This book presents thirty-one accounts by final-year pre-service teachers, providing guidance and insights for less advanced teacher education students, and illustrating the use of life history and narrative stories as methods for pre-service teachers to explore educational issues in classroom practice. This life-history approach identifies those political, economic, and social forces that have impinged on the individual at different points in their life and contributed to the process of changing their identities. These stories are not written by established specialists in the areas they deal with, but instead by novice teachers at the beginning of their paths towards mastering the intricacies of teaching and learning in school settings. As such the book provides a mentoring framework and a means of helping pre-service teachers share their valuable experiences and insights into aspects such as how to manage practicum requirements. It helps establish a supportive relationship among pre-service teachers, providing them with access to valuable peer experiences. In addition it helps pre-service teachers make sense of their own practicum experiences and reflect on their own beliefs and professional judgement to develop their approaches and solve problems in their own classroom practice.

This edited volume offers cross-country and cross-cultural applications of Dialogical Self Theory within the field of education. It combines the work of internationally recognized authors to demonstrate how theoretical and practical innovations emerge at the highly fertile interface of external and internal dialogues. The Theory, developed by Hubert Hermans and his colleagues in the past 25 years, responds fruitfully to the issue of educational experts hitherto working in splendid isolation and does so by combining two aspects of Dialogical Self Theory: the dialogue among individuals as well as dialogical processes within individuals, in this context students and teachers. It is the first book in which Dialogical Self Theory is applied to the field of education. In 13 chapters, authors from different cultures and continents produce theoretical considerations and a wide variety of practical procedures showing that this interface is an ideal ground for the production of new theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches that enrich the work of educational researchers and specialists. Academics, practitioners, and postgraduate students in the field of education, particularly those who are interested in the innovative and community-enhancing potentials of dialogue, will find this book valuable and informative. Ultimately the work presented here is intended to inspire more self-reflection and creative ways to engage in new conversations that can respond to real-world issues and in which education can play a more vital role.

This book celebrates the scholarly achievements of Prof. David A. Watkins, who has pioneered research on the psychology of Asian learners, and helps readers grasp the cognitive, motivational, developmental, and socio-cultural aspects of Asian learners learning experiences. A wide range of empirical and review papers, which examine the characteristics of these experiences as they are shaped by both the particularities of diverse educational systems/cultural milieus and universal principles of human learning and development, are showcased. The individual chapters, which explore learners from fourteen Asian countries, autonomous regions, and/or economies, build on research themes and approaches from Prof. Watkins' research work, and are proof of the broad importance and enduring relevance of his seminal psychological research on learners and the learning process.

Learn all the essentials for making your first year of teaching a success! In this bestselling book, renowned educators Todd Whitaker, Madeline Whitaker Good, and Katherine Whitaker offer step-by-step guidance to thriving in your new role, developing classroom management skills, and overcoming the challenges that many beginning teachers face. In a practical, reader-friendly style, the Whitakers help you learn how to establish procedures and rules, build relationships, maintain high expectations and consistency, and manage your own emotions in the classroom. They also show how to plan effective lessons and how to work with peers, administrators, and parents to foster collaboration. Each chapter offers specific examples and vignettes from different grade levels. This updated edition contains additional guidance on classroom management and dealing with challenging student behavior, two areas that can affect job satisfaction. Importantly, you'll learn how to make tweaks or hit the "reset" button when something isn't going as planned. In addition, there is also a special new feature called "Think About...," which helps you reflect on how you will consider topics such as representation and inclusion as they pertain to your classroom. You can use these reflection questions independently or with a mentor or new-teacher colleague. New teachers are special and needed, and the practical advice in this book will provide valuable support for your professional and personal journey.

As children, we would have spilt glasses of milk, dropped things, and broken things. As children, therefore, we would have developed intuitions about how the world 'works', but we would not necessarily have been able to explain these 'workings'. It would only have been till we entered formal schooling that we would have learned codifications of canon within each respective discipline, and consequently how to articulate the canon to explain the intuition. The preceding example was from the natural sciences, but one could just have easily taken an example from, say, the environmental sciences or from the social sciences. Indeed, much of this book does just that, as it seeks to chart the territory of a new theory of learning around Disciplinary Intuitions. Many of the chapters within draw frequent and explicit linkages to curriculum design, from the premise of the need to go beyond addressing the conceptions of learners, to seeking to understand the substrate upon which these conceptions are founded. The argument is made that this substrate comprises the particular set of lived experiences of each learner, and how - because these lived experiences are as tacit as they are diverse - designing curriculum around misconceptions and preconceptions alone would not lead to enduring understanding from first principles. From this perspective, Disciplinary Intuitions constitute an exciting field at the nexus of learning theories and curriculum design.

