Like many school systems in economically stressed parts of the country, the Everett, Mass., school district had cut back on arts instruction over the years, to the point where most students were getting only a single art class per week. But since 2013, and thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Everett has designed and…

Despite a 100-year-old history and the existence of schools in nearly every country in the world, Waldorf education is a little known and poorly understood educational model that was developed in Europe by Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner. For many years it existed in the United States in the form of private schools. Few of their teachers or…

This article proposes ways to authentically amplify writer's workshop for emergent bilinguals. Through the study of one bilingual teacher's mediation in teaching, we examined the affordances that translanguaging and transmodal practices have for emergent bilingual students' writing processes. In this case study, we focused on a writing sequence…

This article argues that scholarship on literacy in and across the disciplines has disproportionately focused on the core subjects of English, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies rather than on "specialist" subjects such as Physical Education. This disparity in emphasis has provided little guidance to specialist teachers seeking to…

The current discussion among adolescent literacy researchers describes two positions at either end of a continuum: a generalist content area reading approach and a disciplinary literacy approach. Within the field, there are misunderstandings about the disciplinary literacy approach and claims that adolescents are ill suited to the kinds of…

That the arts enhance academic achievement has been a claim of educators for the past century. This experimental study examined whether and to what extent the use of creative dramatics interventions increased the vocabulary achievement of fourth grade students in a language arts classroom. The 20-day study was conducted across five weeks of…

Digital technology offers new possibilities for children to play, express themselves, learn, and communicate. A recent development in online practice is a shift toward youth engaged in computer programming online communities. Programming is argued to be the new literacy of the millennium. In this article, I examine the use of Scratch, an online…

In this article, I highlight findings from a nine-day unit embedded within a larger, four-month long qualitative action research study set in a public middle school. My goal in conducting this research was examination of relationships between visual culture and art integration as a method of fostering students to find voice while taking risks. A…

This manuscript explores the power of using inquiry in a second-grade classroom to make students' understanding of citizenship more complex. It describes an inquiry unit in which students studied primary sources, engaged with fiction and nonfiction children's literature, and participated in interdisciplinary learning to further understand the…

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 mandates that English language proficiency (ELP) standards align with content standards. As the fast-growing population of English learners (ELs) is expected to meet college- and career-ready content standards, the purpose of this article is to highlight key issues in aligning ELP standards with content…

As many K-6 students enrolled in dual language and bilingual programs enter middle and subsequently high schools that implement similar programs, content area teachers in Spanish face a twofold challenge: to remain aligned with the classroom discourse utilized in Spanish Language Arts (SLAs) and to implement effective strategies while teaching…

Web-based digital video (DV) applications such as Animoto, Magistro, and Videolicious allow users without technical experience to easily create quality video by matching up appropriate images with text and sound. DV's multimedia capabilities encourage students to become more proficient in new literacies as well as new technologies. This piece…

When Tom Kelner, a 7th grade social studies teacher, realized that under the Common Core standards he'd be responsible for strengthening students' reading, writing, and research skills in his social studies classes, first he panicked. Then he approached Dana Haring, an English language arts teacher on his 7th grade team, and asked if they could…

An integrated science curriculum assists pupils to retain learnings better than to separate academic disciplines. Too frequently, science teachers teach each academic discipline as separate entities. However, there is much correlating of science with language, for example which might well be implemented in teaching and learning situations. Thus,…

In this article, we analyse how and if participation affects the learning experiences of pupils. Our research questions are: (1) What constituted positive learning experiences for pupils in a multidisciplinary learning module? (2) How do the methods used in this study give pupils an opportunity to express negative emotions and participate in…