The purpose of this self-study of teacher education practices was to examine and improve improvisation and composition teaching practices for three university professors at the same institution. Primary data sets were individual researcher journals and transcripts of seven researcher meetings. Secondary data sets were music major surveys,…

The aim of this research is to reveal the prospective social studies teachers' cognitive structures regarding creative drama through the Word Association Test (WAT). The study group of the research consists of 85 prospective social studies teachers, as the final year undergraduate students attending the course of drama at Faculty of Education in…

This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imaginative processes of discovering new representational…

Because most real-life foreign language speech is naturally unpredictable, spontaneous speech should be practiced in the foreign language classroom. Student teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) may benefit from practising methodology for spontaneous speech practice. This article reports the findings for a study into EFL student…

Improvisational theatre activities can be used as a tool for developing interactional competence in a language classroom. The unpredictable nature of improvisation resembles authentic communication, as it requires topic negotiation, spontaneous reactions and cooperation. The present article examines the student perspective on improvisation, which…

This classroom-based study investigated the antecedents of epistemic curiosity among 25 Thai university students in an English oral communication course. Using a whole-class survey and focus group interview, we recursively asked the students to describe a time in class when they experienced epistemic curiosity and the reasons behind it. A modified…

Strong mentoring relationships improve the success of students in academia and must be the foundation for increasing diversity in STEM. We developed an innovative skills-based training workshop to teach effective communication in mentoring and build awareness of diversity issues in STEM. The workshop was interactive and included open discussions,…

Scott Joplin was an African American composer and pianist of singular merit and influence. This article is the final entry in a three-part series considering the biographical, artistic, and cultural contexts of Joplin's life and work and their use in K-12 general music education. "Ragtime Spaces" focuses on cultural globalization and the…

This article explores the development of the Our Cinema project in Scotland: a revolving annual curriculum of film education for upper primary and lower secondary age children in state schools that, at the time of writing, is approaching a pilot phase. Discussion explores the project's origins in France's Cinéma Cent Ans de Jeunesse, and its…

Defining categories of musical actions in improvisation with young children is challenging due to the spontaneous, creative and emergent nature of interactions. Following a literature review, two new constructs were proposed to circumscribe and classify different types of events in improvisation, Creative Musical Agency (CMA) and Socio-Musical…

In teaching situations, teachers constantly have to make spontaneous and more or less planned choices based on input from pupils, adapted to the specific school setting and within society's social and cultural norms. Two phenomena underpinning such a view on teacher practices are teacher agency and teacher improvisation. The focus of this article…

The paper presents how digital storytelling was used as an empowerment tool among high school students diagnosed with school-related burnout (N = 13) in Hungary. The aim of applying digital storytelling was to change students' time perspective, which was measured with Stanford Time Perspective Inventory before and after the digital storytelling…

Purpose: Evaluation of public library makerspaces traditionally examines achievement of library goals, which reflect leaders' and funders' values. Understanding makers' experiences and perspectives may help evaluators frame their inquiry to reflect community values, test assumptions about makers and support democratic and equity-focused aims. This…

This paper covers teaching a graduate thermodynamics class as a seminar and using improvisational activities to foster community and discussion. The paper includes the experience of piloting improvisational activities online to help foster community for an entirely virtual version of the thermodynamics seminar class. Improvisational activities…

Effective class discussions are often frustrated by dual challenges: lack of participation and poor quality of contribution. To address both challenges, we describe an experiential exercise for managing classroom discussion that is based on an adaptation of a classic creativity model. It motivates student participation by generating structured…