From a leading crisis management expert, a breakthrough book about performance under pressure that will change the way you think about stress Upshift 1. a movement of a variable to a higher level e.g. of performance, growth, frequency. When we experience too much stress, we often feel like shutting down and escaping the source. Neurologists call this 'downshifting', where your thinking shifts from the cognitive and creative areas in the brain to the domains associated with survival. But with too little stress, we become disengaged and apathetic. So what happens in the middle zone - when we experience what psychologists call positive stress - and how can we best make use of it? In Upshift, international thought leader Ben Ramalingam takes readers on an epic journey from early humans' survival of the ice age to present times in our inescapable, pernicious and ever-shifting digital landscape. You will hear remarkable stories from a vast range of backgrounds, including scientists, gamers, performers and artists, athletes and health professionals and everyday people, all of whom carved new routes around perceived barriers using their powers to upshift. Whether discussing how city commuters navigate train cancellations to how astronauts deal with life-threatening incidents, Ramalingam presents a fascinating argument that we all have the power to innovate, whether or not we identify ourselves as creative or extraordinary. In a runaway world that is an engine for perpetual crisis, Upshift is not only an essential toolkit for survival, it is a roadmap for positive, and potentially life-changing transformation and influence. You don't have to shut down - you can upshift.

This book takes up the agenda of the late (but unknown) L. S. Vygotsky, who had turned to the philosopher Spinoza to develop a holistic approach to psychology, an approach that no longer dichotomized the body and mind, intellect and affect, or the individual and the social. In this approach, there is only one substance, which manifests itself in different ways in the thinking body, including as biology and culture. The manifestation as culture is premised on the existence of the social. In much of current educational psychology, there are unresolved contradictions that have their origin in the opposition between body and mind, individual and collective, and structure and process-including the different nature of intellect and affect or the difference between knowledge and its application. Many of the same contradictions are repeated in constructivist approaches, which do not overcome dichotomies but rather acerbate them by individualizing and intellectualizing our knowledgeable participation in recognizably exhibiting and producing the everyday cultural world. Interestingly enough, L. S. Vygotsky, who is often used as a referent for making arguments about inter- and intrasubjective "mental" "constructions," developed, towards the end of his life, a Spinozist approach according to which there is only one substance. This one substance manifests itself in two radically different ways: body (material, biology) and mind (society, culture). But there are not two substances that are combined into a unit; there is only one substance. Once such an approach is adopted, the classical question of cognitive scientists about how symbols are grounded in the world comes to be recognized as an artefact of the theory. Drawing on empirical materials from different learning settings-including parent-child, school, and workplace settings-this book explores the opportunities and implications that this non-dualist approach has for educational research and practice.

This book presents thoughts on and experiences with the introduction of Theme-centered Interaction (TCI) into academia. TCI is a systematic didactic, 'living learning' approach originally developed by social psychologist and pedagogue Ruth C. Cohn. The book explains and introduces the method, attitude and theory of TCI to a broader, higher education audience and relates it to such questions as: How does a teacher in academia achieve a lively and engaging atmosphere in their seminars? How do young academics as leaders-to-be learn how to act socially sustainably in groups? Using practical examples, the book shows how TCI can work in higher education to achieve participation and integration, reflectivity and humane connectedness of academic teachers and students, and professional development of senior and junior academics.

