The authors are both professional practitioners (law and social work, respectively) who entered the university as discipline-based scholars. Their respective interests in teaching and learning have led them both down a path where they have transitioned from a discipline-based orientation to organizational roles grounded primarily in teaching and…

This qualitative study examines the distinguishing themes of cultural responsiveness in state- and federally-derived document-based learning materials. Two data sources--"Teaching with Documents" articles in Social Education and Document Based Questions on New York State 11th-grade U.S. History and Government Regents exams--were examined…

Son and Goldstone (2009) provided orienting activities intended to increase personal engagement, and these activities reduced participants' transfer based on concepts of signal detectability theory. I offer a theoretical interpretation that differs from theirs. First, instead of assuming that activity is contextualized in some conditions and not…

Selective attention is usually considered an egocentric mechanism, biasing sensory information based on its behavioural relevance to oneself. This study provides evidence for an equivalent allocentric mechanism that allows passive observers to selectively attend to information from the perspective of another person. In a negative priming task,…

Many research findings about animal play apply to children's play, revealing structural and functional similarities with mammals in general and primates in particular. After an introduction to life-history theory, and before turning to humans, the author reviews research about the two mammals in which play has been studied the most extensively:…

Some years ago, the author had her first opportunity to teach an undergraduate American Romanticism course, which meant she had a chance to teach "Moby-Dick" the way she thought it should be taught. Meeting two days a week, her course was set up so that students read about thirty pages of "Moby-Dick" for one class meeting a week paired with…

This research explores the ways in which normative structures organize experiences and representations of identities. It reports on two groups, one in which the members identified as rural and heterosexual and the other as urban and lesbian. Both participated in literary reading and response practices organized by a literary anthropological…

Researchers, theorists, practitioners, and policy makers have shown interest in better preparing students to self-regulate their learning. In educational psychology, researchers have developed a number of pedagogical models and instructional strategies designed to facilitate students' self-regulated learning (SRL). This effort is demonstrative of…

This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological…

In this paper, I show how Mead's theory of emergence can prove explanatory in how the theory-practice gap is co-created and sustained in "front-end loading" university programs. Taking teacher education as an exemplar, I argue that trainee teachers encounter different and oft-times conflicting environmental, social and cultural conditions in the…

"Geography for Life: National Geography Standards, Second Edition" ("GFL2") is the recently released update of the original edition published in 1994. The original edition of "Geography for Life" provided excellent guidance on geographic content for teachers, curriculum designers, publishers, and pre-service teachers as well as many other…

Compensatory pedagogy is in theory a strategy used to manage social and cultural diversity (Sleeter, 2007) by providing extra resources or special treatment for so-called deprived groups. A problem with this particular kind of approach to social and cultural diversity is that it lacks critical awareness of the way social differences (i.e. race,…

This qualitative study reveals the ways in which reading and reflecting on two counter-narrative young adult novels fostered opportunities for preservice English teachers to think more acutely about their understandings of race within and beyond the text. Participants expressed feelings of empathy with and connection to characters whose cultural…

Drawing on research on complementary schools in the United Kingdom, this presentation considers some of the issues in the research method used in studying this after-school community site. Processes of analysis employed by the ethnography team are disclosed so as to illuminate the dynamics of theory building in a large research team. (Contains 2…

School psychologists can help build resilience in youth in many ways. This article offers a list of some easy techniques to use when working with individuals or groups, most based on basic cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) techniques. They include: (1) Emotional awareness; (2) Emotional Regulation; (3) Cognitive Flexibility; (4) Self-efficacy; and…