In a given year, approximately 1.6 million children in the United States experience homelessness, and research shows that their living conditions generally place these children at risk for educational underperformance and failure at school (Hall, 2007; Love, 2009). Although lack of education or low levels of education on the part of a head of…

While the intent of the federal and state homeless education laws is clear, securing the educational rights of students without housing has been a long legal and political struggle in Chicago and Illinois. Education for students experiencing homelessness is a continuation of the civil rights struggle for equality in education and educational…

A critical issue in education today is that many middle and high school students are not able to read on grade level (Alvermann & Rush, 2004; Biancarosa & Snow, 2010; Heller & Greenleaf, 2007; Houge, Geier, & Peyton, 2008). In an effort to deal with the problem, many schools encourage all teachers, regardless of their subject area,…

When defending educational foundations, Isabel Nunez and Pamela Konkol sometimes find themselves responding to the question of "why?"-often phrased, "But WHYYYYY do we have to take a class on this stuff??? (We want to take more methods!)." As distressing as this can be for teacher educators whose own work reveals rather a…

William H. Schubert, retired faculty member at the University of Illinois, Chicago, reflects on his teaching career and the loss of "educational foundations." Schubert states that "Foundations of Education" are being pushed toward the precipice of extinction. He describes a loss of "back-to-basics" education with a…

Kathleen deMarrais, professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, was honored to be invited to contribute to this special issue of "Critical Questions in Education." deMarrais addressed college/university deans to review the role of social foundations in teacher education and…

Public education in the United States is sequenced in such a manner that a skill learned at one level is then transferred to a more complex skill at yet a higher level. In addition, the individual concepts or grade-level-expectations based on state Standards are designed this way. Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) stated, "Educators hope…

Language laboratories, developed in the 1970s under the influence of the Audiolingual Method, were superseded several decades later by computer-assisted language learning (CALL) work stations (Gündüz, 2005). The World Wide Web was developed shortly thereafter. From this introduction and the well-documented and staggering growth of the Internet and…

Today's principals are required to put in longer hours, lead larger schools, and supervise more faculty and staff members. Additionally they need to create a positive learning environment for students, a productive work environment for their employees, and contend with a variety of student behaviors at the building level. Aside from the…

In this article, the author describes his attempt to define conversation in the context of teaching, and to explain why it is a vital focus, both theoretically and practically. This article illustrates how educators currently do not pursue the systematic teaching of conversation in teacher education. Harman then presents a few existing ideas that…

Educators are continuously looking at innovative ways to teaching and working with students of all ages. The tools used range from the simplest technologies, such as chalk and pencils, to the high-tech tools involving computers and information systems. The best tools and strategies often invoke the use of the old and new or the old in a new way.…

According to Maxine Greene (1988), aesthetic education is "integral to the development of persons--to their cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and imaginative development" (p. 7). The purpose of this paper is to present the developing sense of self that pre-service teachers experienced through an aesthetic entry point, the 9/11 mural by…

Reading teachers, novice or experienced, face the hard task of having to teach students how to read by moving beyond the mere "surface level" of reading (finding meanings in the text) into a more critical perspective (assigning meaning to what is being read). Many teachers struggle in trying to reconcile these two perspectives as they…

A primary piece of the conceptual framework that underlies this paper is the argument that changing instructional practices and strategies has not led to substantive innovation in higher education classrooms. More broadly stated, instructional strategies typically have not led to true innovation in higher education because strategy change often…