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This commentary addresses a problem of practice related to student disengagement in technology-rich classrooms, where learners are digitally connected but socially and academically disconnected. Although not an empirical study, the commentary draws on instructional examples from secondary- and graduate-level teaching. The authors examine how digital literacy instruction can strengthen engagement, reading comprehension, and ethical participation in online environments. The article highlights strategies such as the workshop model, multimodal composition, digital content curation, and the use of mentor texts to support critical thinking and collaborative learning. These practices aim to develop students’ analytical skills, awareness of audience, and recognition of their own positionality in digital spaces. Across courses, the authors reflected on increased student engagement when digital tools were used not simply for task completion but to support inquiry, discourse, and authentic creation for real audiences.

Academic success is now coupled with social media engagement. Social media has become so normalized in the academy that absent a carefully curated social media presence, scholars risk being seen as unscholarly, unproductive, and unpopular. This article lays bare the pressures, mechanisms, and monstrosities of using social media to promote scholarship. We argue that the widespread adoption of social media outpaces critical attention to its ethics and wonder about the future of public scholarship and the monstrous scholarly selves we are becoming. Thinking of monstrosity, with Krecˇicˇ and Žižek, as the preontological domain that rests beneath society and constitutes alterity and otherness, we ask what kinds of #scholarfamousmonsters we want to be, become, and promote in the digital era.

Nature-based education has been increasingly recognized as a socially responsible approach to nurture curiosities in the hands, heads, and hearts of children. Research in the last ten years suggests that children who attend forest preschools, as opposed to traditional preschools, demonstrate growth in all domains of early childhood development. Domains include cognitive growth, executive functioning, physical development, linguistic proficiency, and socio-emotional well-being. In addition to cultivating these areas two Waldkindergarten or forest schools, studied in this chapter nourish as additional component—connectedness, compassion, and care for nature. There has been a steady increase in nature-based preschool programs as alternative approaches to traditional, indoor classrooms. With the expansion of programs, globally, and heightened awareness around environmental issues in the Anthropocene, nature-based education is increasingly recognized for cultivating socially responsible approaches that yield sustainable practices. This chapter reports on an exploratory study that synthesized two fieldwork experiences in German Wald-kindergarten, one in the north near Denmark and one in south, near the foothills of the Alps. Through a qualitative, thematic analysis of fieldnotes of direct and partici-pant observation, interviews with facilitators and analysis of student-created artifacts, this chapter explores how time in nature can be reconceived as a space to cultivate a connectedness to nature that fosters a commitment to conservation and sustain-ability. Primary goals of this research are to identify practices that center children learning with nature and, subsequently, to reconceptualize forest school practices in contexts outside of northern Europe. This research interrogates ways in which forest schools serve as spaces to engage in work around environmental stewardship while problematizing the accessibility of nature-based programs. Whilst reflecting upon lessons from Waldkindergarten, this chapter explores how nature-based Education provides opportunities towards a sustainable future for cultivating children’s curiosities in timeless traditions. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.

Faculty of color are constantly experiencing trauma and racial inequities in inherently Eurocentric educational spaces where their histories, knowledge, and experiences are delegitimized and marginalized. Employing critical race feminism (CRF) and White racial identity development model, this article details ways in which two Chinese international women instructors grappled with tensions and trauma and celebrated (small) joys and successes within Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) in the United States. We drew on duoethnography, a dialogic methodological approach grounded in social justice, to make meaning of, (re)construct, and advance racial equity in pedagogy. We examined and analyzed four sources of data: our personal narratives, transcripts of eight Zoom meetings, reflection journals, and informal conversational exchanges. We identified three strategies for navigating dissonance and conflicts: 1) being vulnerable, 2) recognizing shared and differing marginalization or privileges, and 3) building allies intentionally and strategically. © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

