With the goal of exploring a motivating way to approach world language teaching and learning in order to promote lifelong language learning, this article reports on a year-long, collaborative action research study of two middle-school German classes that used an imagined communities curriculum. The curriculum, co-constructed with the classroom…

Background: Creativity is one of the key competencies for the talent of the 21st century to meet future challenges in a complex world. It is also an innovative basis for students to discover and pose questions. Purpose: This study aimed to explore which two interventions of the problem-oriented teaching model, teacher-guided problem finding (TGPF)…

We present a drawing discovery lab that crosscuts multiple disciplines in biology and links concepts in genetics and evolutionary thinking to enhance understanding of the genotype-to-phenotype transformation. These combined concepts are also linked to ecological frameworks in nature through the model of biological plasticity. Students and teachers…

Drawing from six-months of action research with spectacle theatre-makers in Chicago, this study explores multimodal, expeditionary practice of teaching artists who apprenticed girls through Redmoon Theatre's Dramagirls program. Concepts of new literacy design and aesthetic experience illustrate teaching in socio-semiotic and material worldcraft,…

The aim of this study is to reveal the contribution of digital storytelling to the creative thinking skills of middle school seventh grade students. The study was designed as a mixed method research. The data were obtained from the digital stories created by the students through block-based coding, video recordings and student interviews.…

This article examines the role that drawing can play in enabling children and young people to theorize concepts of time. In two, independent Australian research projects, children aged between 5 and 8 years were asked to respond to the question, "What might the future be like?", while 12-14 year olds were asked, "What does history…

Recent efforts to define qualities of effective teaching practice have done little to capture the role of play, imagination, and creativity in classroom teaching. Drawing on theories of play and data from a two-year case study that included classroom observations, interviews, artifact collection, and surveys, the author examines the ways in which…

This mixed methods case study examined middle school students' empathy with the environment within a critical place-based art classroom. The curriculum was informed by the ecological imagination, which calls for a new mode of education: education that embraces the arts as a way to conceive of pro-ecological perspectives, other ways of being…

For almost a century, researchers have studied creative imagination, most typically that of children. This article reports on a study of the development of creative imagination of Chinese youths and its relation to the educational environment. Data consisted of 4,162 students from grades 4 through 12. Findings showed that students' creative…

Role-play is one of the most engaging instruments for imagining what is not actually present. Role-play can take a variety of forms: student(s) enacting; teacher(s) enacting; and student(s) and teacher(s) enacting together. In this article, the author examines a number of different ways for teachers to incorporate role-play in their classrooms to…

In an effort to make reading more visible and find out what goes on in the minds of adolescent readers, the author led a group of seventh-grade students in creating Symbolic Reading Inventories. The students created "snapshot" scenes from the books they were reading and placed themselves, as readers, in or around the picture. Reading is a complex…

It is widely believed that a child's imagination ought to be stimulated and developed in education. Yet, few teachers understand what the imagination is or how it lends itself to practical methods and techniques that can be used easily in classroom instruction. This book offers practical help for teachers who want to engage, stimulate, and develop…

These conference proceedings address the following six topics: (1) "Change and the Future" (e.g., English language education in Japan, sociolinguistics in Hong Kong, and Esperanto); (2) "Children and Language Education" (e.g. a short-term language immersion case study, virtual classrooms for bilingual students, and the role of…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…