How does environmental knowledge move from an expert's books into the life and learning of a small community? Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a renowned author of "The Global Forest and Arboretum America, A Philosophy of the Forest," kindly agreed to an interview with Simon Heath, organiser of a rural literary festival. In working with the…

Background: Teaching games for understanding (TGfU) has stimulated so much attention, research and debate since the 1980s that it is easy for its origins to become refracted and misunderstood. For example, in a recent edition of the "Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy" journal there was paper arguing a constraints-led approach (CLA)…

The author always turns to children to be her teachers when she comes up against new ideas and challenges. She believes that observing closely and reflecting on how children engage in exploration and discovery reinforced the notion that children, in fact, do more with less! Supporting children in developing self-regulation is not an easy task in…

In this response to Hewson and Ogunniyi's paper on indigenous knowledge (IK) and science teaching in South Africa, I seek to broaden the debate by setting the enterprise of integrating IK into science education in its cultural and socio-political context. I begin by exploring the multiple meanings of indigenous knowledge in Africa, next consider…

In this essay, Susan Engel argues that curiosity is both intrinsic to children's development and unfolds through social interactions. Thus, it should be cultivated in schools, even though it is often almost completely absent from classrooms. Calling on well-established research and more recent studies, Engel argues that interactions between…

Encouraging students to make independent discoveries is an effective way to get them excited about mathematics, and sharing their triumphant moments (their light bulb moments) helps to spread this excitement to their peers. A Mathematics for the Liberal Arts course is a perfect venue for the sharing of light bulb moments, as it helps to correct…

Many innovative approaches to education such as problem-based learning (PBL) and inquiry learning (IL) situate learning in problem-solving or investigations of complex phenomena. Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) grouped these approaches together with unguided discovery learning. However, the problem with their line of argument is that IL and…

Improvisation can be difficult to teach in any music classroom, but it can be particularly problematic in large ensembles like band, chorus, or orchestra. John Kratus proposes seven levels of improvisation, with exploration as the first step in the development of improvisation skills. Through experiences in making sounds, children begin to develop…

A plea is made that mathematics should be taught the way that mathematicians do it, using an exploratory approach rather than rule learning. (MNS)

Outdoor education is often delivered through games and activities such as nature hikes or observing an ecosystem within a 1-foot circle on the ground. Often, participants look closely at the earth only for that brief moment. Wilderness survival is another way to teach about the outdoors. It offers skills that encourage participants to become more…

Action learning seeks to develop an active, positive attitude toward the personal benefits of musical involvement and places learners' goals and intentions at the center of teaching. But, because action learning uses activities, it can easily be confused with the activities approach. Any similarities, however, are superficial. (RM)

Uses experiences with remedial readers to urge that reading must have a purpose--one purpose ultimately linked to the need for beauty, humor, and order. (MM)

In traditional programming courses assignments usually consist of problems that are somewhat closed in nature. That is, students are usually given a rigidly defined problem statement and are provided with a set of data that they are to use to test their program to produce a unique result. While this approach makes evaluation easy, it discourages…

This paper addresses the issue of learning to write and the need for defining a means of teaching the process of composing. Following a description of what kind of process writing is not, the composing process is presented as a continuum of making meaning out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, and syntactic fragments. The discovery…

Stresses the development of complex cognitive processes during adolescence and sees the challenge of the curriculum in the question of greater match between the learner's cognitive level and the material to learned. (JOW)