Project AIM, a Schools Partnerships program of the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago, partners Teaching Artists with classroom teachers in eight Chicago public schools. Funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund to Improve Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), the project has an ambitious…

Semantically rich domains require operative knowledge to solve complex problems in real-world settings. These domains provide an ideal environment for developing authentic constructivist e-learning environments. In this paper we present a framework and a methodology for developing authentic learning environments for such domains. The framework is…

The role and numbers of teaching assistants (TAs) in English schools has grown dramatically in recent years. This is associated with professional development which could give access to Qualified Teacher Status. This part-time, school-based route is consistent with the growth of alternative routes into teaching that are based on an…

Teachers who frame the curriculum around purposeful playful activities that allow children to work at their own pace and allow children to make choices rather than be coerced into their work are indirectly committed to becoming researchers in their own classrooms. The art teacher-researcher is a participant observer of what goes on in the…

Process-oriented inquiry can help preservice and inservice early childhood teachers implement constructivist science education in their own classrooms. In this article, we discuss the basic elements of process-oriented inquiry applied to early childhood science education, show how we foster the development of process-oriented inquiry teaching…

Despite official government srt (in various jurisdictions around the world) for providing students with opportunities to construct their own knowledge within the context of formal schooling, school science systems continue to place greatest priority on teaching and learning of "products" of science (e.g., laws and theories), while…

This study, conducted from a constructivist perspective, examined the belief system of a prospective elementary teacher (Barbara) about science teaching and learning as she developed professional knowledge within the context of reflective science teacher education. From an analysis of interviews, observation, and written documents, I constructed a…

Writing can be a powerful tool for learning biology. Writing assignments in biology could help students personalize and understand the biology knowledge they are studying. In this article, the authors present the "Botanical Sense of Place" (BSP), a convenient and easy-to-use writing template that they developed to elicit and probe students' prior…

Judith Butler's philosophical writings on identity have provided inspiring, if occasionally "troubling", ways of rethinking gender. A key contribution has been the challenge to conventional social constructionist ideas and thinking on subjectivity. In developing a paradigm of performativity, Butler's work takes us beyond the territory of identity…

Web-based technologies are the medium of choice for most universities as they move their offerings off campus and online. As we continue to move our own programs online we are challenged to consider what elements of our traditional experiences to preserve online, and which ones to modify, and to recognize the impact of the tools we use on our…

Talking about religion in public middle schools has moved from taboo to necessity during the past few years. Although some middle schoolers hold knowledge of their own religion, most remain uninformed about any of the world's religions, including, for many, their own. The purpose of this article is to make the case for religious literacy--the…

This article recounts the battle in the "math wars" that took place in Massachusetts, United States in 1999-2000 over the scope, content and teaching of the state's K-12 mathematics curriculum. Harsh controversies arose between the partisans of a "reform-math" movement stressing an undefined "conceptual understanding"…

A central focus in the study of metacognition is that readers need to recognize what they know about a topic, they need to realize when they have read something they do not understand, and they need to know how to remediate any discrepancies in their understanding. This paper is presented in three sections. The first section discusses what is…

This document consists of one volume year (four quarterly issues) of the journal "HyperNexus," containing articles on hypermedia and multimedia use in education. Typical article topics are: language-learning software; teaching and learning HyperCard; hypermedia-based teacher education; the use of music in virtual reality; integrating…

This study examined curriculum change involving teacher development based on the intellectual development of teachers, parents, and children by means of the theory of schema development. The paper describes constructivist pedagogy and schema and their importance for young children's learning, then reports on a qualitative study of over 300…