Postcards share with others the highlights of holidays, memories of places and events, and brief stories of experiences abroad. They hold the quick jottings to a friend back home, made while in a moment of rest and reflection on a train, at the beach, in a café. They are intimate artifacts, yet they are also public. Their text is available for…

This special report looks at how arts-based charter schools in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Maryland and North Carolina provide access to arts education and integrate the arts schoolwide across curricula, community engagement and teacher professional development.

There has been an increasing focus in policy and practice on adopting inclusive pedagogy as a way of reconceptualising how schools work with children with special educational needs (SEN). The paper considers the split between knowledge and pedagogy inherent in some dominant strains of "inclusive pedagogy". Drawing on the "knowledge…

Disneyland is work disguised as play; school disguised as vacation. While Walt Disney's curriculum deploys across all of its products, it literally engulfs the approximately 50 million "guests" who visit the Disney Parks each year. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed's phenomenological reading of orientation in Queer phenomenology, this…

Learning in formal schools violates several simple principles: that no one can learn on an empty spirit; that true learning requires an absence of fear or authority; that learning is the most natural of human instincts. By making schooling compulsory, we have abandoned trust in our individual and collective experience in favour of experts and…

Research shows low-income students suffer disproportionate learning loss over the summer and because those losses accumulate over time, they contribute substantially to the achievement gap between low- and higher-income children. The Wallace Foundation is funding a five-year demonstration project to examine whether summer learning programs can…

In recent years, playful methods of learning have almost disappeared from school classrooms, and active, creative, extended playtimes during recess, at home, and in neighborhoods have also greatly diminished. This disappearance of play is especially unfortunate because it is happening at the very time that professionals in many scientific,…

This document has been developed by the New Jersey Department of Education with the assistance of the TA Customizer Project funded by the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program (CSP) and conducted by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE). Its focus is on providing information and technical…

The authors analyze the individual elements of a curriculum at the Lexington School for the Deaf (Jackson Heights, New York) in terms of who is being taught, how the staff organizes its teaching, and what should be taught. (SB)

The paper describes the implementation of a 3-year cognitive skills development curriculum, Instrucmental Enrichment (IE), at the North Carolina School for the Deaf in a question/answer format. The following questions are addressed: What are the goals? Who is it for? How is it taught? What is the IE classroom climate like? What is the theory? What…

This paper describes the experiences of an American teacher who taught English to individuals in Bene, Haiti for 10 days in the summer of 1993. The paper describes preparation for the teaching experience, discusses the experience itself, and offers a social and educational analysis of the experience. The paper discusses living conditions,…

This study identified the content and educational methods of family-centered training programs designed to prepare professionals for interprofessional, interagency, and family-professional collaboration. Although the main focus was on training to improve services to families whose children have serious emotional disorders, the programs identified…

This paper describes a curriculum provided to homeless high school students in San Francisco. The curriculum is delivered at a community-based organization already serving the homeless rather than in the schools and features spontaneous symposiums, scheduled symposiums, independent learning, private and small group instruction in basic academic…

This booklet for parents summarizes the curriculum at the University of Tulsa School for Gifted Children in Oklahoma. Program goals are to: (1) enhance academic achievement; (2) provide an emotionally supportive and intellectually challenging atmosphere; and (3) develop a creative and positive approach to school learning. A major premise of…

To determine the extent of changes being implemented in the middle grades in Wisconsin school districts, 532 surveys were mailed to Wisconsin middle level schools that include grades 7 and 8; the return rate was 81 percent. After reviewing the development and content of the survey, this document relates survey findings to the eight principles of…