Past research suggests that a sense of belonging to a community is developmentally important for adolescents and affects their engagement in school, especially during the transition to high school. However, little research examines the teaching practices that simultaneously foster classroom belonging and behavioral engagement to create a classroom…

Based on findings from a recent qualitative study utilizing grounded theory methodology, in this essay, the authors focus on the building of community within the classroom by emphasizing classroom discourse as an essential component of instruction in exemplary teachers' classrooms. The authors then provide insights as to how to encourage and…

The purpose of this study was to explore, using the voices of diverse high school students, the classroom factors that are important for promoting classroom belonging and engagement. Thirty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with tenth grade students about classroom belonging and behavioral engagement in their favorite and least…

The opportunities school-community partnerships pose for students' learning continue to generate the attention of educational stakeholders. Children learn through a variety of social and educational contexts, and the goals for student academic success are best achieved through the cooperation and support of schools, families, and communities. The…

In this article, we report on a study in which we interviewed working class families who were the first cohort in a family literacy program that had been locally developed and implemented in a small village in Canada more than two decades previously in response to community-identified needs. The study was framed by Tulving's concept of episodic…

Service learning is a well researched pedagogical approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning. This essay describes two special education teacher preparation approaches that successfully linked candidate learning outcomes together with service to the community. One approach attached undergraduate teacher candidates in special education…

Today's children spend less and less time in the outdoors, leading Richard Louv in 2008 to coin the term "nature deficit disorder." Louv pointed out that experiences with nature are essential to a child's physical and emotional development and that the lack of these types of experiences has led to an increase in child obesity, attention…