At one Title I K-4 elementary campus located on the Gulf Coast of Southeast Texas, there seemed to be a prevalent problem of minority students, particularly male students, receiving office referrals at a higher rate than their non-minority counterparts in past years. Research from a 2010 Children's Defense Fund report indicates that…

The author likes to have her middle school students work with pens, patterns and textures. Because she was tired of the usual texture project she had been using, Shirley Laird began looking for a new approach. While searching for an inspiration, she ran across some old calendars that had excellent photos of teddy bears dressed up in different…

In this article, the author describes a texture and pattern project. Students started by doing an outline contour drawing of an animal. With the outline drawn, the students then write one of their names to fit "inside" the animal.

Over the past two decades, educational scholars have seen major shifts in how literacy is viewed. One of these shifts has been toward conceptualizing literacy as a set of social practices (Street, 1995) that people embody and value. To disrupt current definitions of literacy, the valued practices that keep those forms of literacy in place must…

The author is always on the lookout for new ideas, and found one with her state's new "grade-level expectations" in art. She had printed the expectations from the state department and bound them in book form for herself and other art teachers in her district. When the author was flipping through the booklet thinking, two things caught her eye:…

This paper presents a cross-level study of German student teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning chemistry. It covers different stages of their teacher training program. The study is based upon drawings of teaching situations, which were analyzed using an evaluation pattern developed using grounded theory. The qualitative scales analyze…

This study was conducted to determine whether a lesson, in which context-based learning approach and scientific stories were used, changed students' (aged 11-12) stereotypical images of science and scientists. Data was collected from two separate sources: Interviews conducted with six students and Draw a Scientist Test (DAST) document that was…

Identity development is a continuous process framed within changing social contexts, and is particularly problematic for musicians and other artists whose work contradicts the mythologized image of the artist. The purpose of this article is to examine the professional growth of music students in relation to developing teacher identities. The…

Writing is the dominant mode through which most learning and assessment is mediated in schools. It is through writing that learners are most often asked to demonstrate their understanding of learned concepts and share their understandings of these concepts. If English language learners are to succeed in English medium schools, they must become…

Five- and six-year-olds know a lot about their own homes. Besides school, home is probably where they spend most of their time. But have they ever really thought about their space? Using students' knowledge of their current space will help them design new spaces and think about all the areas that surround them. In this project, students design…

The author states that she finds it challenging to create new and innovative lessons for her college-level design students. Most of her students are first-year art students, and some never took art in high school. Here, she describes a lesson as one solution she developed that made the students look at themselves, and integrate their personalities…

The study of the beautiful monarch butterfly lends itself to a vast array of subject matter, and offers the opportunity to meet a large and varied number of standards and objectives for many grade levels. Art projects featuring monarchs may include many cross-curricular units such as math (symmetry and number graphing), science (adaptation and…

This article reports on one instructional lesson that integrates literacy and mathematics. Specifically, it describes a lesson conducted in a fourth-grade classroom that integrates reading, writing, drawing, and literature to teach linear measurement to the inch and fractional measurement. The article begins with a rationale for integrating…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can process both interpretations of an ambiguous figure (e.g. rabbit/duck) when told about the ambiguity, however they tend not to do so spontaneously. Here we show that although adolescents with ASD can explicitly experience such "reversals", implicit measures suggest they are conceptually…

In this article, the value of integrating family systems theory into a school counseling curriculum is explored. Some programs have historically placed school counselors in a difficult position by not adequately preparing them for the demands of incorporating family systems and community collaboration into clinical practice. The rationale for…