Science books for professional pleasure reading: round out your content knowledge and foster interest in science with this list

The article lists several science books, including The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universes Report, by Timothy Ferris and Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson

HE 190: Health Education Course Redesign

Poster summarizing course redesign activities for HE 190: Health Education.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/davinci_itcr2014/1012/thumbnail.jp

“Get the Mexican”: Attending to the Moral Work of Teaching in Fraught Times

This article details a four-faceted approach we developed to help structure discourse about topics in partisan arenas, many of which intersect with issues of equity and social justice. The article’s narrative centers on challenging and emotionally charged discussions that unfolded in a classroom management class in our teacher preparation program on November 9, 2016, the day following the election of Donald Trump. We offer the approach, which centers on addressing cognitive biases common in partisan discourse, as a robust, straightforward, and nontechnocratic way to help teachers (both teacher preparation instructors and teachers of children) mediate partisan discussions among their students and to help them situate their personal beliefs within a professional context. When practiced well, the approach invites discussants to engage fully and authentically with ideas even when discourse threatens to become fractious and can help students who may disagree actually hear one another, consider one another’s ideas, and make decisions not as bitterly divided partisans but as members of complex, multifaceted, multicultural communities

Introducing STEM majors to the teaching profession through authentic experiences as tutors

Recruiting people with rich backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) into the teaching profession has historically been difficult and remains so today. In this bounded instrumental case study, undergraduate STEM majors were trained and placed as science and math tutors in grades 9-12, with an overarching goal of encouraging them to consider teaching as a possible career path. Several themes emerged from the tutors’ experiences as significant in their willingness to consider a career in teaching, including altruism from helping others, satisfaction from tutees’ improved academic performance, and a more nuanced understanding of the complex nature of teaching

Developing a sustainability plan at a large U.S. college of education

Despite growing awareness of its importance, most sustainability education efforts in tertiary institutions do not significantly impact curricula. This paper details some of the activities and processes used to draft a sustainability strategic plan designed to address sustainability at the curricular level rather than merely the operational level within a large college of education at a large U.S. public university. The plan is also presented. Our goal was not to articulate a fixed policy but rather to produce a coherent plan that (1) fosters awareness and encourage people to join the effort and (2) readily accommodates input as more people become involved. The plan consists of three position statements, five broad recommendations and 20 specific actions aligned with the five recommendations. The hope is that our development processes, analyses and plan will be useful to other teacher education colleges and other groups with similar organisational structures interested in developing sustainability plans

Countering Deficit Thinking About Neurodiversity Among General Education Teacher Candidates: A Case Discussion Approach

We have observed that many of the multiple-subjects teacher credential candidates in our program often reveal deficit views of autistic children. This report provides an example of how we help credential candidates learn to reframe deficit thinking about neurodiversity via the examination, discussion, and dramatization of a collection of dilemma-based case stories designed to help our students unearth preconceptions and engage in shared inquiry. One strength of this approach is that it asks candidates to develop specific and realistic plans of action, to adopt a care ethic requiring them to think and act from the perspective of the child, to think about the limits of their ability to differentiate, and to recognize that even with mainstreamed autistic children, as non-specialists our candidates may frequently find themselves out of their depth and in need of the expertise of more knowledgeable colleagues

‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects,issues and publics that were more controversial in nature

Teaching in the Age of Humans Helping Students Think about Climate Change.

To convey the magnitude and rapidity of current climate change and the severity of predictions for the next century, I present essential climate science information using four key sets of data and contextualize that information with personal anecdotes. I then consider the reasons for the large gap between the scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change and public perceptions of that consensus. With several known challenges to climate change education in mind, I offer four recommendations for teachers that map relevant social psychology to pedagogy: (1) establish a learning community that works to disrupt in-group favoritism and reduce attribution bias; (2) help students identify a set of superordinate goals to reduce intergroup conflict; (3) structure discourse toward deliberation rather than dispute to minimize the effects of loss aversion and confirmation bias; and (4) help students concretize their beliefs by asking them to think in terms of actual people, places, and events