The Florida Research Ensemble (Ulmer, Revelle, Freeman and Tilson) is an interdisciplinary collaborative arts and research group developing choragraphy, a method of inquiry which applies modernist arts practices and poststructural theory to the design and testing of image as category. The authors argue that image categories functions for networked digital media the way Aristotle's word categories functioned for literate concepts. "Chora" was retrieved for contemporary philosophy by Jacques Derrida, in the context of his deconstruction of Western metaphysics. Grounded in grammatology (the history and theory of writing), Derrida's critique of Being and Becoming as primary concepts of reality is that the category or classification system invented within literacy is not adequate for the apparatus of electracy that has developed since the industrial revolution. The FRE project in Miami designed and tested a prototype for a choral category, capable of coordinating real places, cultural collective information, digital technologies, and personal experience. Miami Virtue tested choragraphy as a method for adopting a particular region (the Miami River), including primary discourses organizing its lifeworld, and articulating it as a category of thought. The designed and recorded virtual site functions for electracy the way concepts function for literacy: as a navigable set supporting holistic intelligence and public discourse.

The virtual community approach described in this book offers over fifty detailed lesson plans that cover the entire social studies curriculum, while also empowering the emotional intelligence of elementary students. Based on the standards, concepts, information and skills established by the National Council for the Social Studies, the virtual community program accommodates all grade levels and learning styles, providing a template that allows teachers to plug in vocabulary, concepts and skills from local 1st through 5th grade classroom texts. Students collaborate to locate and create municipalities, fictitious cities and towns, in which they build, live, debate, vote, legislate, start up businesses, celebrate histories, brainstorm ideas, engineer innovations, and navigate encounters of everyday life in roles of their choosing. With over a decade of facilitating the program with elementary school students, Lee Chasen presents a theoretical and practical recipe for integrating full spectrum learning with therapeutic agency, a child's natural, inherent ability for seeking emotional balance, to create a rich, meaningful, personalized approach to development that restores the neurological dynamic in which the brain best functions and children love to learn. Part cheerleader, Chasen encourages teachers to take on the program and re-imagine what our schools are capable of.

This book is about young people and their transitions throughout their first year of high school, deepening our understanding of how it is to be young and enter new institutional settings, and how to understand the developmental dynamics of youth life. It explores the everyday life of six young people as they enter high school and follows them closely as they encounter and try to make sense of the different standards, values, and demands that are built into the institutional setting of high school. The chapters explore the entanglements of personal motive orientation, interpersonal dynamics, institutional values and demands, as well as societal standards, and how subtle negotiations of who one is and ought to be are interwoven into the fabrics of everyday life. Hence the book explores variations on an institutional level - as different high school environments - along with variations on an interpersonal level, insisting on a person-environment reciprocity in the study of development. Using cultural-historical activity theory and ecological psychology derived from theorists including Bang, Barker & Wright, Gibson, Lewin, Hedegaard, Ilyenkov, Stetsenko, and Vygotsky, Sofie Pedersen argues that developmental dynamics among young people cannot be reduced to individual nor social processes alone but are connected to institutional conditions and to concrete places. By insisting on a wholeness approach to the understanding of youth development, Pedersen reveals the developmental dynamics that unfold in the everyday lives of young people, and sheds new light on youth life dynamics, including the challenges that young people face.

This interdisciplinary volume on The Challenge of Radicalization and Extremism: Integrating Research on Education and Citizenship in the Context of Migration addresses the need for educational researchers to place their work in a broader social and political context by connecting it to the current and highly relevant issue of extremism and radicalization. It is just as important for researchers of extremism and radicalization to strengthen their conceptual links with educational fields, especially with education for democratic citizenship, as for researchers in education to get more familiar with issues of migration. This book meets a current shortage of research that addresses these issues across subjects and disciplines to inform both scientific and professional stakeholders in the educational and social sectors. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part, Foundations, provides fundamental research on radicalization and the rejection of democratic values. In the second part, Analysis of Preconditions within the Educational Context, key risk and protective factors against radicalization for young people are explored. Finally, the third part, Approaches for Prevention and Intervention, offers concrete suggestions for prevention and intervention methods within formal and informal educational contexts. The contributions show how new avenues for prevention can be explored through integrating citizenship education's twofold function to assimilate and to empower.