This book explains why the current education model, which was developed in the 19th century to meet the needs of industrial expansion, is obsolete. It points to the need for a new approach to education designed to prepare young people for global uncertainty, accelerating change and unprecedented complexity.The book offers a new educational philosophy to awaken the creative, big-picture and long-term thinking that will help equip students to face tomorrow's challenges. Inside, readers will find a dialogue between adult developmental psychology research on higher stages of reasoning and today's most evolved education research and practice. This dialogue reveals surprising links between play and wisdom, imagination and ecology, holism and love. The overwhelming issues of global climate crisis, growing economic disparity and the youth mental health epidemic reveal how dramatically the current education model has failed students and educators. This book raises a planet-wide call to deeply question how we actually think and how we must educate. It articulates a postformal education philosophy as a foundation for educational futures.The book will appeal to educators, educational philosophers, pre-service teacher educators, educational and developmental psychologists and educational researchers, including postgraduates with an interest in transformational educational theories designed for the complexity of the 21st century. This is the most compelling book on education I have read for many years. It has major implications for all who are in a position to influence developments in teacher education and educational policy. Gidley is one of the very rare scholars who can write intelligently and accessibly about the past, present and future in education. I was challenged and ultimately convinced by her contention that 'what masquerades as education today must be seen for what it is - an anachronistic relic of the industrial past'. Gidley's challenge is to 'co-evolve' a radically new education. All who seek to play a part must read this book. Brian J. Caldwell, PhD, Educational Transformations, former Dean of Education at the University of Melbourne and Deputy Chair, Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? Young and New Women Professors of Educational Leadership was conceptualized as a follow-up to Breaking Into the All-Male Club: Female Professors of Educational Administration (Mertz, 2009), a book about and by many women who were the first women faculty admitted into departments of educational administration primarily in the 1970's and 1980's. This book offers narratives of those women new to the field of educational leadership and makes comparisons to those stories shared by the veteran women in the field to highlight both similarities and differences. Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? Young and New Women Professors of Educational Leadership is a literary way to preserve and continue the tradition of the sharing/addition of voices to the field of educational leadership that was begun with Breaking Into the All-Male Club. It begs the question, ""If the women from Breaking Into the All-Male Club are ""firsts,"" ""pioneers,"" and ""groundbreakers,"" then who are we, the young and new women of the field? If the entrance of women into the field of educational leadership was threatening enough for the veteran women (and still is for many of the young and new women), then the addition of age and ethnicity as confounding factors has likely created a cacophony of dissonance forty years later! Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? represents a decade of stories (2002-2012) from young and new women to the field of educational leadership.

Much has been written about special education and about inclusive education, but there have been few attempts to pull these two concepts and approaches together. This book does just that: sets special education within the context of inclusive education. It posits that to include, effectively, all children with special educational needs in schools requires an integration of both concepts, approaches, and techniques. It has never been more timely to publish a book that helps professionals who work with schools, such as psychologists, special education professionals, and counselors, to identify effective practices for children with special needs and provide guidelines for implementing these in inclusive schools.

This book critically examines multiple discourses of wellbeing in relation to the composite aims of schooling. Drawing from a Scottish study, the book disentangles the discursive complexity, to better understand what can happen in the name of wellbeing, and in particular, how wellbeing is linked to learning in schools. Arguing that educational discourses have been overshadowed by discourses of other groups, the book examines the political and ideological policy aims that can be supported by different discourses of wellbeing. It also uses interview data to show how teachers and policy actors accepted, or re-shaped and remodelled the policy discourses as they made sense of them in their own work. When addressing schools' responses to inequalities, discussions are often framed in terms of wellbeing. Yet wellbeing as a concept is poorly defined and differently understood across academic and professional disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, health promotion, and social care. Nonetheless, its universally positive connotations allow policy changes to be ushered in, unchallenged. Powerful actions can be exerted through the use of soft vocabulary as the discourse of wellbeing legitimates schools' intervention into personal aspects of children's lives. As educators worldwide struggle over the meaning and purpose of schooling, discourses of wellbeing can be mobilised in support of different agendas. This book demonstrates how this holds both dangers and opportunities for equality in education. Amartya Sen's Capability Approach is used to offer a way forward in which different understandings of wellbeing can be drawn together to offer a perspective that enhances young people's freedoms in education and their freedoms gained through education.

'The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search' will bring together distinguished authors who are conducting cutting edge research on the many factors that influence search behavior. These factors will include low-level feature detection; statistical learning; scene perception; neural mechanisms of attention; and applied research in real world settings.

This handbook addresses the current state and practice of school psychology with a focus on standards unique to Australia, including historical, legal, ethical, practical, and training factors. It provides a compilation of the most current research-based practices as well as guidelines for evidence-based assessment and intervention for common conditions (e.g., autism, depression, learning disabilities) and for delivering appropriate services to targeted student populations (e.g., LGBT, gifted, medical issues). Chapters discuss the application of national and international school psychology practices within the Australian educational and psychological structure. The handbook also examines the lack of formal resources specific to Australia's culture and psychology systems, with its unique mix of metropolitan cities and the vast geographic landscape that spans regional and remote areas. It offers numerous case studies and innovative school mental health programs as well as recommendations for professional development and advocacy that are unique to Australian school psychology. Topics featured in this Handbook include: Evidence-based assessment and intervention for dyscalculia and mathematical disabilities. Identification and management of adolescent risk-taking behaviors and addictions. Understanding and responding to crisis and trauma in the school setting. Prevention and intervention for bullying in schools. Class and school-wide approaches to addressing behavioral and academic needs. The role of school psychologists in the digital age. Practical advice for school psychologists facing complex ethical dilemmas. The Handbook of Australian School Psychology is a must-have resource for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in child and school psychology, social work, and related fields that address mental health services for children and adolescents.

