The structure and functioning mechanics of a student-driven art course, "Arts and Ideas" [described in the September 2001 issue of "Art Education" in "Art and Ideas: Reaching Nontraditional Art Students" (Andrews, 2001)] were designed to create a classroom environment that would promote greater student input into learning and the choice of art…

The notion of "student voice," or a student role in the decision making and change efforts of schools, has emerged in the new millennium as a potential strategy for improving the success of school reform efforts. Yet few studies have examined this construct either theoretically or empirically. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective, this article…

Online learning communities provide opportunities for connections in several ways: instructor to students, students to instructor, and students to students. As online instructors and researchers, we describe the essential elements for developing online learning communities and the strategies we've used for creating these type of learning…

This study investigates the current situation of Arabic education in the United States with an overarching question of, "What is the best way for a student of Arabic in the United States to achieve Superior proficiency?" This study focuses on two elite institutions of Arabic education in the United States. This study is based on 3 sources of…

Freedom Schools, which operated during 1964 after the collaborative efforts of several Civil Rights organizations, provided an opportunity to understand how students can drive the curriculum to meet individual and collective needs within a community. The presence and use of poetry throughout the Freedom Schools was mysterious, given that it is…

Today's children may be exposed to violence in their environment, through the media, at home, and in school. Some children live in countries at war, while others survive in neighborhoods where street gangs prevail. Most parents and children used to assume they could depend upon schools to be safe places, free from abuse and violence. Now it seems…

Teacher education students' instructional metacognitive knowledge needs to be well developed to promote both their own learning and their prospective students' learning. In this study, we asked teacher education students to provide answers to the question "What happens in my university classes that helps me to learn?" Students identified…

What can be learned from two films with "rock" and "school" in their titles, about rock in school and about music and schooling more broadly? "School of Rock" (2003), a "family comedy," and "Rock School" (2005), a documentary, provoke a range of questions, ideological and otherwise, surrounding the inclusion of rock in formal instructional…

Learning objects are instructional materials found on the Internet that can be used to illustrate, support, supplement, or assess student learning. Small in size, they can provide instruction that is just enough, just in time, just for you. Is it time to move your classroom into the twenty-first century? In this article, the author explores what…

Learning science includes learning to argue with "inscriptions": images used to symbolize information persuasively. This study examined sixth-graders learning to invest inscriptions with representational status, in a geographic information system (GIS)-based science investigation. Learning to reason with inscriptions was studied in emergent…

The authors conducted an ethnography investigating children's lived experiences in a 3-day residential environmental education (EE) program with 20 gifted 4th- and 5th-grade students. The authors also conducted participant observation and a series of interviews before, during, and after the trip. After the authors conducted the interviews and…

This paper reports a videotaped self-observation of a 47 minute ESL reading lesson. The focus of the lesson was on intensive reading. The entire teaching session was videotaped; the videotaped data were analyzed using (a) ethnographic microanalysis, (b) selective verbatim transcripts, (c) Seating Chart Observation REcord (SCORE), (d)…

The culture of the young may, in fact, be a harbinger enticing us to follow a pathway from which will emerge the re-conceptualized educational practices of this new century. The culture of those older will, no doubt, strive to maintain the more golden aspects of their now historical learning experiences. One of the tasks of all educators, but…

"Wellness" is a widely used term to describe a participative process through which the individual becomes aware of and makes choices toward a more successful or healthy existence. Many colleges and universities have utilized wellness philosophies or models in a variety of areas. The wellness model serves as an outline for decision making in which…

The study explored the effects of student selection versus teacher selection of instructional activities on the activities selected and reasons given by teachers and 42 elementary resource room students for selecting particular activities. Ss' progress was monitored by a curriculum-based repeated measurement data collection and evaluation system…