The lobby of the college building echoes with the noise of teenagers milling around a table filled with books. Hands flutter over the bright covers, picking them up, flipping them over, thumbing through pages. Welcome to an Elon Academy Saturday at break time, the mid-point pause in this monthly gathering of the more than 70 student participants…

Six young deafblind adults took a 1-week course on civic engagement and advocacy, which provided the focus for a participatory action research study with a collective case study design. They selected advocacy topics, were briefed on these policy issues, and were paired with experienced mentors for meetings with legislators in Washington, DC. Eight…

The five stage cycle model is an interactive flash platform that proposes a challenging scenario with associated questions about light wave features and correlations. As the students navigate from stage to stage, they are able to access some related resources and engage in small group discussions. The students are able to revisit their responses…

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated long-standing educational inequities associated with technology access, learner agency, and participation in online learning. How were preservice and inservice educators supported in their pursuit of interest-driven professional learning that critically examined the unfolding impact of these inequities? This…

The typical conference panel for the presentation of new work includes one or two people who have been designated as commentators or respondents and charged with reading the papers in advance and offering a critique. Normally what follows is a brief period for questions or comments from the audience. In this article, the author discusses…

This article reports on the use of narrative therapy ideas and practices in working with families that are homeless in a shelter-based, multiple-family discussion group program called Fresh Start for Families. It begins with a review of the challenges facing homeless families. It then briefly describes the collaborative methods used to develop the…

This personal reflection describes events at the Appalachian State University that celebrated the Darwin Bicentennial throughout the 2008-2009 academic year. Prominent speakers and writers joined with a film series, theatre productions, and art exhibits to focus on Darwin and his scientific discoveries. The Darwin Bicentennial provided the members…

The Able Privilege Scale (APS) is a theoretically derived reflexive instrument that asks participants to assess their level of personal power and privilege in relation to society depending upon the presence, and/or type, of disability. The 23-items on the APS are derived form McIntosh's concept of white privilege (1988) and adapted to reflect…

Like teachers in many countries with a national curriculum and standardized testing, South Korean teachers find it challenging to include in their curriculums knowledge students will need in the future that doesn't fall within the purview of tested areas. The arts education, character education, environmental education, geography, and education…

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explain a cooperative learning technique, Academic Controversy (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1996), also known as Cooperative Controversy, Structured Controversy and Structured Academic Controversy, that has potential for use in intercultural education and has support in both research and theory.…

Educators know that to engage learners in the enterprise of critical thinking, learner's need to care enough to pay attention, and feel safe enough to take intellectual risks. When interacting asynchronously in online forums, it can become even more challenging to create a space that encourages reflective, integrative, and higher order thinking.…

A vastly influential form of film-making seen by millions of people, educational films provide a catalog of twentieth century preoccupations and values. As a medium of instruction and guidance, they held a powerful cultural position, producing knowledge both inside and outside the classroom. This is the first collection of essays to address this…

Student-run literature circles within the classroom setting have been well documented in recent years. This past year the author was given the opportunity to have her fifth grade library class for an additional library period each week to devote to literature circles. For their program, the goal was to expand the student's pleasure in reading and…

The Great Eight competencies are work behaviors that promote employee effectiveness in 21st-century organizations. These competencies include enterprising and performing, adapting and coping, organizing and executing, creating and conceptualizing, analyzing and interpreting, interacting and presenting, supporting and cooperating, and leading and…

In this article, we address the ways children collaborate to inquire about text in the context of group discussions, addressing the question: How do students stay on-topic and sustain their discussions of text? We speculate that a framework for dialogic discourse, referred to as exploratory talk, allows students to understand that discussions of…