Analyzing Influences: Research on Decision Making and the Music Education Curriculum examines influences on research in music teacher preparation, practices, and policies. These influences include administrators' perspectives, preservice music educators' beliefs, and in-service teachers' practices. Invited essays offer insights into past and present trends in music teacher preparation. This collection of studies represents best thinking in the field and serves as an impetus for further research and action. Each author's analysis on the influences affecting their specific areas provides insights into key issues affecting decision making processes. This volume is a significant addition to the libraries of Colleges of Education and Schools of Music, as well as an important reference for music scholars and educators, researchers, and graduate students who are concerned with advancing both the scope and quality of research in the study of music teaching and learning.

This book is the outcome of a joint collaboration between East China Normal University and the University of Luxembourg, initiated by the Center of Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future (IBEF), and focuses on kindergartens in China from a cultural psychology perspective. By coupling young scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds as research tandems, this book uses an innovative methodological method to reveal a deeply immersing research perspective of the often complicated issues in the Chinese social reality, where long historical tradition and strong motivation for a "modernized" future are fused together and continuously evolve itself into a vibrant and intricate landscape. Meanings and values consciously or unconsciously promoted and conducted in the kindergarten are semiotic devices and they mediate children's and educator's daily behaviours and activities, which are constantly navigating among different social institutions and crossing the border of kindergarten. The book discusses the process of children's socialization in the kindergarten from different angles such as cultural objects, moral education, conflict negotiation, children's drawing analysis and the role of Lego in numeracy development. It also provides an overview of basic educational needs in Chinese kindergartens as well as three commentaries to provide background information and to add a reflective angle for the readers. By reading the book, readers will hopefully go through a constantly transforming process between familiarizing and de-familiarizing along with the research tandem and develop their own understanding of the complex landscape of the Chinese kindergarten and its children as developing subjects constantly living and transcending the context.

This volume helps parents and early childhood educators understand the nature of early literacy at home and at school. Ways in which nursery school structures support and extend childrens's literacy are explored. This volume, based on an 18-month ethnographic study of story reading and other literacy events in nursery school, describes parents' attitudes, beliefs, and values about literacy, nursery school organization of time and space, how reading and writing is used by nursery school participants and how story reading events help children learn to make sense of books and use books to learn about the world.

Biographical Ruptures and their Repair: Cultural Transitions in Development represents the efforts of bridging theoretical, methodological, and practice oriented issues revolving around the notion of biographical ruptures and their repairs from cultural psychological perspectives in order to bring novel understandings to the debateof what it means to be a developing human being in an ever changing world. While persons develop in their every day interactions, they are bound to experience different forms of ruptures, which then must be managed individually. Contrary to mainstream psychology ruptures and repairs are here not necessarily understood as a personal experience, which then must be overcome through various coping strategies, but rather as an experience, which necessarily emerges out of the complex interrelatedness of intra-psychological, inter-personal, and societal processes. Moving along these different levels of analysis, each of the 13 chapters of this book contributes to the general cultural psychological understanding of ruptures from their own particular standpoint. The notion of ruptures and their repairs are thus discussed from e.g. classical developmental psychological theories, while following chapters then challenge such developmental approaches. Ruptures in relation to racial interpellations are discussed using the documentary method and these analyses are then further developed in a following chapter with social representations theory. On the object level ruptures are pointed to within popular music videos to further develop the documentary method, which is then taken up in another chapter and discussed from a Ganzheitspsychological approach. The current book thus does not only represent a conglomerate of various theoretical, methodological, or practice oriented approaches to ruptures and their repairs, each adding with their own expertise a little part to a better understand of the phenomenon in its whole. It further demonstrated a lively debate between leading specialists and practitioners from different disciplines and countries discussing theoretical and methodological issues, but also ethical and moral ones, each from their own cultural psychological viewpoint. This book will interest anyone who is interested biographical rupture and their repairs from a cultural psychological, developmental, social psychological, or psychotherapeutic viewpoint.

