Teachers of history will sooner or later encounter issues that are met with disbelief, protest, or feelings of discomfort by the pupils. This special issue aims to contribute to the field of research into teaching sensitive and controversial issues in history by integrating historical, educational and socio-psychological perspectives and theories.…

Although human patient simulation (HPS) began more than a decade ago, substantial evidence argues for increased use of simulation in teaching basic science courses, such as physiology and the full integration of simulation into medical school curricula so as to benefit both educators and learners. The introduction and application of simulation in…

This qualitative study explores the impact of a workshop on collaborative research assignment design that brought together an interdisciplinary group of faculty in a librarian-facilitated community of practice. Faculty participants attended the workshop, revised and implemented their assignments, and completed a follow-up interview. Themes that…

Teacher professional development (PD) is often extended as a driver of good teaching and effective schools. In recent years, teacher PD has increasingly focused on developing teacher social capital by placing teachers within professional communities to collectively solve instructional problems. Using Bourdieu's and Coleman's conceptions of social…

Background: The new core curriculum for basic education in Finland emphasises the interrelation between learners' participation and multidisciplinary learning. Each learner must be provided with an opportunity to join at least one multidisciplinary learning module each year. Hence, student teachers also implement a multidisciplinary learning…

This work describes a semester-long learning module designed to equip students with the analytical and practical skills necessary to be successful in an interdisciplinary polymer research environment. This learning module combines laboratory experiments involving both synthesis and materials characterization with lectures in polymer theory, and…

Incorporating research activities at the secondary-school level is an effective method to teach science; however, students and teachers may feel intimidated when trying to identify a suitable research topic. Ideas may be obtained from short articles in periodicals or newspapers to allow students to design their own experiments and interpret data.…

Tomorrow's professionals will require an enhanced capacity for collaboration, cooperation and creative thinking. Markauskaite and Goodyear (Markauskaite, L., and P. Goodyear. 2016. "Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education: Innovation, Knowledgeable Action and Actionable Knowledge". Springer) have posited "epistemic…

Agency has attracted considerable attention, especially of late. Nevertheless, perceptions of language learners as nonagentive persist. In this article the Douglas Fir Group's call for a transdisciplinary perspective is heeded in a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory's (CDST) conceptualization of agency. It is suggested that CDST maintains the…

Critical race theory (CRT) was used to frame a study of the impact of racial resegregation on students in a public school district. Racism operated in the district at multiple ontological levels -- such as interpersonal microaggressions, structural economic arrangements, and discursive processes. CRT provided a rationale for the interdisciplinary…

International student mobility to the United States (US) has increased over the past two decades. Despite the increase in numbers, international students may experience racism, nativism, and other forms of discrimination within the US context. Much of the existing literature focus on how international students can assimilate and cope with these…

Teaching children scientific vocabulary is an important part of science education and should be carefully considered when planning units of work so that children can understand new words and apply them to their learning (Sewell, 2018). This view is echoed in the aims of the National Curriculum in England, which states that pupils should be able to…

The launching of The Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning is a signal achievement. I begin this commentary by speculating on why it is that the Psychology of Language Learning (PLL) has enjoyed such vigor of late. I expect that one reason is the coming together of a critical mass of researchers and strong leaders over their shared…

Students in secondary school often find mathematics abstract and irrelevant, frequently questioning its usefulness and purpose. The discourse around STEM education has encouraged secondary teachers to attempt connecting mathematics with other STEM disciplines, most commonly with science. By making connections between content and skills through…

This paper reports the findings from a pilot qualitative study that set out to investigate pre-service primary school teachers' beliefs concerning the integration of children's literature in their mathematics learning and teaching. The thematic and content analyses were drawn from self-reported beliefs of 33, third- and fourth-year pre-service…