This article grasps the essence of how a science content can be foregrounded by elaborating around concepts as floating and sinking, in relation to boats. The data consist of a videotaped authentic session with one preschool teacher and four children. The model of pedagogical reason and action [Shulman, L. S. 1987. "Knowing and Teaching:…

There is widespread agreement that emotions play a critical role in informal science learning, yet little is known about the emotional experiences of children in informal science learning environments. This study aims to address this challenge by exploring the relationships among emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement in a science museum…

We report our progress on the "River Memorial Museum" didactic intervention project developed with schools, in the basin of the Atoyac River in Mexico, that are significantly impacted by the pollution produced through industrialisation. The teachers of the elementary schools in these communities, environmental scientists, educators, and…

This co-authored qualitative case study explores the challenge of teachers connecting with their students at the middle school level, especially when White teachers serve predominantly African-American students in large urban metropolitan areas like St. Louis, Missouri. While research has established the need for teachers to better understand the…

Both curators and educators craft ways for others to enter into relationships with objects and ideas, finding personal meaning therein. As university art educators of a teacher training program, the authors invited their preservice art educators to enter into curatorial acts that call on them to unpack their own teacher identities and…

The Lawrence Hall of Science implemented a two-phase project, Building Understanding in Language Diverse Students, to modify school group workshops and drop-in public programs to better support linguistically diverse students and visitors. As we applied language support strategies developed for the school group workshops to additional areas of the…

This essay explores the ways that museums educate adults, and reveals that, as cultural educators, museums have the ability to promote hegemonic stories through their displays. I discuss these ideas through my visits to two museums in Atlanta, Georgia, USA: the Atlanta History Centre and the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History.…

Literature on art education often emphasizes dialogue as a preferred approach and as a way of practicing democratic education in museums and galleries. Dialogue-based tours in such contexts are often characterized by a sense of harmony and agreement. In contrast, this article discusses the democratic aspect and political potentiality when…

This study is a collaborative project between university researchers and museum practitioners investigating ways to advance STEM learning opportunities for young children and their families in museums. The focus of the work is on how the knowledge resources that are available to families (e.g., prior knowledge, information provided by the museum…

Thoughtful and intentional collaborations among small, community-curated museums, colleges, and schools have the potential to create transformative learning opportunities for all partners while also improving access to, and preservation of, museum collections. In this article, we describe the Digital Scholarship in Museum Partnerships (DSMP)…

Student-scientist-teacher interactions provide students with several advantages. They provide opportunities to interact with experts and professionals in the field, give students a chance at meeting a role model that may impact students' career choices, and increase awareness of available career options combined with an understanding of how their…

A driving factor in designing interactive museum exhibits to support simultaneous users is that visitors learn from one another via observation and conversation. Researchers typically analyze such collaborative interactions among museumgoers through manual coding of live- or video-recorded exhibit use. We sought to determine how log data from an…

Taking multilingual, minimal urban texts as objects of its analysis, this paper suggests that language(s) (writing) need(s) to be examined as part of "multimodal ensembles" (Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). "Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication." Arnold). I examine and draw parallels…

This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods practice workshop attracted 40 participants and aimed to train doctoral students and early career researchers in practices of observing, feeling,…

Addressing complex global issues -- such as alterations in nutrient cycles, climate change, large-scale drought, widespread erosion, and new disease vectors -- require adaptive changes in our collective behavior and policies. To date, approaches to advancing science literacy to address such challenges have generally failed to produce sufficient…