This phenomenological study describes how secondary mathematics preservice teachers (PSTs) in a teacher residency program designed and implemented project-based learning (PBL) units. The Six A's, a framework used to evaluate the rigor and relevance of PBL units, helped capture the research question: What are the successes and challenges PSTs…

Anecdotes describe how outdoor education provides active-learning experiences by involving students in direct interaction with each other and the real world. Outdoor education reveals the inherent natural connections between different branches of knowledge by accessing and honoring multiple modalities of thinking and expressing, and encouraging…

Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound (ELOB) is a framework for comprehensive school improvement that uses the philosophy and pedagogy of Outward Bound to make learning more hands-on, project-based, and adventurous. One of the 10 ELOB design principles is service and compassion. This book by teachers in ELOB schools contains accounts of students'…

This publication contains faculty stories about experiences with service learning from Miami-Dade Community College. The stories are first-hand accounts of real learning and how lives change because of that experience. The stories come from teachers who see themselves as facilitators of a student's own active learning; who look for and commend…

In this chapter, a Canadian high school teacher describes a senior English independent study program requiring that each student become involved in a topic through experience. From previous teaching experiences, the teacher realized that the curriculum was secondary to the method of delivery, that learning happened when a teacher instilled in…

A teacher describes using some of the Foxfire core practices to teach a "last chance" program for students in grades 7-8 who were angry, oppositional, and defiant. After a cooperative classroom planning process in which counselors helped students articulate their ideas, the students began revealing their interests. These interests, in…

Jack Shelton, teacher, minister, and community builder, describes the benefits of education that is active, relevant, and involved in the community. As coordinator of a cooperative of 29 small rural Alabama schools that enables teachers to implement experiential educational approaches rooted in community study and service, he discusses the…

In this book's essays, teachers describe and reflect on the practice of experiential education in elementary, secondary, college, and outdoor settings. Major themes of these narratives include the insider's view of the teaching experience; active learning that requires student autonomy, imagination, and responsibility; and the view of experience…

In fall 1966, Eliot Wigginton took his first teaching job in Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a semiprivate rural Georgia high school with both local and boarding students. This book is his account of his early struggle to control and interest his students, the genesis and development of the student-produced Foxfire publications, and his views on the…