This article is based on a research project carried out by the author between 1997 and 2001. The article or story has two main characters: the pacifier and the concept of childhood. The idea is to use the pacifier optically, as a text and a context where the pacifier is a starting point for interpretations and reflections about modern Norwegian…

We examine the role of tasks that have the intended effect of teachers re-conceiving the mathematics they teach as comprising a coherent body of meaningful ideas. We ground our discussion in ideas of trigonometry and modular functions and draw from a professional development research project to illustrate our approach. In this project, many…

Using storytelling from his experiences with the Western Apache, Keith Basso elaborates the notion that "wisdom sits in places," that is, the way in which social and cultural knowledge and guidance--wisdom--is based on experience. Because experience occurs in places, landscapes (and their stories and place names) can come to encode social and…

Switzerland is the land of Big Ideas, where even the streets have Nobel prizes. At the European particle physics lab known as CERN, the roads through campus bear the names of Einstein, Curie, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Working amid those tributes to giants of the past century, physicists from around the world are trying to make history of their own and…

This study examines the organizational and institutional factors that may be associated with the success of schools of social work (SOSWs) in securing research grant awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and constituent agencies. Using data from the CRISP database on NIH grant funding, the Lombardi Program on Measuring University…

The article presents the rationale, methodology, and selected outcomes from "More than a body's work," a collaborative, international, arts educational interactive research project. The project, taking place in both New York and England, explored the ways in which young people construct and "perform" identity through the…

The field of teacher education is border and boundary rich. Navigating and attempting to confront the seemingly intractable boundaries between schools and universities, and between research and teacher education goes with the territory. Schools and teacher education may share the broad goal of improved educational outcomes for all students, but…

Since 2000, The Wallace Foundation, nationally recognized for its involvement in educational programs, has supported efforts to improve the training and conditions of school leaders to better enable them to improve student achievement. One of these efforts in Delaware was the development of district level aspiring leadership development programs.…

From 2002 to 2006 the Australian Government funded the Adult Literacy Research Program (ALRP), which was managed by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). The NCVER commissioned two projects to reflect on the research undertaken through the program. The first, the Adult Literacy Resource, brings together the key messages in…

Student engagement is widely viewed as an important antecedent to learning and achievement; however, research finds that engagement declines sharply as students advance through school. This article uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the engagement of high school seniors working on the IB Diploma Program's extended essay. Average engagement…

In this paper we describe a UK-based participatory action research project that looks beyond the discourse of tolerance to investigate and challenge heteronormative processes in primary schools through reflective action research. This 28-month ESRC-funded project supports 15 primary teachers working in schools in three regions of the UK to develop…

Research-like experiences range from relatively "canned" labs that are highly controlled by the instructor (such as those described in Lord and Orkwiszewski 2006) to more individually designed projects (e.g., Switzer and Shriner 2000; Wyatt 2005). This article describes a laboratory approach that allows for many of the benefits of independent or…

This article draws on a recent research project in New Zealand on teaching literature in the multicultural classroom. Its focus is on how one teacher-researcher used the cultural and linguistic diversity of a junior, secondary English class as a resource in the development of her programme. It details a sequence of activities designed for a unit…

Project Fleur-de-lis[TM] (PFDL) was established to provide a tiered approach to triage and treat children experiencing trauma symptoms after Hurricane Katrina. PFDL provides school screening in schools in New Orleans and three tiers of evidence-based treatment (EBT) to disaster-exposed children utilizing a public health approach to meet the…

This entire issue is devoted to the problem of producing enough food for the world population and of distributing it equitably. Areas covered include reports on the latest agricultural research, biological research concerned with more efficient photosynthesis, nutrition, and the world social structure, politics, and economics of food. (MA)