Educators are continuously exploring ways to enhance the academic potential of students while fostering a positive social atmosphere within classrooms. To meet these various curricular and interpersonal objectives, teachers are increasingly utilising educational storification in order to engage students and positively support their social…

In this ethnographic research, discovery of how preschool-aged children use play to wield their individual power in the outdoors is documented in a single classroom. Embedded as a participant-researcher and working from constructivist and critical theory orientations, the researcher seeks to understand how children use their play to construct the…

The purpose of this study has been to explore young children's understandings and experiences of friendship as these manifested in children's behaviours, in a reception class setting. Drawing on an evolutionary, ecological framework, friendship is seen as not only the expression and further development of social understandings and cognitive…

This dissertation explores the role of social media use in the social development of "at-risk" youth in Los Angeles, CA and Lafayette, IN, with a major goal of identifying beneficial ways to address the social support needs of youth and adolescents to aid in their successful assimilation into adulthood. This study employs ethnographic…

This paper discusses new empirical evidence for a positive relationship between musical learning and desistance from crime. On investigating the learning processes occurring within a Javanese gamelan project in a young offender's institution, parallels between musical learning processes and the development of certain attributes linked to…

Theatre for Development (TfD) is a special kind of Theatre practice that creates a platform for members of a specific community to respond to, and actively participate in issues relating to their social development through an engaging process of play and acting. The sole essence of this form of theatre is to sensitize, radicalize and conscientize…

This study examined the influence of spending time outdoors on young children's physical and socioemotional development. We observed preschoolers' activities in two naturally provisioned outdoor environments over the course of one year. Eleven preschoolers were videotaped continuously for 16 days at a local river and 9 days at a creek adjacent to…

Aims: to develop and observationally evaluate a multi-component programme for the reduction of risk behaviours in vulnerable adolescents. Methods: the programme was theoretically informed by Catalano and Hawkins' social development model. It was developed using a combination of participatory consultation with young people and a review of evidence…

What happens when a team of university education researchers initiates a social justice learning project in a local high school, and--despite the overall project's considerable successes in cultivating students' critical political "voice"--is confounded by the periodic, apparent "silences" of some of its young female students?…

This paper investigates forest school practitioners perceptions of learning at forest school to identify the topics covered, the learning styles, and the philosophies underpinning its delivery, based on interviews with experienced forest school practitioners. Practitioners identified the focus of learning at forest school as social development:…

In this article, we describe how students were invited to write and publicly read their "momentos de cambio" (moments of change) stories--memoirs in which they recount moments of significant change, both joyful and traumatic, in their lives. Drawing from elements of Latino critical theory, we conceptualize these stories in part as…

We investigate how different mealtime situations help shape teenager and staff subjectivities in two Swedish residential care homes and a special school for girls and boys, 12-15 years old, with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Three mealtime networks are analysed using concepts from actor-network theory, treating architectural…

This article explores the parenting practices of wealthy Danish families and offers insight into the workings of dominant parenting norms within contemporary Danish society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among 15 families living north of Copenhagen, Denmark, this article identifies the parenting strategies of people with ample…

Though music has a long and successful history within education, it is often one of the first sacrificial lambs when school budgets tighten. Over the course of an academic year, a documentary film sought to tell the story of an American middle school drum ensemble. The context of this group provided an ideal way to examine the nature of student…

Background: Physical education teacher behaviour has been a subject of study in physical education including physical education teacher education for 30 years. However, the research on teacher behaviour has tended to focus on direct teaching behaviour (DTB) to demonstrate the benefits of effective teaching, centred on a technical understanding of…