The purpose of this Action Research Study was to examine the lived experiences of interim administrators at a private university in New York and determine how they made sense of unexpected appointments resulting from crisis scenarios including those caused by leadership departures and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Key to the investigation…

This chapter explores ways that incarcerated men and women in New York State prisons made use of both formal and informal educational initiatives to transform themselves and build a cadre of leaders who have played a key role in the movement for criminal justice reform--in the process raising questions about the role adult educators can play in…

This article examines how the MAT [Master of Arts in Teaching] program in Earth Science at the American Museum of Natural History was conceptualized and enacted within its institutional context. We argue that the program was completely consistent with the museum's public and democratic institutional logic, as reflected in funding, staffing,…

Even in this "Age of Data," independent progressive schools have shown a remarkable persistence in offering an alternative educational model. As Traditional Public Schools (TPS) become even more committed to a testing model of achievement, there are schools that continue to operate on identified progressive educational principles. This…

To address the lack of research in early science learning and young children's informal science experiences, this exploratory case study investigated a 7-year-old girl's (Abigail) emergent science competencies and how they are related to her science experiences in everyday family contexts. Data sources included observations, interviews, parent…

This study provides a comparative analysis of the pre-service education system for preschool educators in China and the United States. Based on collected data and materials (literature, policy documents, and statistical data), we compare two areas of pre-service training: (1) the formal system; (2) the informal system. In the formal system, most…

Paulo Freire's notion that education is politics is well known to readers involved in areas of critical education, and thus a detailed rehearsal of the burgeoning literature illustrating and elaborating on this view is not necessary. After all, this view has a very long, albeit repressed, history, which anticipates Freire and those who took up the…

The Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC) and The Presidents' Forum have released a new study authored and researched by the Online Learning Consortium's Dr. Jill Buban, which sheds light on how adult learning institutions address students who possess alternative credentials and seek to apply these experiences to a degree. This…

Through the lens of hospitality, we explored the meanings that members constructed about their experiences within a blended formal/informal college music ensemble. The focus in this ensemble was not on competition and musical excellence but on independent musicianship and praxis. The bandleader had his roots in tradition but his heart in socially…

Despite there being a significant amount of research investigating workplace learning, research exploring firefighter workplace learning is almost nonexistent. The purpose of this qualitative multi-case study was to explore how firefighters conceptualize, report, and practice workplace learning. The researcher also investigated how firefighters…

In this paper I examine the music learning and teaching in the Banjo Hangout online music community (www.banjohangout.org/) using cyber ethnographic methods of interview and participant observation conducted entirely through computer-mediated communication, which includes Skype and written narrative texts--forum posts, email, chat room…

This article examines how arts-based informal learning spaces engage young people at the intersection of creativity and technology. We conducted case studies of four youth media arts organizations to understand how teaching is defined and realized in these contexts. We find that teaching is a distributed act that sits at the intersection of…

This issue of "Bank Street Occasional Papers" explores the value of time outside of school. Educators have given relatively little scholarly attention to young people's nonschool lives. Ignored or valorized, nonschool spaces show up in educational research only as a backdrop, implying that school learning is the yardstick by which to…

The focus of this quantitative study with a correlational design was to determine the relationship between professional development and the use of drama in education techniques in the general education classroom as a tool to increase students' critical thinking ability. Teachers from four different schools on Long Island were asked to participate…

In this paper we provide the first rigorous evidence of the impact of a partnership between public middle schools and informal science institutions (ISIs), such as museums and zoos, on student outcomes. This study focuses on Urban Advantage (UA), a program in New York City (NYC) that explicitly draws upon the expertise and resources of the city's…