It is difficult to capture the life of a classroom. Schools usually measure the performance of students and teachers alike through numbers, quantifying students' attendance and test scores. But what of each individual student's experience, their unique understanding and life concerns in and out of school? Building on the work of Vivian Paley, who…

This paper focuses on "Pictures for Schools," an art patronage scheme established in postwar Britain by the artist and educationalist Nan Youngman (1906-1995) to sell affordable works of art to educational establishments. Highlighting the use of works of art as a pedagogical tool, "Pictures for Schools" is contextualised within…

This third of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores the educational settings where students with disabilities spend their time. As was the case in the analysis of the previous CRDC covering the 2018-19 school year, students with disabilities spend more time in…

The authors examined how the spaces and structures of literacy classrooms were organized, inhabited, and felt by teachers and students in a new project-based high school. The authors attended specifically to the political valence of these feelings: how educators characterized certain spatial arrangements (modular furniture and flexible seating)…

Active participation of learners has been viewed as the key to the learning process. To constructivists, challenging materials and cooperative activities where students participate and become engaged are essential in classroom instruction. In comparison, classrooms in Chinese heritage culture classrooms, where lectures are the main form of…

This article focuses on how students make use of different spaces in one compulsory school in Iceland and how gender is produced through activities in these spaces. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted for three months in 2016 among 8th and 9th graders at one public school in Iceland. Our analysis is based on poststructural and material…

This paper investigates the role of the physical classroom environment, coupled with a technology environment that includes real-time agents and data analytics, to support the orchestration of complex collaborative inquiry designs in a high school physics classroom. This design-based research contributes to the wider domain of scripting and…

One of most important sources of frustration for teachers is not being able to manage their classes successfully, especially since class management is closely related to student learning (Soria Duarte & Quezada Campoverde, 2018). This article presents several guidelines that can help teachers to manage their classes effectively, especially…

The places where high school teachers teach have a relationship with what and how their students learn. Certain aspects of the physical environment have been examined for decades, such as those that affect basic physiological needs including but not limited to climate control, air quality, appropriate lighting, and cleanliness. In addition to…

Over the past decade, abroad range of policymakers, corporations, educators, and scholars in the United States have catapulted computer science (CS) education from the sidelines to the center of K-12 public education discourse. While calls for CS education are often framed in terms of national and economic competitiveness, there is a growing…

The Ecological class is a kind of class in which the system of class teaching is in a state of dynamic balance and it can enhance the efficiency of class teaching. The article analyzes the feature of English ecological class, illustrates the non-ecological class teaching problems and explores the ways to establish English ecological class from the…

Allocated classroom time is not the same as time available for learning--a host of economic and social stressors undermine learning time in schools serving low-income students. When time is limited, it is hard to meet rigorous learning standards. The challenge is compounded in high-poverty schools where community stressors place additional demands…

Drawing on observational evidence of two classes working on "Romeo and Juliet," one in England and the other in Palestine, this essay explores the nature of knowledge in relation to English as a school subject. It asserts the importance of paying attention to the resources that students, situated in culture and history, bring with them…

In this article, we address one of the most critical challenges facing the schools today: designing of learning environments that can provide learning opportunities for all students. The article first provides a brief introduction to content of this challenge. Then we focus on theoretical tools to understand the learning environment. Based on the…

One of the major dilemmas when practising critical sociolinguistic ethnography within the field of education is the ethnographer's degree of implication within the studied site (Goldstein, 2003; Martin Rojo, 2003; Unamuno, 2004). How far should the researcher intervene within the daily practices he/she is observing? This exercise of methodological…