asked to consider the following questions: In your experiences as a student in an education system: What are the things that help students learn? What are the things that…