The persistent fear of physics by learners motivated the author to take action to increase all students' interest in the subject via a new curriculum for introductory college physics that applies Greene's model of Aesthetic Education to the study of contemporary physics, utilizing symmetry as the mathematical foundation of physics as well as the…

This article documents what happened when a teacher in an urban school shifted classroom practice through changing participation structures to incorporate digital technology and multiple modalities into a fifth grade literacy curriculum. This shift in teacher practice provided opportunities for immigrant students to become more visible in the…

Multimodal learning clubs link principles of motivation and engagement with 21st century technological tools and texts to support content area learning. The author describes how a sixth grade health teacher and his class incorporated multimodal learning clubs into a unit of study on human body systems. The students worked collaboratively online…

Contemporary curriculum guidelines, such as those provided in the incoming Australian curriculum, call for English to attend to multimodal forms of text and literacy as well as more traditional forms. Students are expected to become capable and critical readers, users and creators of texts and forms of literacy that span everything from newspapers…

Group work is fundamental to working with youth learning about independent living and in making the tough and challenging transition to independence. The authors, seasoned and experienced group workers and researchers with youth leaving the child welfare system, will present a conceptual framework and set of practices for helping youth gain those…

Using an article about labor leader Cesar Chavez's grape boycott and hunger strike, students at Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Washington, D.C., are doing a "close read," a skill prized by the new Common Core State Standards being put into practice in the District of Columbia. As an English/language arts teacher in the common-core era,…

This article examines how it is possible to use the aesthetic process to enrich teaching practices in preschool and elementary school education. What is under scrutiny is the aesthetic dimension of a core curricular subject, the ultimate goal being to achieve an understanding of curricular content through aesthetic learning processes. For this…

The principles of Hungarian music educator Zoltan Kodaly can be particularly useful not only in teaching children how to read music notation but also in creating curiosity and enjoyment for reading music. Many of Kodaly's ideas pertaining to music literacy have been echoed by educators such as Jerome Bruner and Edwin Gordon, as well as current…

The one theorem just about every student remembers from school is the theorem about the side lengths of a right angled triangle which Euclid attributed to Pythagoras when writing Proposition 47 of "The Elements". Usually first met in middle school, the student will be continually exposed throughout their mathematical education to the…

In light of emerging technologies prompting new avenues for teaching and learning, students are positioned to "create" to learn, with video production being an important process for literacy development. There is a growing need for innovative instructional practices in reading and writing that are aligned with student interests and the activities…

Designers, teachers and administrators intuitively know that different students learn differently, but they rarely intentionally create learning environments for specific learning modalities--especially within traditionally academic spaces. The REFP workshop presented in September of 2009 at the CEFPI Annual World Conference and Expo provided…

In this article, the author begins with a proposition asking what if visual thinking were privileged in the English classroom and then proceeds to elaborate on a curriculum grounded on three principles: (1) sense and perception as starting points; (2) meta-conceptual links between visual and verbal texts; and (3) the art of visualization in…

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is an approach to teaching and learning languages that uses computers and other technologies to present, reinforce, and assess material to be learned, or to create environments where teachers and learners can interact with one another and the outside world. This book provides a much-needed overview of the…

The majority of studies in second-language (L2) speech processing have involved unimodal (i.e., auditory) input; however, in many instances, speech communication involves both visual and auditory sources of information. Some researchers have argued that multimodal speech is the primary mode of speech perception (e.g., Rosenblum 2005). Research on…

This paper presents an overview of modalities that can be used to make learning statistics fun. Representative examples or points of departure in the literature are provided for no less than 20 modalities. Empirical evidence of effectiveness specific to statistics education is starting to emerge for some of these modalities--namely, humor, song,…