Expanding Minds And Opportunities

Expanding Minds and Opportunities: Leveraging the Power of Afterschool and Summer Learning for Student Success presents an impressive and significant body of work that comprises almost 70 reports, research studies, essays, articles, and commentaries by more than 100 authors representing a range of researchers, educators, policy makers, and professionals in the field, as well as thought leaders and opinion influencers. Collectively, these writings boldly state that there is now a solid base of research and best practices clearly showing that quality afterschool and summer learning programs-including 21st Century Community Learning Centers-make a positive difference for students, families, schools, and communities.

There is considerable interest in education around the world in flexible thinking and learning skills but very little consensus as to the nature of these skills and how best to promote them in schools. This book puts forward a clear and practical framework for understanding thinking, creativity and learning to learn as the fruits of engagement in dialogue. It also outlines in detail how this framework can be applied to teaching across the curriculum at both primary and secondary level, drawing on the best practices associated with the teaching thinking; creativity; and learning to learn movements explaining their success in terms of dialogic theory. In particular the book incorporates aspects of a number of thinking skills approaches, such as Lipman�s Philosophy for Children approach, as well as features of contemporary innovations in education such as assessment for learning and the development of creativity. Each chapter opens with a vignette to set the scene and continue into a light and popularly written exposition of theory, before moving on to a description of practice and concluding with practical guidelines for how to teach for thinking and creativity in schools and classrooms. The first six chapters in the book have more of a focus on developing core theoretical themes and the following six chapters in the second half of the book focus more on practice-led themes. The relationship between theory and practice is treated as flexible and dynamic, theory being developed by practice as much as practice implementing theory.

The first collection of its kind to explore the diverse and global history of psychedelics as they appealed to several generations of researchers and thinkers. Expanding Mindscapes offers a fascinatingly fluid and diverse history of psychedelics that stretches around the globe. While much of the literature to date has focused on the history of these drugs in the United States and Canada, editors Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock deliberately move away from these places in this collection to reveal a longer and more global history of psychedelics, which chronicles their discovery, use, and cultural impact in the twentieth century. The authors in this collection explore everything from LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia to the first applications of LSD-25 in South America to the intersection of modernism and ayahuasca in China. Along the way, they also consider how psychedelic experiments generated their own cultural expressions, where the specter of the United States may have loomed large and where colonial empires exerted influence on the local reception of psychedelics in botanical and pharmaceutical pursuits. Breaking new ground by adopting perspectives that are currently lacking in the historiography of psychedelics, this collection adds to the burgeoning field by offering important discussions on underexplored topics such as gender, agriculture, parapsychology, anarchism, and technological innovations.

Is today's fast-paced media culture creating a toxic environment for our children's brains? In this landmark, bestselling assessment tracing the roots of America's escalating crisis in education, Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., examines how television, video games, and other components of popular culture compromise our children's ability to concentrate and to absorb and analyze information. Drawing on neuropsychological research and an analysis of current educational practices, Healy presents in clear, understandable language: -- How growing brains are physically shaped by experience -- Why television programs -- even supposedly educational shows like Sesame Street -- develop "habits of mind" that place children at a disadvantage in school -- Why increasing numbers of children are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder -- How parents and teachers can make a critical difference by making children good learners from the day they are born

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman--in which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations about the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

First released in the Spring of 1999, How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. Topics include: How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain. How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn. What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach. The amazing learning potential of infants. The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace. Learning needs and opportunities for teachers. A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children’s learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development.