Lisa Jean Moore describes a class assignment for her Social and Cultural Change course in which she was required to accommodate the material limitations of teaching within a highly regulated and restricted environment. This assignment, carried out in a women's prison, could be adapted for traditional college settings and travel abroad programs,…

Structured opportunities for reflective writing allow students to polish their writings and to reflect actively on their written creations, while encouraging clearer and more honest writing products. In addition, the use of reflective writing can transform students as they begin to incorporate metacognition, or thinking about their thinking, into…

Since education reform efforts have long focused on reading and mathematics, the social studies classroom has been a target of remedial services--with children being removed from social studies to gain additional support in reading and math. As a result, many children spend years in school with little to no exposure to the social studies, despite…

For four years, Pat Paugh, a university teacher educator, and Mary Moran, a teacher researcher, collaborated on action research by systematically studying literacy development connected to the latter's third-grade community gardening and urban farming curriculum. Their goal was to support an existing classroom culture that valued…

Beginning in third grade, Pennsylvania students are required to take the Pennsylvania State Standardized Assessment (PSSA), which presents multiple-choice mathematics questions and open-ended mathematics problems. Consistent with the Communication Standard of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, while solving the open-ended problems,…

For several years children at Joyce Public School have been rewriting traditional stories from localized cultural and linguistic perspectives, creating innovative, individualized narrative forms with digital technology. Our experimental multiliteracies research project is a collaboration of school and university teachers and researchers following…

The development of communication skills is a key component in any science program. However, students do not see the connections between writing and science. In particular, students lack the enthusiasm when the time comes to write lab reports. Students say that they do not see why they should have to write dry, boring lab reports following an…