An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…

As gentrification changes the racial and socioeconomic composition of many neighborhoods across the United States, the enrollment of local schools in gentrifying communities may also change. While gentrification may provide opportunities for creating more diverse schools, challenges often accompany such changes. In this case, Principal Miller…

Makerspaces are collaborative workplaces equipped with a variety of high- and low-tech tools and materials that individuals can use to create physical and digital products. In this article the authors take the perspective that integrating a makerspace into a school is a proactive, thoughtful, and time-consuming process. To help meaningfully…

This study offers a contextualized understanding of the distance-learning experiences of Montessori educators and students in the spring of 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In this article, we build on results reported in a separate article published in this issue of the "Journal of Montessori Research." First, we…

The transition to distance learning in the spring of 2020 caused by COVID-19 was particularly challenging for Montessori educators and students because key elements of the Method were not directly transferable to this new and hastily designed format. Hands-on learning with Montessori materials and learning in a community, as well as careful…

The purpose of this study was to analyze how mobile technologies were incorporated and implemented in an outdoor learning activity. Two classes of primary school students participated in the experiment. Using activity theory as an analytical framework, it is found that underlying tensions provided rich insights into system dynamics and that…

Verbal and non-verbal interactions that occur daily between teachers and headteachers, teachers and pupils, and among pupils can generate conflict that may adversely affect teaching, learning, and schooling effectiveness. Little attention is, however, paid to the quality of relationships that exists between teachers and pupils, among teachers,…

Ambitious teaching is a form of teaching that requires a high level of teacher responsiveness to what students do as they actively engage with the subject matter. Thus, a teacher enacting ambitious teaching is often confronted with uncertainties about how to advance students' learning while also building on students' contributions. In…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not the principal citizenship issues identified by scholars as significant with regard to the African experience were addressed in state-endorsed Kenyan social studies instructional materials. This study also determined whether or not the treatment of the principal citizenship issues was…

This article examines the effect of a teacher's cultural representations and tacit communicative style on interactive practices in the classroom. We compare two second-grade classrooms constituted predominantly by Latino immigrant children and teachers with differing cultural representations of education. Through video and acoustic analyses of…