Hyde Park Neighborhood Club (HPNC) is a small, hyper-local community-based organization that, before the pandemic, provided after-school care and enrichment to children living on the South Side of Chicago. During the pandemic, HPNC created a learning pod for children in grades K-8 to provide parents in the community with childcare and students…

In compensation for the diminishing time spent on science in school, afterschool programs are taking an increasingly larger role in STEM education, with over 69 percent of programs in the U.S. offering some type of STEM programming (Afterschool Alliance, 2015). As the demand for afterschool STEM programs increases, so too does the need for trained…

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced educational inequities that pose unprecedented challenges for teaching and learning. Scott Sikkema, Jenny Lee, and Joseph Spilberg of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) and Maggie Dahn, Nickolina Yankova, and Kylie Peppler of the University of California, Irvine, explain how the arts, which are often…

Although social-emotional learning is associated with long-term success in school and careers, it is often a missing link in U.S. public education. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the need for social-emotional supports for children. In this time of crisis, educators have also sought new ways to make connections and reimagined how students…

This article describes how a federally funded afterschool program serving an elementary-age population in a rural southern community used the creative affordances of Minecraft and a creative youth development (CYD) framework to support the local school district's character education program, The Leader in Me (LiM). On receipt of a 21st Century…

As this paper was being written, school systems across the country were increasingly announcing plans for full or partial distance learning to respond to COVID-19, and it seems likely that more school systems may implement these plans should the pandemic surge in the fall or winter. As a result, working parents with school-age children are faced…

As society expects children and youth today to explore content-area topics in depth and to develop critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills, out-of-school settings are becoming increasingly important to individual learning. These settings, which include libraries, museums, digital media, and after-school programs, are evolving…

North Carolina's education model is based on an agrarian calendar when it comes to time spent in school and on an industrial, factory model for the process of how students are educated. Educational models structured around the agrarian calendar and industrial model served the state well during a time period in the state's history, but that time…

This paper argues that the emphasis on orchestration as a metaphor for teaching in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments, featured in recent academic discussions, is an opportunity to broaden the scope of the inquiry into educational technology. Drawing on sociological literature and research that investigated the systemic factors that…

Both employer expectations and education standards, including the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards, are shifting the focus of learning from knowledge and discrete skills to the ability to think critically and creatively. This paper describes the process of translating an existing teacher-led STEM curriculum to fit…

In this webinar, Dr. Joyce Epstein, Director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships and the National Network of Partnership Schools, discussed what the research says about effective family engagement. The webinar and PowerPoint presentation are also available. A brief list of resources is included.

Public libraries are redefining their roles in order to stay relevant to the needs of the communities they serve. Today, libraries are places where reading meets hands-on learning and where quietness coexists with voices and music. The latest advances in technology for children and teens, specifically, robotics sets and media-rich software, are…

Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children's social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children's web play as "discourses in place": fluidly converging and…

In this article we propose that the grammar of schooling [Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994). "The 'grammar' of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change?" "American Educational Research Journal, 31"(3), 453-479.] is responsible not only for the well-known and world-wide difficulties in integrating ICT into formal educational settings, but also for…

The Afterschool Alliance and MetLife Foundation are proud to celebrate a fifth round of the MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Awards. For the past five years, we have collaborated to highlight the work of quality afterschool programs that support children, families and communities across the nation. This compendium is a compilation of four…