This study examines the experiences of a number of participants from urban community colleges with high percentages of students from underrepresented populations in Central California. The participants were involved in action research with the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California. The purpose of the study is to…

Because the senior population comes from various backgrounds, how to meet their needs and to cater to their different levels poses a great challenge for aging-education instructors when designing effective projects. The goal of this paper was to present the implementation of an innovative and effective project in aging education titled The K-shape…

This paper analyses the uncertain foundations of the use of action research in a graduate teaching degree. This analysis is conducted by the course coordinator in partnership with a recent graduate. The uncertainty is traced to the pedagogical incoherence of the course that is caused by philosophical infidelity. The philosophy and practice of the…

This paper is a reflexive account of the use of critical social theory within my practice as an action researcher. It is set within the ongoing debates between pragmatist and critical tendencies within action research. The paper discusses how a selective deployment of key constructs from the work of Jurgen Habermas has supported my work as a…

Collaboration is identified as a key feature of pedagogic action research (see Norton, 2009), which is often a core part of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) methodology. Despite this, there appear to be few articles which explore experiences of collaborative partnerships within SoTL. This paper is a personal reflective essay which…

The use of technology in the evaluation of higher education programs is a mainstay. Physical evidence rooms, face-to-face interviews, and reviewing of documentation on site have become obsolete. Relying on the heavy use of technology in the evaluation process has allowed what some believe to be a more cohesive, streamlined approach to the…

PROFILES is a project of teacher education and curriculum innovation funded by the FP7-programme of the European Union. The aim of PROFILES is implementing innovative science teaching practices incorporating a societal perspective and compassing inquiry-based science learning. The University of Bremen, Germany, as one of the partners, combines…

This study explores the lived experience of democratic civic education for middle school students. Grounded in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology as guided by Heidegger (1962), Gadamer (1960/2003), Casey (1993), and Levinas (1961/2004), among others, the framework for conducting action-sensitive research, as described by van Manen (2003),…

Attempts to recruit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into nursing degrees have made minimal impact on the number of registered nurses working in Australia's healthcare sector. Yet increasing the number of Indigenous nurses remains one of the most important objectives in strategies to close the health gap between Indigenous and…

Series of international studies have shown that subtitled television programs provide a rich context for foreign language acquisition. This study investigated whether incidental language acquisition occurs from watching a television program with/without subtitles. Children in the experimental conditions watch: (a) a 15 minute snapshot of a well…

"Visible teaching and learning" is an educational philosophy that makes the processes and endpoints in a classroom highly visible and understandable to all involved. This was translated into a series of lesson "roadmaps" for a group of chemistry students studying rates of reaction and reaction energetics. Their end-of-unit…

October 6, 2012: 109 adults simultaneously threw their heads back and shouted "I discovered!" at the top of their lungs. Slightly mangled bright-green paper helicopters littered the floor. The class was six minutes into a daylong journey of discovery, during which this group of volunteer trainers would learn to facilitate a curriculum…

This article gives an account of an action research project that I used to examine and improve my own teaching practices. In this project, I used insights from critical pedagogy to inform my transition from a transmission to a social reform teaching perspective. When I used the critical pedagogical concept of constructed consciousness and the…

This teacher research project focused on utilizing blended learning to teach writing to middle school students. The intervention was designed to fit into individual lessons needed to improve students' writing skills with the main focus on sentence structure. Sixteen (16) 7th grade students were assessed with a writing sample applying the new…

Play is generally identified as a basic tool for effective learning and development in children. This study explores the ways in which amorphous or unstructured play contributes to children's overall development at the pre-primary level, helping to develop cognitive, social, and motor skills. The findings indicate that through unstructured play,…