Indigenous methodologies for guiding, advising, and educating children have been in place since time immemorial. Those well-honed approaches to education were built to support whole and healthy individual development while also establishing a lifelong awareness and reverence for community, connection, kinship, and reciprocity. In Western cultures,…

This article examines the ways in which racist structures negatively affect students' social and emotional development and how social-emotional learning (SEL) may be a useful tool to push against racist structures to develop students socially and emotionally. We propose an ecological framework to examine how micro-, meso-, and macro-level…

This article considers the impact of the "Lau v. Nichols" Supreme Court decision on the education of English learners in Washington State, US In particular, we focus on the most popular educational program in the state, Sheltered English Instruction. We first examine how intertextual links to various policy texts and discourses shape…

This research assesses the first cohort of pathway students' needs and their academic and sociocultural experiences at a US university. A needs analysis survey, individual student interviews, and a follow-up survey were used for data collection. Understanding lectures, completing assignments, and building social relationships with domestics were…

This discussion examines an academic intervention designed to enhance the motivation and classroom engagement of English Language Learners (ELLs) during literacy-based activities. Stemming from a sociocultural perspective of literacy (Au, 1993; Perez, 2004) within a funds of knowledge framework (González, Moll, & Amanti , 2005), our approach…

Teaching reading to low-level English as a Second Language (ESL) students can be a challenge, according to the author. At times, teachers are teaching adult students to read in English when some in class are not literate in their first language. In such a situation, they are not mapping a sound-symbol correspondence onto a known oral language, as…

Exemplary Middle Grades Research: Evidence-Based Studies Linking Theory to Practice features research published throughout 2009 in MGRJ that has been identified by the Information Age Publishing's review board as the most useful in terms of assisting educators with making practical applications from evidence-based studies to classroom and school…

When English language learners (ELLs) don't speak in class or make friends outside their language group, teachers often attribute the problem in the student's cultural background. It's possible, however, that the method of teaching ELLs is part of the problem. A growing number of schools are trying to roll back that problem by launching…

Between 1979 and 2008, the number of school-age children (ages 5-17) in the United States who spoke a language other than English at home increased from 3.8 to 10.9 million, or from 9 to 21 percent of the population in this age range, according to the latest figures from the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES). The NCES also reveals…

This article presents several units from a course on German Humor offered at Washington University in St. Louis in the Spring of 2003 and 2006. The course was constructed according to the principles of the task-based classroom outlined by James Lee and employed at Georgetown University. The emphasis in each of the four units, which address East…

The purpose of this paper is to describe basic skills students in relation to their participation in basic skills and their success in transitioning to college-level classes, and the momentum they gain towards college success from this participation. In the period of time covered by the data used for this analysis, 24 colleges offered I-BEST…

This report describes the approach to teaching German used at Rose Hill Junior High School in Redmond, Washington. The program provides for individualized instruction, and no major emphasis is put on any basic textbook. The program's development is summarized, followed by detailed discussion of the following: (1) the first phase of implementation,…

The purpose of this article is to describe the attempts of faculty members in one teacher education program to foster integration of content and skills across courses, prepare teachers for the diverse classrooms they will encounter, and connect course content to real life experiences. This paper describes the design of a cross-curricular video…

This paper describes the Foreign Language Alternative Program (FLAP) of Bellevue Community College, in Washington state. The program is designed to provide students with alternative choices best fitted to their individual needs, and is thus individualized and equipped to deal with both academic and vocational programs. The first year of a given…