This article comprises a lyrical exposition of the 'in-betweenness' that underlies pedagogical relations and musical practice. The latter comprises making, performing, teaching, and indeed listening to music, phenomena encapsulated in the term 'musicking', first coined by the musicologist Christopher Small in 1999. Improvisatory practice is…

When Louis Pasteur remarked that chance favours the prepared mind, he was commenting on the important role played by serendipity in scientific discovery. That role is well known (most know of the story of Fleming's accidental discovery of penicillin) but much of the literature focuses on the STEM disciplines, on 'big' science, and concentrates on…

As a member of the team that created elements 104 and 105 at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, James Andrew Harris [1932-2000] was the first African American credited in the discovery of an element. This factoid has been posted on social media, used in a quiz game, and repeated on numerous Web sites. The story (if any context is offered at all) is…

Art serves as a powerful medium of expression for young students, especially for bi/multilingual children. Beyond mere artistic endeavors, their drawings vividly reflect their perceptions and provide insightful glimpses into their cultural backgrounds, linguistic diversity, and the intricate interplay of languages and identities. This article…

Epistemic curiosity is a desire for knowledge accompanied by positive emotions, increased arousal, and exploratory behavior (Grossnickle, "Educational Psychology Review," 28(1), 23-60, 2016). Although curiosity has typically been characterized as a domain-general construct, domain-general conceptualizations do not acknowledge systematic…

Discovery learning continues to be a topic of heated debate. It has been called a zombie, and this special issue raises the question whether it may be a phoenix arising from the ashes to which the topic was burnt. However, in this commentary I propose it is more like an elephant--a huge topic approached by many people who address different…

Details of the London pilot of the "Discovery Project" are presented, where university-based astronomers were given the chance to pass on some real and applied knowledge of astronomy to a group of selected secondary school pupils. It was aimed at students in Key Stage 3 of their education, allowing them to be involved in real…

Everyone who writes anything--even non-fiction!--knows you discover things as you go along. Writing is a heuristic. Writing history is no different. Yet senior-secondary and tertiary exponents of the teaching and learning of history are often strangely tongue-tied on the matter of writing and thinking as engines of discovery in historical studies…

Serendipity in the library stacks is generally regarded as a positive occurrence. While acknowledging its benefits, this essay draws on research in library science, information systems, and other fields to argue that, in two important respects, this form of discovery can be usefully framed as a problem. To make this argument, the essay examines…

Pennsylvania Intermediate Unit 8 (IU8) seeks to scale innovations that are evolving as local solutions to educational challenges in rural school districts. Consistent with its mission of creating customized solutions, IU8 seeks to make the innovations better, meaning more learner centered and community focused. IU8 is evolving the Getting Better…

Little work on the significance and implications of decision-making has been undertaken since that led by Hodkinson in the 1990s, and the experiences of young people on vocational programmes and their reasons for undertaking them remain under-theorised and poorly understood. Drawing on two narratives from a study exploring young people's…

Arthur Cropley (2006) emphasized the critical place that convergent thinking has in creativity. Although he briefly refers to the blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity, his discussion could not reflect the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in BVSR, especially the resulting combinatorial models.…

Rather than focussing on the relationship between science and literature, this article attempts to read scientific writing as literature. It explores a somewhat neglected element of the story of the emergence of geology in the late eighteenth century--James Hutton's unpublished accounts of the tours of Scotland that he undertook in the years…

In his "Proofs and Refutations," Lakatos identifies the "Primitive Conjecture" as the first stage in the pattern of mathematical discovery. In this article, I am interested in ways of reaching the "Primitive Conjecture" stage in an undergraduate classroom. I adapted Realistic Mathematics Education methods in an…

In this response to "Measuring Students' Writing Ability on a Computer Analytic Developmental Scale: An Exploratory Validity Study," the authors agree that assessments should seek parsimony in both theory and application wherever possible. Doing so allows maximal dissemination and implementation while minimizing costs. The Writing…