Search results

While visual arts, drama, dance and music have been used to enhance literacy learning for many decades in preschool and primary classrooms, engaging with mobile learning can also provide many opportunities for young learners to explore and develop language and literacy. The use of mobile devices is of particular interest as technology has an impact on pedagogy and the mobility of digital devices provides many opportunities for engaged and meaningful literacy learning when teamed with the arts. In this chapter, we define the arts and their relationship with literacy learning before exploring a number of resources and practices for integrating their use in early learning settings.

Educators who teach for social justice connect what and how they teach in the classroom directly to humanity’s critical problems. Teacher education at the elementary level must center such themes of social justice in order to prepare today’s teachers to lead their students in developing an understanding of how to make the world a better place to live. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper presents three case studies of exemplary, pre-service teacher-created lessons that integrate the arts, social studies, and language arts around themes of social justice. Teacher-candidates envisioned, planned and taught effective, engaging, standards-based learning experiences that began with children’s literature and led to artistic expression.

Through lessons like these, teacher-candidates learned to meet arts, social studies, and literacy standards while building the skills and attitudes their students need as “citizens of the world.”

Elementary teacher education programs can help teacher-candidates to prepare for the challenge of teaching for social justice by integrating the arts with core academic areas, including social studies.

This integrated model suitably serves our current, mathematics- and literacy-focused, assessment-saturated school system. Pre-service teachers learn to plan and teach integrated learning activities. They learn practical ways to infuse the arts in both their field experience and future classrooms.

When the arts are central in education, students benefit in numerous important ways, developing critical and creative thinking skills, empathy, self-awareness, and the ability to collaborate with others productively. The arts, essential to humanity since the dawn of civilization, thus serve as a natural focal point for education for social justice.

The innovative methods involved in this study, in which subject areas throughout the elementary teacher education program are integrated in one meaningful, practical, applied lesson on social justice, represent a practical, original, and valuable way to enhance teacher education programs’ focus on social justice.

This chapter centers the investigation and findings of a participatory action research (PAR) study designed and implemented by four language arts teachers in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Using collaborative inquiry as a means of interrogating personal text selection practices for diverse groups of Albuquerque students, the teachers involved in this study came to understand their text selection as an ongoing struggle among historical traditions in the teaching of English, current critical perspectives within that field, and their own early experiences with literature. The findings of this PAR study emphasize the importance of using community-based research as a means of exercising teacher intellectual autonomy as well as the responsibility of practicing language arts teachers to investigate and reflect on text selection.

This study compares parallel philosophies of the work of American educator John Dewey in Art as Experience and the arts infused educational approach of the Reggio Emilia Schools of Italy.

This historical and contemporary comparative, cross-cultural analysis explores educational approaches that incorporate the arts in the process of learning and the use of democratic processes in collaborative learning approaches. Data sources include primary source historical documents, field observations, interviews, and primary source educational materials.

Similarities are identified across cultures and time in the examples analyzed for commonalities including arts creation as central to the processes of learning, democratic processes in collaborative project learning experiences, community involvement as an integral part of the learning processes, and imagination and communication as consistent elements in the experiences of the school. This study provides a historical and contemporary context for the cross-cultural analysis of the use of art in the learning processes as described by American educator John Dewey and the educators in the Reggio Emilia schools of Italy.

The Internet and World Wide Web offer a rapidly increasing quantity of valuable resources on Asia‐specific information. In view of the vast scope of the Asian countries and the fast proliferation of good sites, this article offers only a sampling of valuable Internet resources as starting points for further exploration. It covers meta sites, Asian search engines, library resource pages, and electronic journals and newspapers. The first part of this paper includes the Internet sites of Asian studies, the second part contains selected East Asian country resources from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and the third part presents the leading Asian electronic journals and newspapers. Preference was given to comprehensive sites on countries or regions that have been the focus of recent academic study and research. All the sources are in English and some of them contain bilingual or multilingual versions.

Art is a complex, multiform, fluid human activity that is subjugated to time-space-place contexts and dependent upon social representation and values. But what is it for? This introduction to the book Art in Diverse Social settings begins with a general characterization of Art as universal language. Unlike verbal language, art is primarily processed in the sensorial and emotional fields and only later rationally; unlike science, it does not aim at explaining or predicting the laws of the world's phenomena, instead it communicates by showing (in essence, it has an expressive meaning). In today's world, art became an accessible good and a valuable human creation because of this reappraisal of artistic practices; art is today expressive in domains such as politics, citizenship, economy, ethics, sustainability or public affairs.

The introduction to this edited book explains why it is focused on the role of art in today's diverse society. Art is part of the worldviews and mindsets from which it results and as a complex and ambiguous product of culture and perception, it must be understood from multiple perspectives. As such, this book includes in the first part seminal chapters with a theoretical scope, which highlight conceptual, contextual and cultural issues of contemporary art. The chapters in the second and third parts of the book are exemplary case studies, describing concrete intervention projects, which use some form of art or composed artistic expression as a medium for communication and intervention in the contexts of social and professional organizations, public spaces or the community. A summary of each chapter is provided and linked to the main goal of the book.

This chapter builds on theories of culturally responsive teaching and translanguaging pedagogies to explore teaching strategies that linguistically, culturally, and educationally empower Muslim immigrant emergent bilinguals in the classroom. These students are often speakers of less commonly used languages, not shared with other adults in the school, thus teachers and school leaders often do not know how to use home languages as teaching tools. This study sought to find practical solutions by going straight to the source – the students themselves. Through a one-year qualitative arts-based study, 15 recently arrived Muslim immigrants provided information about their language use and meaning-making of school experiences. Using interview, observation, and student-created artifacts, data were collected during after-school sessions that also included intensive group discussion and peer interviews in home languages. It was found that these students are facilitating and regulating their own bilingual and multilingual educations through cultural communities of practice. However, it was also found that these students perceived messages from the larger school community as discriminatory, thereby negatively impacting feelings of belonging and value in a school setting. One classroom where students and their languages were valued is profiled in this chapter offering practical ways teachers can engage learning through all languages, especially minority languages, regardless of a teacher’s own linguistic abilities. This chapter offers transferable ideas that may be adapted to diverse classrooms with similar student populations and needs. It is understood that classroom contexts differ based on resources, students’ home language literacy, and curricular demands.

Based on the proposition that “per pupil per hour” is a viable unit for analysing both costs and benefits of education. It is proposed that “per pupil per hour” is a unit on which programmes can be analysed and tracked across terms or years to give trend data. Such trend data can provide better information on which educational decisions can be based. “Benefits” are defined as percentages of students who achieved an expected level of accomplishment set by principals prior to the start of the study. Whatever the basis of expected success, it is proposed that standards set at the school level in harmony with the real situation can provide the most relevant data for programme analysis. Results from this case study reveal that on a “per pupil per hour” basis, education is perhaps the best bargain that the public gets.

This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities of using multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodality in a nontraditional English language arts classroom. The paper highlights the dynamic and contemporary nature of the multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodal literacy practices proposed by the New London Group (1996). This paper makes connections through the analysis of scholarship and practice and provides solutions for educators to promote learning that is meaningful, engaging, and relevant to students. The focus is on promoting literacy instruction that values students' creativity, language, and culture to cultivate analysis, inquiry, and agency.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.