This book explores how mindfulness has been infused into education to produce favorable outcomes, such as stress reduction, heightened focus, resilience, calmness, alertness, mood regulation, self-awareness, professional commitment, and increased compassion and kindness to self and others. The chapters are situated in diverse contexts, including schools and colleges, warfare, violent extremism, global warming, child sex abuse, and species extinction. A feature of the book is the use of what is learned from ongoing research to design interventions to increase the incidence of mindful practices, to enhance learning and forms of conduct to transform social life and sustain harmonious lifestyles. Inclusion of mindfulness-based interventions in teacher education programs include breathing meditation and tools such as heuristics and mindful writing. Breathing meditation and its relationship to mindfulness is addressed, including abdominal breathing as a component of meditation, leading to mindful conduct and physiological changes, including heart rate and blood oxygenation levels. The extent to which breathing practice includes nasal and oral inhalation and exhalation is also considered in relation to increasing levels of nitric oxide in the airways, thereby enhancing social communication and wellness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning: Research and Practice.

Teaching and Learning Science consists of sixty-six chapters written by more than ninety leading educators and scientists. The contributions are informed by cutting-edge theory and research and address numerous issues that are central to K 12 education. This resource will be particularly valuable for parents and teachers as schools around the country prepare students to meet the challenges presented when science is added to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2007. These insightful contributions touch on many of the most controversial topics facing science educators and students today, including evolution, testing, homeschooling, ecology, and the achievement gaps faced by girls, children of color, and ESL learners. Accessible and full of insight, the set is written for teachers, parents, and students, and offers a wealth of resources germane to K-12 settings. The book is arranged according to themes that are central to science education: language and scientific literacy, home and school relationships, equity, new roles for teachers and students, connecting science to other areas of the curriculum, resources for teachers and learners, and science in the news. The authors address controversial topics such as evolution, and present alternative ways to think about teaching, learning, the outcomes of science education, and issues associated with high stakes testing. In addition, relationships between science and literacy are explored in terms of art and science, making sense of visuals in textbooks, reading, writing, children's literature, and uses of comics to represent science. Chapters also address how to teach contemporary science, including the origin of the chemical elements, the big bang, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis.

Many would argue that the state of urban science education has been static for the past several decades and that there is little to learn from it. Rather than accepting this deficit perspective, Improving Urban Science Education strives to recognize and understand the successes that exist there by systematically documenting seven years of research into issues salient to teaching and learning in urban high school science classes. Grounded in the post structuralism of William Sewell_and brought to life through the experiences of different students, teachers, and school settings in Philadelphia_this book shows how teachers and students can work together to enact meaningful science education when social and cultural differences as well as inappropriate curricula often make the challenges seem insurmountable. Chapters contain rich images of urban youth and each strives to offer insights into problems and suggestions for resolving them. Most significant, in spite of the challenges, the research offers hope and shows that fresh approaches to teaching and learning can lead students_some who have already been pronounced academic, even societal, failures_to becoming avid and deep learners of science.

Re/Constructing Elementary Science seeks to improve the way science is taught in the elementary school. There are three main contradictions that make it difficult for teachers and students to engage in meaningful activities from which understandings result. The central issues in this book are framed in terms of three dichotomies that lead to tensions arising from the dialectic of opposing aspects of teaching and learning. First, there is a tension between learning as an individual process (cultural production) and as a cultural process (cultural reproduction). Second, there is a tension between science and technology (applied science). Finally, there exists a tension between children's interaction with nature and their language for describing and explaining nature. Exemplary case studies are featured that show the tremendous capabilities of elementary students to talk about technology and, in the process, to learn to talk science. These case studies are couched in an ongoing professional dialogue among the authors and the requirements to make such exemplary science happen in other classrooms.

13 Questions: Reframing Education's Conversation: Science examines thirteen critical questions confronting contemporary science education and a dynamic and evolving universe threatened by issues of sustainability and disharmony. The world's leading scholars in science education utilize cutting-edge theories and analyses to illuminate possible pathways in a world threatened by global warming, mass extinctions, and pervasive conflicts. These provocative responses to some of the most difficult questions facing science education to date are intended to provoke, expand, and enlighten readers about possibilities for transforming and enhancing the social and physical worlds we inhabit and for which we are stewards. The sections of 13 Questions address science curriculum; power and science education; quality of science teachers; quality of science students; quality of science teacher education; equity; language; religion; race; families; culture of science and science education; political issues and science education; and bold visions for science education. The book is international in scope and shows value for difference in the perspectives, values, and theoretical underpinnings of authors.

13 Questions: Reframing Education's Conversation: Science examines thirteen critical questions confronting contemporary science education and a dynamic and evolving universe threatened by issues of sustainability and disharmony. The world's leading scholars in science education utilize cutting-edge theories and analyses to illuminate possible pathways in a world threatened by global warming, mass extinctions, and pervasive conflicts. These provocative responses to some of the most difficult questions facing science education to date are intended to provoke, expand, and enlighten readers about possibilities for transforming and enhancing the social and physical worlds we inhabit and for which we are stewards. The sections of 13 Questions address science curriculum; power and science education; quality of science teachers; quality of science students; quality of science teacher education; equity; language; religion; race; families; culture of science and science education; political issues and science education; and bold visions for science education. The book is international in scope and shows value for difference in the perspectives, values, and theoretical underpinnings of authors.

This book explores how mindfulness has been infused into education to produce favorable outcomes, such as stress reduction, heightened focus, resilience, calmness, alertness, mood regulation, self-awareness, professional commitment, and increased compassion and kindness to self and others. The chapters are situated in diverse contexts, including schools and colleges, warfare, violent extremism, global warming, child sex abuse, and species extinction. A feature of the book is the use of what is learned from ongoing research to design interventions to increase the incidence of mindful practices, to enhance learning and forms of conduct to transform social life and sustain harmonious lifestyles. Inclusion of mindfulness-based interventions in teacher education programs include breathing meditation and tools such as heuristics and mindful writing. Breathing meditation and its relationship to mindfulness is addressed, including abdominal breathing as a component of meditation, leading to mindful conduct and physiological changes, including heart rate and blood oxygenation levels. The extent to which breathing practice includes nasal and oral inhalation and exhalation is also considered in relation to increasing levels of nitric oxide in the airways, thereby enhancing social communication and wellness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning: Research and Practice.