Learning spaces in higher education are fraught with colonial barriers such as teacher-centered, front facing, stark, feelingless, and unwelcoming classrooms that diminish students' feelings of well-being. For pre-service teachers, these are also the types of classrooms that they often inherit as they foray into the profession. Three Bachelor of…

A first year non-majors biology course, with an enrollment of around 440 students, has been redesigned from a course of traditional content and teaching style to one that emphasizes biological concepts in current global issues and incorporates active learning strategies. We were informed by the education literature incorporating many aspects of…

One of the most important questions I ask as both a cultural anthropologist and a university teacher is: How do people come to know what they think they know? In this article, I adopt a narrative approach to processes of learning and discovery in two very different locales, an indigenous society in the South Pacific, and a senior seminar on…

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…