In recent years, the concept "making" has been claimed by "The Maker Movement." While making offers great potential (and resources) for art integration in informal learning sites, maker discourse is often intertwined with a neoliberal mission. For example, movement leaders glorify Steve Jobs and hark on the myth that hobbies…

Careful consideration is essential for developing and conducting effective paraprofessional development. This study described a process of paraprofessional development and outcomes from assessments, workshops, and social validation focus group interviews from one rural public school in the USA. Fourteen paraprofessionals and their supervisors…

The low representation of Indigenous people in the sciences is often described as an effect of colonization and the result of a dominant western science paradigm that ignores or dismisses Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Initiated by Indigenous faculty of the University of Wisconsin, the Tribal Youth…

"Suzanne's Project" is a 28-hour program, which began in the Antalya province of Turkey in 2011 to empower small-scale women farmers to manage their farms as a business by training them in computer literacy, technical production topics, and farm business management. A survey 1.5 years after the workshop ended found that all of the women…

This study applied the stages of transformative learning to faculty perceptions and application of best practices to online learning. Research questions included: Can transformative learning theory constructs be used to identify potential barriers in faculty development and delivery of online instruction?; How does the stage of transformative…

This study explored how often Saudi EFL teachers engage in professional development (PD) activities and how useful these activities were to them for their teaching practices. A random sample of seventy-seven English language teachers in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, was selected. Questionnaires were used as a data collection tool. The…

The gender gap in computing has persisted--and grown--over the past 40 years. One class of solutions offered as a way to close the gap are software and hardware design tools created for girls. This study compares one such construction kit--the Adafruit Flora--to a comparable kit that was not designed with girls in mind--the Arduino Leonardo. Using…

Many Canadian universities have created professional development programs for their teaching assistants (TA) but may be uncertain about how to bridge the gap between TAs' knowledge of effective teaching strategies and TAs' confident applications of these strategies. We present a technique used in a two-day training workshop to enhance graduate…

Tremendous research on teacher leadership over the last decade has revealed both the prevalence of and the imperatives for a model teaching force that can actively participate in school improvement (Harrison & Killion, 2007; Katzenmeyer & Moller, 2001; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). The highly participative teacher leader paradigm is so…

Diversity is a word used by many people with different meanings and interpretations. The differences in the way we understand and use the word "diversity" pose unique challenges for those who do social justice education. Students and educators may not share the same definition, connotation, or beliefs related to the idea of diversity.…

In an effort to support future teachers in their work toward enacting (and not just espousing) counter-hegemonic, social justice concepts, this research describes a course assignment that required teacher candidates (N = 134) to identify an issue related to power and/or privilege with which they personally grapple, and to then construct a…

The acquisition of both transversal and specific competences cannot be achieved using conventional methodologies. New methodologies must be applied that promote the necessary competences for proper professional development. Interdisciplinary projects can be a suitable tool for competence-based learning. A priori, this might be complicated, as…

Drawing from the research methods of three distinct literacy studies, in this piece, we highlight the visualisation approaches integral to our enquiry processes as researchers working to make sense of literacy and learning. We aim to encourage, provoke even, a conversation about visualisation processes in literacy research by sharing the…

This article describes a review undertaken in 2012-2013 by Nutrition and Dietetics, Flinders University, to assess the Indigenous health curriculum of the Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics (BND) and Masters of Nutrition and Dietetics (MND). An action research framework was used to guide and inform inquiry. This involved four stages, each of…

We highlight ways to support interest-driven creation of digital media in Scratch, a visual-based programming language and community, within a high school programming workshop. We describe a collaborative approach, the programmers' collective, that builds on social models found in do-it-yourself and open source communities, but with scaffolding…