Quality in education at the tertiary level is constantly questioned, and increasingly "professional standards" are offered as the solution to the perceived decline in quality. Foucauldian archaeological analysis of teacher graduate and geography graduate standards in Australia is conducted, revealing tensions between the different…

A new, interdisciplinary high school geoarchaeology curriculum unit, titled "Living with Volcanoes," was created and tested in two pilot lessons with 30 high school students total studying geography and classical civilization in northern England. Students were highly engaged during the curriculum unit and showed positive learning gains…

This study reports two stages of research into the discourses of poetry education in the United States from the early 20th to the early 21st centuries. The first is an original study that traces the history of discourses about teaching poetry, and the second is a coda or concluding analysis that raises questions about how history functions as a…

Background: There is much to be realised in the educational potential of national and world heritage sites. Such sites need to be supported in sharing their resources with a wide and international public, especially within formal education. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) heritage site visualisations could serve this need. Our…

This paper argues that teaching of concepts is deeply rooted in human phylogeny. The basis of this argument is a consideration of the type of knowledge used to make handaxes, a tool that is found in the archaeological record beginning around 1.8 million years ago. A distinction is made between the human capacity for teaching concepts, which has a…

Another historic Montessori essay puts into writing a landmark activity in the middle school world: the school Odyssey trip. This type of trip challenges the group's ability to cooperate around daily living and is combined with the "testimony of the spade" that is so much a part of the archaeology discipline of physical work and study at…

In this paper, we present our efforts in embedding product archeology inspired curricula into two engineering courses along with assessment results. The assessment focuses on the effectiveness of the embedded curricula in enhancing students' understanding on the global, societal, environmental, and economic (GSEE) implications of engineering…

Understanding the global, societal, environmental and economic (GSEE) context of a product, process or system is critical to an engineer's ability to design and innovate. The already packed curricula in engineering programs provide few occasions to offer meaningful experiences to address this issue, and most departments delegate this requirement…

Studying language evolution has become resurgent in modern scientific research. In this revival field, approaches from a number of disciplines other than linguistics, including (paleo)anthropology and archaeology, animal behaviors, genetics, neuroscience, computer simulation, and psychological experimentation, have been adopted, and a wide scope…

Since the mid-20th century in the United States, there have been several reform movements within mathematics education; each movement has been subject to its own unique socio-cultural and -political forces. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) Standards documents--"Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School…

Elementary students are often hampered by a tendency to ascribe innovation to increasing human intelligence or individual agency rather than increased information, better access to information, or collective and institutional agency. As a result, they struggle to build evidence-based interpretations of the distant past. A fifth-grade…

This article traces the formation of community music through professional and scholarly articles over the last century in North America, and argues that community music has been discursively formed through social rationales, although the specific rationales have shifted. The author employs an archaeological framework inspired by Michel Foucault to…

This article explores the epistemological innocence of the field of history of education. The author's interrogation of the field's regime of truth and its effects intends to enact what he is conceptualizing as a "self-reflexive historiography," a historiography that attends to the ways in which the field has constituted and turned historians of…

Like many other history departments nationally, Ed Podesta and his colleagues face a daunting practical challenge: redesigning three years' historical learning so that it can fit into a compressed two-year Key Stage 3, whilst enhancing, rather than compromising, the quality of students' historical learning. Podesta's article reports the beginning…

Contrary to stereotypes of proto-Athapaskan culture as simplistic and archaic, evidence points to a sophisticated web of late prehistoric Asian-Athapaskan interactions. A holistic assessment of Athapaskan migrations in the context of the transpacific Dene-Yeneseian phylum (the largest, fastest pedestrian language spread on earth) sees…