Students' curiosity in the world and sense of belonging in the elementary classroom can develop as teachers learn alongside students in the context of a critical literacy framework. In an end-of-year reflection, one of my fifth-graders, Anne (all names are pseudonyms), a student of color (at times, I used the term "student of color" to…

Argumentation is an indispensable part of scientific knowledge construction, and the inquiry laboratory is full of opportunities for argumentation. Yet, at primary schools, students learn science without any inducement to argumentation or inquiry. To fill this need, this study was aimed to develop pre-service primary teachers' understanding of and…

While traditional assessment models effectively evaluate student learning objectives within the classroom, they often fail to capture the extent to which students practice civic engagement, critical inquiry, and global citizenship following graduation. As educators, we often do not know whether students employ these concepts and embrace these…

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across the world were forced to move from a classroom-based delivery model to an online learning model which heavily disrupted the learning process for students. Despite proactive efforts for academic staff to embrace online teaching tools and techniques, the pressing urgency with which solutions…

The "A+ Inquiry" Capstone course has been taught at Minot State University every spring and fall term since the fall 2019 semester. Like a thesis, the course requires students to write a proposal paper describing their study, form a committee and propose their study to their committee, obtain Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval,…

Appreciative inquiry has become increasingly popular as a method for facilitating organisational or systemic change through focusing on the positive aspects and 'life giving properties of a system' as opposed to traditional 'deficit-based' approaches. However, there has been criticism that this process could invalidate negative experiences of…

Education is dominated by economic priorities and intellectual virtues that place emphasis on individual success, yet issues of social injustice are demanding of urgent attention. My hopes for social justice are rooted in education. I consider the place of schooling for continually reimagining social justice, and to think about what it might be to…

History shows that learning and collaborative inquiry are the path forward. Continuous improvement can produce great thinking and learning that enables the continuation to support the most vulnerable children. Civil rights organizers, such as Septima Clark, are viewed as model improvers. Regarded by many as the queen of the Civil Rights Movement,…

Gardening provides children with hands-on, minds-on, and inquiry science learning. This article describes the benefits of gardening, preparations for gardening with preschoolers using children's books, creation of a garden, and planting a garden. It presents ways in which teachers can look deeper for the practices and experiences that meet the…

Integrating STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in authentic ways is often overlooked in early childhood spaces, despite young children having the ability to engage with the world around them through STEM practices. This piece showcases the work of children in a prekindergarten classroom as they explored an integrated STEM…

This research project explores the use of 'happy accidents' as agents for facilitating more meaningful and critical exploration in secondary school art. Owing to a preoccupation with standardisation and quantifiable results, the more nebulous and invisible qualities of art have become deprioritised within many curricula. This paradigm creates…

This paper considers educational futures from the perspective of social justice. It takes as its framework futures studies, which looks at what is probable (what is likely to happen), what is possible (what could happen), and what is preferable (what we would like to see/make happen). It also makes the case for science fiction as a method of…

Guided by the questions "What can a dance curriculum look like when it purposefully integrates social-emotional learning?" and "What can we learn from the process of designing curriculum at the intersection of dance and SEL?" we relate the experience of creating curriculum for early elementary students. We build on current…

This paper investigates affect as part of children's sensemaking in the context of a play-based mixed-reality science learning environment. We build on theories of affect as disciplinary work by investigating the multiple layers of affect that are essential to children's scientific inquiry and to identify pedagogical moves that recognize, value,…

This article describes preservice art education students who curated an exhibition for a university gallery, using description and analysis as aesthetic inquiry processes. The students curated an exhibition that placed 1977 Central and Latin American and contemporary children's artworks in dialogue with each other. They constructed themes that…