Recently, interdisciplinary instruction has come back to the educational scene, specifically supported through the Common Core State Standards. As teacher educators and former middle-level teachers, the authors see this as a positive move to enhance learning for adolescents. This qualitative study sought to answer: How do secondary preservice and…

Some mathematics educators assert that P-12 students respond better to mathematics when it is taught for cultural relevance and social justice. Providing teachers with examples of how to use culturally relevant pedagogy and social justice pedagogy (SJP) is critical to enacting these strategies in mathematics classrooms. The results of this…

We examine how counselors, teachers, and other professionals at a secondary school in Madrid (Spain) understand cultural diversity and work with immigrant students' educational circumstances. Our analysis suggests that cultural diversity is largely construed as a problem and the explanation of educational difficulties is organized around an…

How can scholars trace the global production and circulation of educational policies? The vertical case study incorporates three elements: "vertical" attention across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, or scales; a "horizontal" comparison of how policies unfold in distinct locations; and a "transversal," processual…

Tamil Nadu has gained international recognition for reforming its government school classrooms into active, child-centered learning environments. Our exploration of the history of the Activity Based Learning movement suggests that this reform was achieved by social movement actors serving in and through the state's administration.…

Based on my fieldwork with Burmese teachers in Thailand, I describe the drawbacks of using IRB-mandated written consent procedures in my cross-cultural collaborative ethnographic research on education. Drawing on theories of intersubjectivity (Mikhail Bakhtin), ethics (Emmanuel Levinas), and translation (Naoki Sakai), I describe face-to-face…

This article explores the possibility of anthropology as Bildung, or self-cultivation. As an educational mode, Bildung is focused on the moral education of students, encouraging them to broaden themselves in their encounters with others. I will discuss this process in terms of a lesson I learned from the highland Maya about being a good neighbor…

This article is a report of a study that used data from multiple sources to explore the hypothesis that systemic barriers inherent in Colorado's teacher evaluation policies often contribute to ineffective teacher evaluations across the state. Data were collected from extant studies, focus groups, and surveys of teachers, site…

This article reflects on the introduction of "matrix management" arrangements for an Educational Psychology Service (EPS) within a Children's Service Directorate of a Local Authority (LA). It seeks to demonstrate critical self-awareness, consider relevant literature with a view to bringing insights to processes and outcomes, and…

A view from the dance floor of ALICSE participants showed that the integrated children's services remain under pressure to become multi-dimensional, with the rhetorical push to a joint working becoming increasingly complex and difficult to navigate. This was the view of a 360 degree questionnaire to a number of ALICSE participants and…

The importance of middle leaders in bringing about improvement in schools is well recognized in the UK, as in many other countries, with the ever-present demand for raising standards and achievement. This article outlines some initial findings and discussion points emerging from the first stage of a project exploring how middle leaders in…

School leaders face potential conflicts between the demands of national and local education policy and the values and ethics that brought them into teaching and subsequently into school leadership. This article asks whether head teachers' values are changed by the policy context, and looks at incidents in head teachers' professional…

The authors describe and evaluate a method to motivate medical students to maximize the effectiveness of dissection opportunities by using In-Course-Assessments (ICAs) to encourage teamwork. A student's final mark was derived by combining the group dissection mark, group mark for questions, and their individual question mark. An analysis of…

Embryology is integrated into the Clinically Oriented Anatomy course at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine. Before 2008, the same instructor presented embryology in 13 face-to-face lectures distributed by organ systems throughout the course. For the 2008 and 2009 offerings of the course, a hybrid embryology…

Medical professionalism is a multifaceted paradigm and is an essential component of medical education. Gross anatomy is a laboratory to teach professionalism, and promoting critical reflection in medical students is a prerequisite to furthering professionalism. The aim of this study was to determine if professionalism case discussions during a…