There is love on these pages, love for nature, the cosmos, the body's deep knowing and students. Learning in Nature focuses on the lives of 6 drama students who gathered weekly at a community arts center during their childhood and adolescence. Before each play rehearsal the students explored contemplative practices such as meditation, yoga, breathing and visualization. After these warm-up sessions the rehearsals were dynamic and highly creative. So, what might happen if these students went out into nature and experimented with the same practices? What would happen, over a year long period, if they stopped the noise of life and just listened, deeply, just looked and inhaled, phenomenologically? Returning the experience of learning to nature, the book tells the story of this group, it tells of their lives and their growing understanding of consciousness, and does so through the complex and rich perspectives of holistic teaching and learning.

With the rapid availability of information, it becomes essential to keep pace with this availability as well as process the information into knowledge that has real-world applications. Neuroscientific methods allow an approach to this problem based on the way that the human brain already operates. Over the centuries and through observation and trial and error, we already know a great deal about how we can teach and learn, but now we can verify this with scientific fact and discover previously unknown aspects of brain physiology. These observations of brain functioning have produced many learning theories, all of which have varying degrees of validity. These theories, in turn, give birth to theories and models of instructional design, which also have varying degrees of validity. A Conceptual Framework for SMART Applications in Higher Education: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly publication that explores how the brain acquires and processes information to turn information into knowledge and the role of SMART technology and how it combines and integrates visual and aural data to facilitate learning. The book also discusses ways to apply what is known about teaching to how the brain operates and how to incorporate instructional design models into the teaching and learning process. Highlighting various topics such as neurogenesis, smart technologies, and behaviorism, this book is essential for instructional designers, online instruction managers, teachers, academicians, administrators, researchers, knowledge managers, and students.