While students of color’s experiences of academic bullying from their advisors have been documented in the literature (e.g., Moss & Mahmoudi, 2021), little is known regarding the role that race plays in the normalization and perpetuation of academic bullying within higher education. Utilizing Asian critical theory (AsianCrit) as both the theoretical and analytical lens, this phenomenological study centers five STEM Asian international doctoral students’ experiences of academic bullying through semi-structured interviews. It is found that racialized academic bullying is operationalized by a) legitimizing exploitation through racializing discourses; b) maintaining White supremacy across transnational contexts; and c) intersecting systems of oppression. Implications and recommendations are offered as to what stakeholders can do collectively to address racialized academic bullying towards minoritized students and to combat systemic inequities and oppression.

Designing and analyzing lesson plans is a ubiquitous practice in teacher education, and yet we know little about how preservice teachers (PSTs) notice elements of their lesson plans that afford opportunities for supporting equitable student sensemaking. We investigate how the use of a tool, a framework for supporting equitable sensemaking, guided 36 PSTs to notice four features of equitable sensemaking in their plans. Qualitative analysis of PSTs’ comments about their plans generated a coding rubric and three associated levels for noticing. These levels included (1) paying little to no attention to explicit strategies and making assumptions about the ways that traditional classroom practices might facilitate equitable sensemaking; (2) attending to some strategies but providing few details; and (3) attending to and making connections between specific moves and broader principles and practices of supporting equitable student sensemaking. Guided by the tool, PSTs were able to provide elaborate details about their plans to design instruction to engage students in authentic scientific work focused on investigating and explaining phenomenon (feature 4) and to position students as knowers (feature 2), but they struggled to discuss explicit ways to leverage students’ lived experiences in their science lessons (feature 3) and facilitate equitable engagement and participation (feature 1). This suggests that even with the use of a tool, it may be challenging for PSTs to attend to and describe in detail strategies for leveraging students’ out-of-school lives and interests for science learning and explicit classroom strategies for making learning accessible and engaging for all. © 2024 Association for Science Teacher Education.

"This poetry anthology, with poems from poets throughout New England and from other states - is a result of Peterborough Poetry Project's second poetry contest. We invited poets, writers, and observers to submit up to three poems about New Hampshire - past, present, future, or fantasy. Forty-eight poems from the contest form this book. The poems are in three different sections by themes: People, Places, and The Wild, but readers may find that several poems have more than one theme. A poem may appear to be about nature, but also our reactions to it. Another poem may appear to be true, but might be pure fantasy. Such is the nature of poetry: read it for the obvious, then read it again to see if more reveals itself"--Back cover

This entry explores the question of how to conceptualize literacy as a deictic concept, one that continually changes as new technologies for literacy and learning emerge. It suggests a dual-level conceptualization of theory: a New Literacies theory as an overarching theory that encompasses perspectives and findings from the many studies of literacy, which are referred to as new literacies theories, using lower case. It then focuses special attention on an important lower-case theory, the new literacies of online research and comprehension. This new literacies theory frames online reading as a process of problem-based inquiry involving the new skills, strategies, dispositions, and social practices that take place as we use the Internet to solve problems and answer questions. Current understanding of online reading to learn from a New Literacies perspective is informed by recent research using assessments that measure students' ability to conduct online research in science and comprehend what they read in a virtual online world. Findings suggest that online reading requires different skills than reading paper materials; that differences across modes of reading are important for school learning; and that the Internet is best conceived as a literacy issue rather than a technology issue.

The growing diversity of students in schools has raised important questions regarding how students learning English and discipline-content simultaneously succeed academically. This challenge has been exacerbated by disparities in resources among multilingual communities throughout the COVID-19 pande...

Drawing from analyses of teaching and learning, we posit a theoretical framework of axes, practical to epistemic and explicit to implicit, which frame four quadrants of support needed to know how and why to use the crosscutting concepts in sensemaking. This work has implications for the design of learning environments that use the crosscutting concepts in scientific sensemaking. © ISLS.