This literature review offers compelling evidence for the significant role music and song can play in cultivating student engagement in elementary school science lessons. With students disengaging from science education, there is concern about the lack of necessary scientific literacy skills required in today's world. To explore whether music and…

Climate change is a contemporary global crisis that necessitates pedagogical innovation for the middle school dance classroom. This article describes an integrated design for a dance and science unit. Building on students' kinesthetic abilities, teachers are able to create a unit comprising a series of lessons on bird migrations effected by…

Interdisciplinary teaching and learning is an approach that synthesizes the curricular objectives and methods of two or more disciplines or subjects focusing on a specific topic or issue. While it is being increasingly implemented in universities, at lower levels of education there are still countries where science subjects are taught and learned…

Although education research in critical thinking is a rapidly emerging field, how teachers can facilitate, monitor, and support critical thinking in primary science remains a challenge. This paper builds on recent semiotics mediated scientific reasoning research to present a fresh perspective of critical thinking in primary science. Analysis of…

Situated in an elementary afterschool Engineering Literacies Club framed around multiliteracies and the engineering design process, this article explores engineering habits of mind and disciplinary literacies. Disciplinary literacies encourage students to read, write, think, and act like historians, mathematicians, scientists, or engineers by…

The purpose of this article is to introduce a methodology for analyzing the complex configurations emerging in students' speech and drawing activities, having consequences for how and what students learn and make meaning of in science. Accordingly, we launch a methodology to unfold the multidimensional communication as to deepen the analysis of…

When elementary schools integrate literacy and science instruction, they create rich learning environments that allow students to develop an understanding of science ideas while improving their reading, writing, and speaking skills at the same time. Neither subject takes a back seat. Literacy instruction supports science and science instruction…

Reforming instruction is challenging. In this comparative case study of 12 school districts, we investigated the dilemmas that emerged for system leaders as they engaged in system building for elementary science and the approaches leaders took in managing them. We found that system leaders' efforts to manage their environments contributed to the…

Background: The Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) and Next Generation Science Standards ([NGSS] NGSS Lead States, 2013) emphasize that all students from the earliest grades onward must have the opportunity to learn and actively participate in authentic science. In K-12 science instruction, this means that students should have the…

The limited time available to teach content area subjects, given the intense demands for literacy and math instruction, is a common concern in U.S. elementary schools. Unfortunately, this is especially true in schools that serve students who are less economically advantaged. With time being a perennial concern for educators, integrated…

Children are often denied science education that engages their emotions and multiple identities. This study focused on ways in which embodied arts-based experiences offer opportunities for such engagement in pedagogical efforts associated with justice-centered science. The conceptual framework that informed the study considers the body as a site…

We investigated pre-service elementary teachers' engagement in science and English language arts (ELA) instruction integrated in the context of a children's book. Teachers developed models and conducted a compare-and-contrast analysis after exposure to different accounts of the butterfly life cycle: a popular children's book, "The Very Hungry…

Philosophy is concerned with fundamental questions about knowledge, truth, reality, experience, justice and what is right and wrong. In this article, the authors discuss how philosophy and science can be taught together in the primary classroom.

The way science education is positioned and practised in New Zealand primary schools varies widely. In this qualitative case study, participants in senior management from five Auckland primary schools were asked how they perceived science, how it was taught and reasons for the pedagogical approaches chosen. It was clear all schools were different…

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind-body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces…