Eventful Learning


Book Description

A rich array of social and cultural theories constitutes a solid foundation that affords unique insights into teaching and learning science and learning to teach science. The approach moves beyond studies in which emotion, cognition, and context are often regarded as independent. Collaborative studies advance theory and resolve practical problems, such as enhancing learning by managing excess emotions and successfully regulating negative emotions. Multilevel studies address a range of timely issues, including emotional energy, discrete emotions, emotion regulation, and a host of issues that arose, such as managing negative emotions like frustration and anxiety, dealing with disruptive students, and regulating negative emotions such as frustration, embarrassment, disgust, shame, and anger. A significant outcome is that teachers can play an important role in supporting students to successfully regulate negative emotions and support learning. The book contains a wealth of cutting edge methodologies and methods that will be useful to researchers and the issues addressed are central to teaching and learning in a global context. A unifying methodology is the use of classroom events as the unit for analysis in research that connects to the interests of teacher educators, teachers, and researchers who can adapt what we have done and learned, and apply it in their local contexts. Event-oriented inquiry highlights the transformative potential of research and provides catchy narratives and contextually rich events that have salience to the everyday practices of teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Methods used in the research include emotion diaries in which students keep a log of their emotions, clickers to measure in-the-moment emotional climate, and uses of cogenerative dialogue, which caters to diverse voices of students and teachers.




Labor of Learning


Book Description

This book is about the end of an era in education. It argues that schooling as we know it will cease to exist and be replaced with something else. Education will undergo a radical, fundamental change, replacing traditional compulsory schooling with a market-based system of learning that is finely tuned to demand and does not rely on extra-economic coercion. The premise of the book is to treat school learning as a form of labor. Its genre lies somewhere between educational theory and a political economy of education. The author explores the origins of the contemporary mass schooling models and redefines school learning in terms of labor, with special reference to genesis of education and to the history of childhood in its connection with schooling. Schools are described as islands of non-market, semi-feudal economies in the midst of the sea of markets, which explains some of the most common worries about learning motivation. The book offers several critiques of the most influential thoughts on schooling today: Progressivism, the Human Capital theory, the belief in intrinsic motivation, the voucher movement and the accountability reform. And finally, it outlines two alternative solutions for educational problems which stem from the essential lack of learning motivation. This book is an invitation to resurrect the tradition of asking fundamental questions about education. Improving what is essentially a flawed institution can take us only so far; the author is inviting the reader to go further.




Reverse Hypothesis Machine Learning


Book Description

This book introduces a paradigm of reverse hypothesis machines (RHM), focusing on knowledge innovation and machine learning. Knowledge- acquisition -based learning is constrained by large volumes of data and is time consuming. Hence Knowledge innovation based learning is the need of time. Since under-learning results in cognitive inabilities and over-learning compromises freedom, there is need for optimal machine learning. All existing learning techniques rely on mapping input and output and establishing mathematical relationships between them. Though methods change the paradigm remains the same—the forward hypothesis machine paradigm, which tries to minimize uncertainty. The RHM, on the other hand, makes use of uncertainty for creative learning. The approach uses limited data to help identify new and surprising solutions. It focuses on improving learnability, unlike traditional approaches, which focus on accuracy. The book is useful as a reference book for machine learning researchers and professionals as well as machine intelligence enthusiasts. It can also used by practitioners to develop new machine learning applications to solve problems that require creativity.




Handbook of Research on Science Teacher Education


Book Description

This groundbreaking handbook offers a contemporary and thorough review of research relating directly to the preparation, induction, and career long professional learning of K–12 science teachers. Through critical and concise chapters, this volume provides essential insights into science teacher education that range from their learning as individuals to the programs that cultivate their knowledge and practices. Each chapter is a current review of research that depicts the area, and then points to empirically based conclusions or suggestions for science teacher educators or educational researchers. Issues associated with equity are embedded within each chapter. Drawing on the work of over one hundred contributors from across the globe, this handbook has 35 chapters that cover established, emergent, diverse, and pioneering areas of research, including: Research methods and methodologies in science teacher education, including discussions of the purpose of science teacher education research and equitable perspectives; Formal and informal teacher education programs that span from early childhood educators to the complexity of preparation, to the role of informal settings such as museums; Continuous professional learning of science teachers that supports building cultural responsiveness and teacher leadership; Core topics in science teacher education that focus on teacher knowledge, educative curricula, and working with all students; and Emerging areas in science teacher education such as STEM education, global education, and identity development. This comprehensive, in-depth text will be central to the work of science teacher educators, researchers in the field of science education, and all those who work closely with science teachers.




Transforming Learning and Teaching


Book Description

This book consists of 19 chapters on heuristics – reflexive tools, designed to heighten awareness of actions and catalyze desired changes. Thirty-three heuristics address six foci: teaching and learning, learning to teach, emotions, wellness, contemplative activities, and harmony.




Affectivity and Learning


Book Description

This book presents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of affectivity and human learning by bridging the gap between neuroscience, cultural and cognitive psychology. It brings together studies that go beyond the focus on cognitive-intellectual variables involved in learning processes and incorporate the study of the role played by affectivity and emotions in learning not only at educational settings but in all processes of transformation and human development, thus presenting affectivity as a catalyst and mediator of all daily learning processes. Chapters brought together in this contributed volume present both theoretical contributions and results of empirical research from different disciplines, such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cultural psychology, educational psychology, developmental psychology and philosophy, and are grouped into five thematic sections. The first part of the book brings together chapters discussing different aspects of the role played by affectivity in learning processes from the perspectives of cultural, educational and developmental psychology. The second part is dedicated to the role of affectivity for teachers during their training as educators and during their pedagogical practice in diverse contexts. The third part focuses on the relationship between affectivity and learning from a neuroscientific point of view. The fourth part discusses affectivity and learning in therapeutic and clinical contexts. Finally, the fifth part brings together chapters about affectivity and learning in everyday life. By bringing together this rich interdisciplinary collection of studies, Affectivity and Learning: Bridging the Gap Between Neurosciences, Cultural and Cognitive Psychology will be a valuable resource for researchers in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and education, as well as for educators and teachers interested in knowing more about the relationship between affectivity and human learning.




Radical-Local Teaching and Learning


Book Description

The cultural-historical approach started in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, who held that learning and instruction are the means to development, is the foundation for the Radical-Local Theory of Teaching and Learning formulated by Mariane Hedegaard and Seth Chaiklin in the first part of the book. The central concern in this approach to education is how to integrate particular historical and cultural conditions that the children encounter into educational practices. The second half of the book is an extensive case study of an after-school programme for Puerto Rican primary students in East Harlem, New York conducted in a radical-local perspective. This programme focussed on the history of the community and of Puerto Rican immigration, and the study describes how it helped students become both more positive and more critical about their backgrounds. By acquiring basic academic skills in a theoretical framework the children learn how to analyse their own local situation, addressing not only immediate issues (housing conditions, family life, community dynamics) but also historical issues. Unlike apparently similar culturally responsive approaches to teaching underprivileged children, radical-local teaching explicitly uses subject matter teaching to encourage children's development in relation to their social conditions. Hedegaard and Chaiklin detail how they developed concrete lesson plans in a radical-local perspective, and enumerate the accomplishments as well as the difficulties they encountered in implementing this approach.




Science and Drama: Contemporary and Creative Approaches to Teaching and Learning


Book Description

This edited volume presents interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to drama and science in education. Drawing on a solid basis of research, it offers theoretical backgrounds, showcases rich examples, and provides evidence of improved student learning and engagement. The chapters explore various connections between drama and science, including: students’ ability to engage with science through drama; dramatising STEM; mutuality and inter-relativity in drama and science; dramatic play-based outdoor activities; and creating embodied, aesthetic and affective learning experiences. The book illustrates how drama education draws upon contemporary issues and their complexity, intertwining with science education in promoting scientific literacy, creativity, and empathetic understandings needed to interpret and respond to the many challenges of our times. Findings throughout the book demonstrate how lessons learned from drama and science education can remain discrete yet when brought together, contribute to deeper, more engaged and transformative student learning.




Doing Authentic Inquiry to Improve Learning and Teaching


Book Description

Suited for students of educational research and researchers and practitioners involved in teaching and learning, teacher education, and policy. Readers experience potentially transformative research that is applicable to today’s challenges.




How to Become an Entrepreneurial Teacher


Book Description

Driving a shift in the way we think about entrepreneurial and teacher education, this book invites teachers to think and act as entrepreneurial innovators and lead meaningful change in everyday school contexts. How to Become an Entrepreneurial Teacher takes teachers through theory, entrepreneurial techniques, reflective practice, and learning experiences, which can be applied to schools from K-12. Adopting an entrepreneurial ethos, orientated towards action for making change happen, this book illustrates pathways to transform the everyday professional work of teachers. It introduces teachers to entrepreneurial thinking, explains the benefits of this approach to teaching practice, and outlines how this way of thinking can influence and promote innovation and change across a school. The final chapters present case studies of entrepreneurial teaching in practice, sharing the experiences of both new and established teachers who have adopted this approach. This book will inspire and empower teachers to enact change for the benefit of their students and is essential reading for teachers and school leaders at all stages of their career.