This book examines the eight-year development of the Reading Orienteering Club after-school program, showing how to develop, test, change, and adapt an after-school program to fit the needs of the children who attend. It includes case studies and data reports for each year and presents the theory, application, and program evaluation steps that workers in the field or students learning about program design must follow. Chapters present first-person accounts as well as statistical evaluations of the effectiveness of the reading program with each group of children. In addition, chapters highlight the changes that were made in program design and why each change was implemented, giving practitioners the insights needed to adapt interventions and strategies to their own programs. The book concludes with recommendations from the authors on how to run a successful after-school reading program. Topics featured in this book include: The effect of intrinsic motivation to mental wellness in the classroom. The importance of oral reading in correcting reading failure. Group-center approaches to teaching reading in the classroom. How to select the best evaluation tool. The challenges of mixing inner city and rural students in a reading program. After-School Programming and Intrinsic Motivation is an essential reference for scientist-practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and graduate students in such disciplines as school psychology, childhood education, social work, psychotherapy and counseling, and learning and instruction.

The book pursues the goal of exploring and strengthening a dialogical approach of communication and cognition. It brings together contributions from world-leading researchers related to the dialogical approach in education and psychology. It presents, among others, the place of language and materiality in the development of communication and thinking, as well as the role of the methods in the relationship between researchers and participants. This leads to an innovative definition of the dialogicality and how a dialogical approach can provide heuristic (conceptual and methodological) tools to better understand how people think, communicate and learn in a complex world. The authors hereby develop an epistemological framework inspired by scholars such as Michail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky and Herbert Mead under the assumption that dialogue, or dialogicality - and therefore the presence of the other - is fundamentally entangled into the human thinking and development. This book contributes to the understanding of human communication, cognition and mind, and participates in a scientific dialogue which helps to advance future research. It includes theoretical and empirical chapters and presents innovative methods of inquiry, which makes it a useful tool for both teaching and research.

This volume reflects the multiplicity of perspectives in the theory and practice of creativity, while it is broadly accepted that the dynamism of humanity s responses to our evolving scientific, social and environmental needs depends on our creativity. It examines the central issues that animate the themes of creativity, talent development and excellence in schools and in the workplace, as well as analysing their related socio-cultural activities and processes. Forged in the workshops of a number of conferences and symposia, this collection represents in itself a creative partnership between European and Asian academics. Thus it includes contributions from various cultural and organizational settings, as well as chapters that enhance our conceptual models of creativity in both learning and teaching.

The contributing authors recognize that exploring the nature of creativity necessitates a new paradigm in research and praxis in which integration, collaboration, and the synthesis of knowledge and expertise are key factors. Their chapters detail the results of studies relating to to creativity, talent, school excellence, team and goal setting, innovation and organizational excellence, resilience, self-regulation, and personal epistemology. Clearly defined sections take on discrete aspects of the topic that include a vital assessment of the challenges that lie ahead in fostering the creativity, talent and excellence of the young and in doing so, allowing them to play a positive and innovative role in a variety of social contexts.

Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement analyzes the psychological, social, and academic phenomena comprising engagement, framing it as critical to learning and development. Drawing on positive psychology, flow studies, and theories of motivation, the book conceptualizes engagement as a learning experience, explaining how it occurs (or not) and how schools can adapt to maximize it among adolescents. Examples of empirically supported environments promoting engagement are provided, representing alternative high schools, Montessori schools, and extracurricular programs. The book identifies key innovations including community-school partnerships, technology-supported learning, and the potential for engaging learning opportunities during an expanded school day. Among the topics covered: Engagement as a primary framework for understanding educational and motivational outcomes. Measuring the malleability, complexity, multidimensionality, and sources of engagement. The relationship between engagement and achievement. Supporting and challenging: the instructor's role in promoting engagement. Engagement within and beyond core academic subjects. Technological innovations on the engagement horizon. Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement is an essential resource for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in child and school psychology; social work; educational psychology; positive psychology; family studies; and teaching/teacher education.

Educational Learning and Development: Building and Enhancing Capacity explores the topic of educational learning and development in order to examine issues that are impacting, either positively or negatively, on current research in this area. This is explored through ten groups of research participants from various countries, including circus families and teachers, students and teachers in a senior secondary art classroom, a parent-run alternative school, and refugees and migrants in a rural setting. These data sets are analysed through eight 'hot topics' and 'wicked problems' in contemporary education, seeking to uncover the capacity building potential of the research projects and what factors impacted on or assisted their development.