Attending college, for many immigrant families, is a critical step in achieving the American Dream. This essay, written as a reflection and response between professor and student, explores the conflicting messages young community college students negotiate and process as they move through the City, revealing how knowledge learned in the college…

Although engineering educational endeavours are often described with regard to how well they prepare students to meet national or global engineering concerns, the purpose of this paper is to show how those efforts can also serve the larger educational goals of the educators themselves as they develop learning experiences for their students. This…

Teacher-researcher narrative accounts are essential and insightful for the science education field, yet they are few and far-between. In this forum, I engage in dialogue with Nicole Grimes's auto-ethnographic narrative on the affordances her femme-Caribbean identity allowed for some students to engage more deeply in science. While I agree with and…

As educators, we write about how we teach and how our students learn, but often there are some things missing from these accounts. These "somethings" are the animations and agitations that attend most deep learning. These are not easy to describe, particularly because they are often only visible in passing moments. I argue that story-telling is…

In this article, the author gives an autobiographical account of his learning experiences and the lessons he learned from his lecturers. The author learned what he subsequently found is supported by experience and research, that the informal is as necessary as the formal. He also learned that teachers and students need to interact spontaneously,…

Every year American faculty members bring students to Africa to participate in study-abroad programs. Last December Joseph Akol Makeer, a Sudanese student at the author's institution, North Dakota State University, turned the tables and brought the author to his home village in Sudan, Duk Payuel, to see how they might help rebuild that war-torn…

In this article the author tells the story of her experiences with a high school U.S. literature class composed of English language learners (ELLs). The students were from a variety of nations and cultures, spoke several different languages, and had a wide range of English proficiency levels. During their time together, the author and students…

The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers' professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in…

The importance of the "learner voice" is again a concern throughout the learning and skills sector, and turning the rhetoric into some kind of meaningful reality has become a renewed challenge. The concern to be responsive to "learner and learning experience" can be seen across developments in information, advice and guidance…

Reflects on the lessons of one life, a life lived to the fullest, to illustrate a philosophy of life experiences and learning. Discusses the importance of the quality of interpersonal relationships to student success, focusing on the theme of respecting children and taking them seriously. (SV)

Anecdotes describe how outdoor education provides active-learning experiences by involving students in direct interaction with each other and the real world. Outdoor education reveals the inherent natural connections between different branches of knowledge by accessing and honoring multiple modalities of thinking and expressing, and encouraging…

Eleanor Duckworth, professor of education and former student and colleague of Jean Piaget, discusses her theories of teaching and learning and some of her own learning experiences as a teacher. Author of "The Having of Wonderful Ideas," she grounds her work in Piaget's theories of intelligence, trying to engage learners with their own ideas. (CDS)

Specific studies are used to discuss three approaches to examining language teacher training programs. Points considered are teacher training programs do not provide enough training in affective areas; they do not have an adequate definition of teacher training; and they can do little to change basic perceptions about teaching and learning. (11…

Describes the trials and tribulations of a teacher of remedial English as she attempts to find a learning strategy that will reach her class of problem students. (RBW)

After 18 years of using a traditional approach to teaching, a middle-school teacher turned her classroom into a shared learning experience by giving students the responsibility to make choices about their education. To reassure parents who were skeptical of the Foxfire approach, she continued to interject traditional learning activities. (LP)