"Every Child Matters" under New Labour provided a framework for services for young children's care and education. It was pushed aside by the Conservative-led coalition and replaced by "More Great Childcare". The UK as a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, therefore has obligations for…

Let's face it--teaching can be stressful. In this generation of Common Core Standards and highstakes testing, educators are often left without the time to plan positive behavioral supports or the sanity to cultivate compassionate relationships with their students. Even though they understand the critical relationship between behavior and…

This empirical study examines the virtual exchanges between an African American mother and son's engagement in a blog. Using literacy as social practices as a framework, this study describes how blogging was developed and used to create affinity spaces, encouraged apprenticeship models, and shaped agentic roles within their family. Attention…

The contemporary interest in researching student agency in science education reflects concerns about the relevance of schooling and a shift in science education towards understanding learning in science as a complex social activity. The purpose of this article is to identify problems confronting the science education community in the development…

Both educational research and practices pay little attention to the experiences of girls related to trauma within the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Educators typically take a deficit approach toward youth experiencing trauma and often reinforce trauma through discriminatory and exclusionary disciplinary practices. Using a Youth Participatory Action…

This chapter describes one university's effort to integrate civic engagement programs and leadership education curriculum, informed by empowerment theory, servant leadership, and community organizing methodologies.

Undergraduate biology programs in smaller liberal arts colleges are increasingly becoming focused on health science fields. This narrowing of focus potentially decreases opportunities for these students to explore other sub-fields of biology. This perspectives article highlights how one small university in Connecticut decided to institute a…

From an ecological perspective, learning and development in childhood and throughout the lifespan occur in the context of interactions within complex social networks. Collectively, the articles in this special issue illuminate three important themes related to teacher-student interactions within instructional contexts: relationships, competence,…

Evidence suggests that there is a correlation between the violent images and stories we view through media and the effects those stories have on children and young adults, namely the suppression of compassion. With so much emphasis on academic standards, sometimes social emotional skills are grossly neglected. Students are being taught how to…

Self-regulated learning (SLR) is a socially embedded process in which individuals use strategies to influence thoughts, behaviours and environments in ways that enable them to achieve their academic goals. As a form of engagement that is almost exclusively associated with academic success, empowerment and agency, researchers are committed to…

A plethora of political volleyball regarding the use of specific derogatory terms (e.g., "the retarded") recently made headlines throughout the United States. Often movies are made without concern for their portrayal of persons with disabilities using stereotypes and stigma supporting language in the script. Many of those in special…

Educators in many Western nations have used the Kübler-Ross stage model of grief for five decades as a lens to explain parental response to disability. A recent article in "Improving Schools," representing this deficit model, asserted that the grief lens is useful in understanding parent's response to learning that their child qualified…

This qualitative study of 3-to-5-year-old children's hiding places and experiences is framed around the importance of recognizing children as active agents in creating their own culture and places in the world. Through the use of interactive data collection strategies collected at school and in children's homes, including book discussions,…

This keynote consists of two parts. The first part offers some general observations from the past related to the power (and eventual powerlessness) of education. The aim is to create a framework with which the specific case, discussed in the second part, must be interpreted. Furthermore, it is emphasised that almost every pedagogical intervention…

Much of the research writing done in high school and college lacks the personal and social component that is integral to student engagement. This author suggests that the research paper take the form of a national column that is authored by students, giving them authority and a sense of empowerment.