Background/Context: Mentors play a central role in preparing new teachers. This is multifaceted and demanding work, for which they rarely receive training, instead often relying on their own intuition or past experiences to guide their practice. As a result, most mentoring assumes the format of observation followed by feedback, emphasizing…

As pictorial-based social media (e.g., Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr) continue to encourage and sustain contemporary culture, the future success of America's democratic experiment may increasingly depend on its citizens' ability to critique visual information and take informed action. Promoting critical, historical analysis of…

Purpose: The purpose of the project was to intervene in a deficit reading of communities. This article engages public pedagogy in a way that suggests a new approach to the field. To this end, both the terms public and pedagogy are interrogated. Design/methodology/approach: The approach in this paper is an analysis of a qualitative research…

Purpose: This study examined and deconstructed socialization experiences relative to the educative teacher performance assessment (edTPA) process of preservice teachers during their physical education (PE) teacher education program and induction year as a PE teacher. Method: Utilizing a multiple case study design, two PE teachers were purposefully…

Engaging with materials can shape the teaching experience, teachers' practices and mindsets, and, ultimately, students' learning experiences. This issue of "Learning Professional" looks at an area of emerging interest: curriculum materials and the role they play in the daily work of educators and leaders. Educators, researchers, and…

This article is based on a lecture given as a result of the Catherine D. Ennis Outstanding Scholar Award 2021, presented by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) special interest group for Research on Learning and Instruction in Physical Education. It is a reflection on the field of physical education, beginning with an argument…

Based in the 1977 Tbilisi formalization of Environmental Education (EE), this memory-work study of contemporary silences in Environmental Education Research (EER) emphasizes an embodied~materialist theorization and activist conception of ecological experience in EE (eco)pedagogy. Relevant empirical-conceptual research drawn from EER Special Issues…

This article highlights both the internal educative practices of social movements and how these practices can effectively link to building Freirean pedagogies within higher education institutions. At the heart of this possibility lies the democratic transformation of relations between students and teachers on the one hand and researchers and…

New reform documents underscore the importance of learning both the practices and content of science. This integration of practices and content requires sophisticated teaching that does not often happen in elementary classrooms. Educative curriculum materials--materials explicitly designed to support teacher and student learning--have been posited…

Lately I have been thinking and writing about the idea of a teacher's oeuvre -- the notion that over time teachers create a significant body or work that might be compared to that of an artist or composer. I have argued that too often the contributions that teachers make remain invisible, under-valued and unknown in the field of education. This is…

While prior research suggests that many educators turn to social media to grow and enhance professional learning networks (PLNs) that extend beyond their schools, little is known about how PLNs shift over time. In this exploratory study, we investigated the nature of continuity and change in the PLNs of 192 K-12 and university educators from 17…

Kindergarten teachers face the challenge of balancing traditional developmental programming and contemporary academic standards. In classrooms following a play-based learning framework, academic content such as literacy is to be taught within children's play. However, educators have reported conceptual and practical challenges with integrating…

Farm education organized by farmers and directed towards students and groups of citizens is a relatively new practice often considered as one specific business strategy to diversify farmers' income. Although we endorse the importance of an economic rationale we argue that this conceptualization undermines a diversity of perspectives on educative…

For centuries, education policymakers have sought to identify the most effective way to assess a potential teacher's readiness to enter the classroom. These assessments evolved from multiple choice examinations to performance-based assessments focused on teacher actions. The latest iteration of these performance-based assessments is edTPA. edTPA's…

This article explores an aspect of Karl Marx's concept, praxis. Praxis is meaningful work, through which we fulfil ourselves by fulfilling others. The discussion draws on the author's work with postgraduate student teachers, where both students and author were researching their own practice. Reflecting Marx's conception of praxis as subjective…