In this article, we revisit the co-creation of a 45-min film, "Gender is Like an Ocean," produced with middle school students in response to Kirstin Cronn-Mills's young adult novel "Beautiful Music for Ugly Children." The making of this film brought together collaborative inquiry and arts creation. Drawing on the work of…

Films touch our emotions, ignite our imagination and curiosity, and establish lifelong memories. They transport us to new worlds, help us recognize differing perspectives, and suggest positive change. Films engage students in social and emotional awareness and can open a portal into ways that smart young people can better understand themselves.…

Talking about race does not have to be incredibly awkward. In this book, Gooding offers twelve clear, cogent, and concise racial rubrics to help users of mainstream media more readily discern patterns hidden in plain sight. The text primarily leverages popular movies as the medium of analysis--since they are unparalleled in their cultural…

Empathy is a key contributor to moral, pro-social behaviour and an important element of socio-emotional learning (SEL). Schools deliver SEL programmes during adolescence to develop a range of skills including empathy. As education becomes increasingly digital, more research is needed to understand the role digital technologies may play in…

In this article, the authors explain how they leveraged the popularity of the "Star Wars" franchise to introduce a task steeped in popular culture as a fun way to engage their students in investigating complex mathematics that have real-life connections to careers in toy design and engineering design in general. The authors share various…

In Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), students should reach formal mathematics knowledge and explore mathematics based on their informal knowledge. The problems chosen in the exploration process should apply mathematics to real-life situations and be suitable for students to explore and create mathematical structures. In the current study, the…

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of using short films in Turkish lesson on visual reading skills of 7th graders. Mixed methods design was utilized. The quantitative part of the study was formed by an experimental pattern with pretest-post-test control group, and the qualitative part was a case study consisting of observation and…

The Transformative Experience Questionnaire (TEQ) has previously been used only in formal science learning environments to examine how students' learning experiences extend beyond the classroom into their daily lives. In the present study, an example of how this tool can be useful to assess transformative experiences in an informal learning…

Language is connected to a people, culture, history, and communicative purpose. One way world language teachers help students explore the intersections of culture and language is through the use of authentic texts, such as films, newspapers, podcasts, videos, music or short stories (see: Pinzon, 2020). While the research points to the success of…

This paper explores different ways in which teachers use film as a medium for literacy instruction in secondary settings across different content areas in the American public school system. Three educators participated in an ethnographic interview study serving as a pilot for further enquiry. Educators represented two sites in the southern United…

Improving reading comprehension for middle school students with disabilities and others who struggle with reading, referred to here as striving readers, is challenging. Formal reading instruction typically shifts from skills acquisition to application in middle and high school, providing inadequate support in the skills for comprehension (Chall,…

Modern social intelligence includes the ability to watch videos and answer questions about social and theory-of-mind-related content, e.g., for a scene in "Harry Potter," "Is the father really upset about the boys flying the car?" Social visual question answering (social VQA) is emerging as a valuable methodology for studying…

Culturally sustaining and science education theorists advocate that children need to have opportunities to use personal experiences and background knowledge in dialog with peers as they make sense of phenomena in the natural world. Practically, this is a challenge to orchestrate -- both in classrooms and in out-of-school learning spaces -- as…

This research aimed to present reasons and solutions that soon-to-graduate preservice social studies teachers expressed in relation to middle school students' low level of historical literacy as reported in the literature. To this end, we used a basic qualitative research design. The sample consisted of 30 soon-to-graduate preservice teachers (17…

According to former National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) president Cathy L. Seeley (2014), students experience more success when they engage in doing mathematics (i.e., writing about or discussing mathematics, modeling situations, or exploring ideas in the classroom). She further recommended that teachers pose challenging problems or…