Neanderthals In The Classroom

Neanderthals in the Classroom examines the ongoing battle surrounding evolution from a cultural and historical perspective and then puts Theodosius Dobzhansky’s claim that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” to the ultimate test by exploring the potential evolutionary roots of this societal and educational clash over human origins. In examining the biological roots of the conflict, Watts demonstrates how understanding our inner Neanderthal allows us to consciously choose more highly evolved forms of communication as a means of alleviating societal division and creating space for more effective science education. Key Features: Introduces readers to the multifaceted world of evolution education. Describes the complex interplay between religious beliefs and science as well as the clash of false information and formal education. Offers an overview of the transformation of public opinion of evolution and science over time in the United States due to the perceived conflict between science and religion. Examines students’ misconceptions about the theory of evolution and the general nature of scientific discovery due to the contradictory messages that they receive in popular culture. Offers potential means to amend misconceptions so that students and other individuals can integrate evolutionary theory into their worldviews, regardless of their religious background.

Ensuring that children leave school emotionally literate is becoming of increasing concern in the UK, with the introduction of initiatives in both primary and secondary education. This highly practical text provides teachers with strategies and engaging classroom activities which will help teachers to develop their pupils emotional literacy.

The challenges of teaching history are acute where we consider the world history classroom. Generalized world history courses are a part of many, if not most, K-12 curricular frameworks in the United States. While United States history tends to dominate the scholarship and conversation, there are an equally wide number of middle-level and secondary students and teachers engaged in the study of world history in our public schools. And the challenges are real. In the first place, if we are to mark content coverage as a curricular obstacle in the history classroom, generally, then we must underscore that concern in the world history classroom and for obvious reasons. The curricular terrain to choose from is immense and forever expanding, dealing with the development of numerous civilizations over millennia and across a wide geographic expanse. In addition to curricular concerns, world historical topics are inherently farther away from most students’ lives, not just temporally, but often geographically and culturally. Thus the rationale for the present text, Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach World History. The reviews of the first volume Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach Untied States History strategy have been overwhelmingly positive, especially as it pertains to the application of the strategy for practitioner. Classroom utility and teacher practice have remained our primary objectives in developing the Hollywood or History? strategy and we are encouraged by the possibilities of Volume II and the capacity of this most recent text to impact teaching and learning in world history. We believe that students’ connection to film, along with teachers’ ability to use film in an effective manner, will help alleviate some of the challenges of teaching world history. The book provides 30 secondary lesson plans (grades 6-12) that address nine eras in world history.

Kipp Herreid learned other ways to teach- much better ways. His favorite approach puts science in vivid context through case studies, which he calls "stories with an educational message." This compilation of 40-plus essays examines every aspect of the case study method.--[back cover].

This book contests the general view that natural selection constitutes the explanatory core of evolutionary biology. It invites the reader to consider an alternative view which favors a more complete and multidimensional interpretation. It is common to present the 1930-1960 period as characterized by the rise of the Modern Synthesis, an event structured around two main explanatory commitments: (1) Gradual evolution is explained by small genetic changes (variations) oriented by natural selection, a process leading to adaptation; (2) Evolutionary trends and speciational events are macroevolutionary phenomena that can be accounted for solely in terms of the extension of processes and mechanisms occurring at the previous microevolutionary level. On this view, natural selection holds a central explanatory role in evolutionary theory - one that presumably reaches back to Charles Darwin's Origin of Species - a view also accompanied by the belief that the field of evolutionary biology is organized around a profound divide: theories relying on strong selective factors and those appealing only to weak ones. If one reads the new analyses presented in this volume by biologists, historians and philosophers, this divide seems to be collapsing at a rapid pace, opening an era dedicated to the search for a new paradigm for the development of evolutionary biology. Contrary to popular belief, scholars' position on natural selection is not in itself a significant discriminatory factor between most evolutionists. In fact, the intellectual space is quite limited, if not non-existent, between, on the one hand, "Darwinists", who play down the central role of natural selection in evolutionary explanations, and, on the other hand, "non-Darwinists", who use it in a list of other evolutionary mechanisms. The "mechanism-centered" approach to evolutionary biology is too incomplete to fully make sense of its development. In this book the labels created under the traditional historiography - "Darwinian Revolution", "Eclipse of Darwinism", "Modern Synthesis", "Post-Synthetic Developments" - are thus re-evaluated. This book will not only appeal to researchers working in evolutionary biology, but also to historians and philosophers."

Fire has provided people with heat and energy for ages, but how was fire first discovered and harnessed? This Reader's Theater five-act script recreates the excitement and danger of harnessing fire as a source of energy. The leveled script includes roles at differentiated reading levels that accommodate all students. This classroom resource helps students interact cooperatively with peers, speak with meaning, and increase vocabulary and comprehension. It includes a glossary, poem, and a song that will engage students in learning, and helps students increase fluency, comprehension, and content literacy in sciences and social studies.

We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live — our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values — seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this? In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history — and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations. A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.