This paper explores the role of school gardens in nurturing secondary students' STEM skills and 21st century skills/global competencies. Predominantly, the affordances of garden-based learning are highlighted in fostering students' biodiversity and sustainability consciousness. The positive impact of school gardens as an informal learning setting…

This study explored a place-based summer enrichment offering for gifted rural students through the lens of a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2003). To ameliorate well-documented opportunity gaps for rural students, we established a residential camp on our university's campus where middle school students engaged in STEM and humanities…

Pressing social problems and inequities call attention to the need for interventions that target root causes and change systems. A significant challenge facing system change efforts is the lack of systems-based evaluation theory and methods. To address this challenge, we conducted an instrumental case study of evaluation within an exemplary…

With this project, we seek to add historical and philosophical depth to the theoretical foundations for critical service learning and offer a philosophical framework that allows for a critical pedagogy of place. Lewis Mumford's Regional Survey is offered as a means to augment Deweyan democratic education. Regional Survey positions students out in…

The majority of Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) in the United States come from Hispanic backgrounds. Although a relatively smaller number of EBs attend rural schools, there remains a dearth of research on what rural secondary teachers know and do with EBs to support their learning. In order to accept educational responsibility for all EBs, we must…

This research was conducted in the following four countries: Malaysia, Mexico, Canada, and the United States (US). Educators in each country were asked how US international policies were addressed in their respective curricula. The theoretical construct for critical border dialogism was developed as an outcome of these studies. Critical border…

The researchers developed the Questionnaire Assessing Connections to Science (QuACS) to assess students' perceptions of their learning environment, their attitudes toward science, and their engagement with science content through narratives and place-based learning opportunities. When the QuACS was field-tested with a sample of 495 undergraduate…

This paper reflects on the impact of engaging pre-service teachers in an academic service-learning project working with urban students on a place-based science project. This collaboration seeks to provide pre-service teachers with experiences that encourage them to recognize the importance students' funds of knowledge and help them develop the…

This mixed-methods study explored the use of an augmented reality, location-based, iPad game to enhance the learning experience of young elementary history students. Utilizing the ARIS platform and a design-based research approach, researchers and teachers built a customized game experience that was inserted into a school's traditional second…

Student participation in real-world problems promotes "a sense of their own agency andcollective capacity to alter their neighbourhoods or communities for the better" (Smith, 2007).This paper describes student engagement in a two-week summer workshop conducted in June2016, where they used geospatial technologies and community mapping to…