Why do teachers and other educational practitioners become researchers of their own practice? Is their primary motivation one of self-development, the attainment of a doctoral qualification, or the desire to improve outcomes for their learners? Practitioner research is often believed to bring about transformation, particularly in its more…

Much has been written about teachers' professional learning through inquiry into their own practice. The emphasis has been on teachers researching, reflecting and making change in their practice. Despite the wealth of literature concerning teacher inquiry and professional development, there is little about teacher educators with respect to their…

This article presents an interview with Linda Gottfredson (nee Howarth), who obtained her BA (psychology, Phi Beta Kappa) from UC Berkeley in 1969, served in the Peace Corps in the Malaysian Health Service from 1969 to 1972, and received her PhD (sociology) from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in 1976. She was Research Scientist at JHU's Center for…

The International Boiling Point Project is an online, collaborative project for students in grades 6-12 in which they investigate the impact of four factors (room temperature, elevation, volume of water and heating device) on the boiling point of water. A detailed procedure is provided for students in order to limit the number of variables…

There is increased phenomenological interest, philosophical and empirical, in the meaning and meaning-making dimensions of the experience of movement in physical education (Kentel & Dobson, 2007; Kretchmar, 2000a; Loland, 2006; Smith, 2007; Whitehead, 1990). This scholarly concern about the qualities and characteristics of movement shifts the…

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions…

This article argues for approaching pedagogical outcomes as ends-in-view that guide, but do not determine or limit, pedagogical possibilities. In this article, the authors draw from their experience in a senior-level, interdisciplinary service-learning course called Literacy and Community to demonstrate that the moments of conflict generated by…

This study investigated whether the mere knowledge of the meaning of variables can facilitate inquiry learning processes and outcomes. Fifty-seven college freshmen were randomly allocated to one of three inquiry tasks. The concrete task had familiar variables from which hypotheses about their underlying relations could be inferred. The…

Experiential learning is making meaning from direct experience. Experiential learning is used in workplace training (Silberman, 2007), and is the theoretical foundation for all practicum and co-op program learning. Supported by findings on expert/novice learning styles (Boshuizen, Bromme, and Gruber, H., 2004), this essay reflects on the practice…

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework has become a prominent model of teaching and learning in online and blended learning environments. Considerable research has been conducted which employs the framework with promising results, resulting in wide use to inform the practice of online and blended teaching and learning. For the CoI model to…

The technique class can be an amalgam of frustration and joy, cautious imitation and mindless replication, being right and being wrong. Competing requisites, such as a desire for expressive freedom in relation to the demand that a movement be precisely structured, can unwittingly create a tension between teachers and students. The reasons for such…

This new biochemistry laboratory course moves through a progression of experiments that generates a platform for guided inquiry-based experiments. RNase One gene is isolated from prokaryotic genomic DNA, expressed as a tagged protein, affinity purified, and tested for activity and substrate specificity. Student pairs present detailed explanations…

During a recent unit on characteristics of animals in different environments, "backyard safari" trips around the schoolyard provided opportunities for students to describe ways that animals are adapted to their unique environments. This led to a discussion of how polar bears have adjusted to living in the arctic. Therefore, students' questions…

John Dewey's "religious attitude" has great potential for the educative development of children's spirituality. This is because it enables their spiritual understandings to become more intelligently composed--not just in a cognitive or hyper-rational sense, but as a way of being. This paper provides an outline of Dewey's approach, which is…

Wikis are simply Web sites that provide easy-to-use tools for creating, editing, and sharing digital documents, images, and media files. Multiple participants can enter, submit, manage, and update a single Web workspace creating a community of authors and editors. Wiki projects help young people shift from being "consumers" of the Internet to…