Culturally responsive standards-based (CRSB) teaching can help bring diverse school communities together and make learning meaningful. Unlike multicultural education--which is an important way to incorporate the world's cultural and ethnic diversity into lessons--CRSB teaching draws on the experiences, understanding, views, concepts, and ways 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…

This book examines how young people who struggle with life's worst conditions somehow manage to overcome adversity, identifying significant factors that contribute to their resilience. The book presents information and decision making skills students need to make good decisions in the face of adversity; learning strategies and teaching techniques…

Education has become a domain of considerable ideological division. Today the mantra is freedom and choice, yet at the same time, a push to "back to basics" is observed. This author attempts to trace the contours of this division by taking two steps back from the contemporary fray. One step is to situate present day discussions in a larger…

This paper represents a conversation between a high school science teacher and a university researcher as they found common ground in the theory and experiences of designing powerful learning experiences. The teacher describes an instructional unit in which students designed a complex, interactive display showing what life may have been like…

Those growing up in the 1950s, 60s or 70s are familiar with how physically active children were before computers and video games were introduced. Each neighborhood had its own version of the various games that were played. Many of these games involved a pink rubber ball called a Spaldeen. They were everywhere and almost everyone had one. These…

Opportunities for future teachers to reflect on their own learning helps them be more thoughtful about their students' learning. Putting theory into action, Montclair State University developed a required course entitled "Program Planning in Early Childhood Education." The course, taken by all preservice teachers before their student teaching…

This paper, written in the twenty-first anniversary year of the journal "Educational Psychology in Practice", attempts to uncover those distinctive aspects of the discipline and the practice of applied psychology in general and educational psychology in particular. After considering some of the reasons for attempting this task at this point in…

As our understanding of learning focuses on the whole person rather than individual aspects of learning, so the process of learning is beginning to be studied from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines. This handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the contemporary research into learning: it brings together a diverse range of…

This article offers an overview of the life and work of Eileen Egan, a contemporary and passionate Christian leader whose values can inform religious education today. It argues that her critical questioning of the traditions, assumptions, and premises of Catholic teaching on war and peace is a sign of the emancipatory, transformative learning that…

This paper describes the professionally oriented Masters of Education degree program at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia (BC), Canada, a program that provides graduate education to cohorts of nontraditional adult learners using the idea of transformational learning. For the past several years, Simon Fraser University has offered a model…

Describes how two faculty members of a liberal arts, Catholic university used constructivist learning theory and Reuven Feuerstein's concept of the mediated learning experience to create an environment of enculturation in an interdisciplinary philosophy course for doctoral students from multiple cultures. (EV)

Participatory research (PR) is a term that was first articulated in Tanzania in the early 1970s to describe a variety of community-based approaches to the creation of knowledge. Taken together these approaches combine social investigation, education and action in an interrelated process. The International Council for Adult Education provided a…

In the mid-1960s, the foundations of Participatory Research were being laid in Tanzania and around the world through the work of muckraking adult educators--President Julius Nyerere, Marja-Liisa Swantz, Orlando Fals Borda, Rajesh Tandon, Budd Hall and many more of their friends and colleagues. At the same time, a bunch of American kids were over…

This chapter discusses the challenges of fostering spirituality in the higher education classroom and its relationship to the practice of transformative learning.