Most students who engage in name-calling or tell demeaning jokes don't have deeply thought-out and deep-seated bias towards particular groups. Often, they're just picking up on the messages they hear repeated again and again in the schools. When peers challenge the language, it not only cuts down on the degrading messages themselves, but it also…

Student participation in discussion in traditional delivery and interactive college telecourses are compared. Results indicate that the norm of the consolidation of responsibility continues to prevail in traditional classroom discussion: a few students were responsible for the majority of interactions. However, in telecourses students frequently…

In recent years in Spain there has been a growing popular concern as well as research interest in the study of social relations pertaining to coexistence at school, including a desire to know the real incidence and nature of conflicts involved. Thus, a great variety of school interventions have been underway, with the aim of reducing the…

This study explored ways to increase authentic participation of Mexican American parents in the education of their children. It focused on direct dialogue between Spanish-speaking parents and English-speaking school personnel and how dialogue facilitated group development. The design of the study included phenomenological inquiry and action…

This phenomenological study sought to identify the attributes of meaningful learning experiences as found in an outdoor education program. Thirteen students in the Wilderness Writing Program at Brigham Young University were the sample of this study. Their participation in outdoor recreational activities and their reflections about their…

Since the time of Kinsey, sexuality education courses in colleges across the country have drawn large numbers of co-eds to their rosters. As educators move beyond discussions about the facts of anatomy, physiology, and biology, they increasingly look to technological advances to further the art of teaching. Taking a conversational approach to…

Immigration to a different country can change one's socioeconomic status, familial and social networks, cultural behavioral norms, language, and values. Immigrants to the United States usually reevaluate themselves and their identity as a result of this acculturation process. Group counseling can help alleviate the sense of isolation many…

Effective classroom discussion is improvisational, because its effectiveness derives from the fact that it is not scripted. Instead, the flow of the class is unpredictable, and emerges from the actions of both teachers and students. In this article, I apply principles from training classes for improvisational actors to provide practical…

Library media specialists are gung ho on technology, but they often lack the cash to take advantage of it, according to "SLJ"'s first-ever tech survey. Earlier this year, they reported on the various ways that school librarians use technology--from creating Web sites to policy-making to training students and colleagues. This time, they…

Prejudice and discrimination are ugly cousins, haunting humankind like the evil fairy who appears unbidden to curse the young princess. Is education the good fairy, bestowing tools to overcome this curse? A course the author taught in winter 2006 at the University of California, Irvine--one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the United…

This article discusses a reading instruction applicable to widely diverse classrooms, because it weaves together dynamic strands from three approaches to teaching reading: literature circle method, reciprocal teaching, and modern literary theories. The author presents three stages to achieve reading success: (1) applying the key features of…

In this article, the authors talk about the action research study they conducted involving literature discussion groups. They observed how students spontaneously took up roles as questioners, as emotional responders, as group facilitators, and as information providers without having been assigned roles in literature circles. They then selected…

In this article, the author examines the character of the conversations generated in an elementary teacher group as they worked on mathematical problems together and analyzed their students' work. Two distinct forms of talk--"exploratory" and "expository"--were found. The first type of talk occurred most prominently when discussions centered on…

In this article, we examine the construction of word meaning by students during collaborative activities in a multicultural classroom at a Dutch primary school. The analysis is based on recordings of student talk in small groups of four or five students during mathematics lessons. Difficulties with specific terms and expressions frequently arose…

Sexual harassment is a pervasive problem on our nation's college and university campuses, one that can have devastating results. Educational institutions had been shielded from liability for sexual harassment until the late 1990s, when two landmark Supreme Court decisions set forth a new standard for liability of institutions where students are…