In this article, the authors analyze the ways literacy integration evolved in a multi-year interdisciplinary after-school program that supports youth through a focus on literacy, physical activity, and health. To deviate from the increasingly siloed assumptions around literacy education and attend to a more interdisciplinary, integrated…

Situated in an elementary afterschool Engineering Literacies Club framed around multiliteracies and the engineering design process, this article explores engineering habits of mind and disciplinary literacies. Disciplinary literacies encourage students to read, write, think, and act like historians, mathematicians, scientists, or engineers by…

LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion) has been exploring different opportunities to engage children with practical science enquiry to develop children's understanding of the nature of science and how they suppose science connects to 'big questions'. After-school club opportunities and classroom opportunities are presented.

This paper focuses on a transdisciplinary research project in a historically underrepresented public school in Toronto, Canada. At the intersection of elementary science, technology, and arts-based curriculum, the project employs the feminist new materialist practice of "diffraction" (Barad, 2007) in an after-school robotics club.…

The current K-12 educational system often does not engage students in interdisciplinary learning. To address this need, we developed an integrated STEM + L (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Digital Literacies) afterschool programme in which middle school students took discipline-specific roles (writer, scientist, artist, and engineer)…

Out-of-school time (OST) programs can play an important role in fostering the development of literacy skills among children and youth. To investigate the variety of literacy skill-building strategies OST programs use, researchers from the National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST) examined the practices of 31 programs in Massachusetts. This…

Teachers have the daunting task of preparing students for a future that they cannot predict. In an age of information where students have the world quite literally at their fingertips, and with the ever-growing momentum of integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), it is not enough that students experience STEM subjects…

In general, vocational psychologists have not been engaged in applied research that demonstrates how career interventions can improve educational problems that matter to relevant decision-makers and stakeholders. This article describes how vocational psychology can make a difference in K-12 education by embracing an interdisciplinary…

This qualitative study, based on data from an ongoing after-school literacy and songwriting initiative, examines the multiliteracy practices of Noriah Rose and Koral, Black adolescent girls, and their socially situated meaning-making and sharing about loss. Specifically, we asked, "In what ways do youth grapple with complicated meanings of…

Severe flooding was prevalent within the authors' region at the beginning of the school year. Many homes and fields were affected by the amount of rain that fell within a short period of time over multiple days. Their students were concerned about the impact this natural phenomena was having on their local community. Natural phenomena can provide…

This article describes three interdisciplinary events held outside of the classroom to examine social psychological concepts in the criminal justice system, with undergraduate students enrolled in criminal justice and psychology courses. These events can most accurately be described as using a synthetic interdisciplinary approach, in which the…

The purpose of this action research study was to develop a rubric that identified levels of integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) lessons through agriculture, food, and natural resources (AFNR) lessons that were developed and implemented in afterschool programs by preservice informal educators. The research study…

Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), founded in 2009 in the Virginia Tech Music Department's Digital and Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio, "explores the power of gesture, communal interaction, and the multidimensionality of arts, as well as technology's potential to seamlessly integrate arts and sciences with particular focus on K-12…

Over the last several decades, the number of afterschool programs has grown considerably due to the growing employment rates of mothers and concerns regarding at-risk students (James-Burdumy, Dynarski, & Deke, 2007). Afterschool programs impact the lives of nearly 10.2 million children in Kindergarten through 12th grade, an overall increase…

We describe a pair of fully integrated courses designed to teach biology to non-majors in a manner that connects authentically to the liberal arts. The co-taught courses were organized around the question: What does it mean to be human? Students investigated this question in the context of three topics: dis/ability, race, and sex and gender. In…