Art and Indigenous culture are inseparable. From the immaculately decorated lodges and war shirts of thousands of years to contemporary mixed and digital media images, Indigenous arts are expressions of survivance. Creative arts have sustained Indigenous ways of knowing, being, doing, and healing through attempted cultural genocide. Research has…

This paper tests a new theoretical framework for engaging students by evaluating two project-and-design-based pedagogies: "Arts Integrated Collective Creation (AICC) and Educational Social Enterprise (ESE)." Findings provide statistical support for benefits with middle school students when instruction is designed around Socially…

In the present study, students' perceptions of their self-directed and collaborative learning with and without technology were examined in ICT-supported middle school classrooms. Three hundred and twenty middle school students from eight schools across Alberta, Canada participated in the study by completing a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics,…

French immersion programs in Saskatchewan have traditionally served to further the goals of additive bilingualism between Canada's two official languages, French and English. Whereas these programs have historically consisted of predominantly Anglophone populations, recent trends in immigration have contributed to the increasingly diverse…

Dialogue about social and political conflicts is a key element of democratic citizenship education that is frequently advocated in scholarship but rarely fully implemented, especially in classrooms populated by ethnically and economically heterogeneous students. Qualitative case studies describe the contrasting ways 2 primary and 2 middle-grade…

This study was undertaken to learn about the impact of using the web-based Inquiry Strategies for the Information Society of the Twenty-First Century (ISIS-21), software developed by the authors, to improve the information literacy (IL) skills of late elementary students (10-12 years). Using a series of multi-media and learning strategies design…

Background: Uncertainty is a crucial element of scientific knowledge growth. Students should have some understanding of how science knowledge is developed and why scientific conclusions are considered more or less certain than others. A component of the nature of science, it is considered an important aspect of science education and allows…

Picturebooks were one format of multimodal text used during the classroom-based research that is featured in this article. Although the research conducted with a class of grade 7 students had several overarching purposes, the two most relevant to this article were to investigate student development of visual meaning-making skills and competencies…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 13th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2016), October 28-30, 2016, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by the University of Mannheim, Germany, and endorsed by the…

What does it mean to be engaged, especially when it comes to literacy learning? It is this question that drove my doctoral research in 2007 when I became a participant observer in a grade two classroom with the goal of making the everyday visible while sharing a greater understanding of classroom life in relation to engagement. Six years later, I…

A risk-averse philosophy and practice towards children playing and learning in natural surroundings predominates many parts of the educational world. In schooling, the concepts of risk and risk management have created the false impression that there's something inherently dangerous about learning in natural surroundings. The purpose of the current…

During two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects, Grade 7 students had opportunities to develop their understanding of metafictive devices and art and design elements by reading a selection of picturebooks and graphic novels. The students also had the opportunity to apply their knowledge and create their own multimodal print texts. This…

In recent years, the use of personal electronic devices has become widespread in Canadian society, and many Canadian schools are adopting "bring your own device" policies. This exploratory research investigates the technological practices of middle years students with mathematics learning disabilities who use personal electronic devices…

Halifax Independent School is a small K-9 school where children learn in multi-age groups and in a setting where all the core subjects are integrated into the study of interesting themes such as Oceans, Nova Scotia, and Living Things. These themes last a whole year, involve the whole elementary school, and are designed to cover traditional subject…

In this article, we consider the phenomenon of improvisation by small groups of middle years students while engaged in rich mathematical tasks in a classroom setting. Working from the premise that improvisation comprises a spectrum of behaviour, we propose that there is a range of improvisational behaviours that may be observed as the students…