PROJECT-BASED LEARNING: A TEACHING APPROACH WHERE LEARNING COMES ALIVE

“Doing projects” is a long-standing tradition in American education. According to Buck Institute for Education (BIE) (www.pblworks.org) the roots of PBL lie in this tradition. But the emergence of a method of teaching and learning called Project Based Learning (PBL) is the result of two important developments over the last 25 years. First, there has been a revolution in learning theory. Research in neuroscience and psychology has extended cognitive and behavioral models of learning—which support traditional direct instruction—to show that knowledge, thinking, doing, and the contexts for learning are inextricably tied. We now know that learning is partly a social activity; it takes place within the context of culture, community, and past experiences.

Families of Deaf Children With Co-Occurring Disabilities

The authors of this chapter focus on immigrant families who have deaf children with co-occurring disabilities. The journey is filled with understanding deafness, co-occurring disabilities, resources, cultural impact, communication and amplification options, and navigating the American education system. The chapter covers a range of information for professionals and families to understand what families with deaf children with co-occurring disabilities face and the continuous decisions that must be made and implemented while having limited access to support due mainly to language barriers and cultural understand. The chapter covers from the time the deaf child with co-occurring disabilities is identified and the multiple layers to understanding the path the family takes, knowing each one is as unique as the child.

Reimagining american education: Possible futures: Possible futures for equitable educational assessment

The COVID-19 pandemic led states and districts to take a break from grading students and pause standardized testing. As part of an ongoing series of articles on how schools might reconceptualize their work, William Penuel considers what kinds of assessment practices should be carried forward, as schools attempt to become more equitable. He suggests that schools look to work students create as evidence of learning, that they ensure their assessment practices recognize students’ various cultures, and that they use student work to make connections with families and community members.

What's Really New about the Neoliberal University? The Business of American Education Has Always Been Business

Journalists, academics, and ordinary Americans wrongly bemoan the student debt and college financing crises as two separate unhappy endings to a mythical story of unprecedented postwar federal and state support for higher education. Rarely have they considered that either catastrophe has anything to do with the labor question. Yet the thousands of Americans in debt and the many colleges facing bankruptcy (even before the pandemic) are intertwined disasters, which reveal that Americans never had genuine economic security or basic social welfare, a basic truth that has historically hurt and still overwhelmingly harms residents of color, particularly women, who disproportionately hold the most debt. Colleges and universities have always had to rely on tuition and business support because they never received adequate sustained funding from lawmakers, who had far more interest in offering young people and their families ways to creatively finance tuition in order to get the credentials needed to just compete for well-paying work. Business needs and demands did a lot to shape postsecondary schools before the emergency of the neoliberal university, supposedly a late twentieth-century phenomenon. As such, seemingly radical solutions, like forgiving debts and unionizing adjuncts, are not enough to transform universities into the progressive strongholds that they never really were. Lawmakers, taxpayers, and faculty would have to embrace a complete overhaul of how higher education is funded as well as how students are assisted in studying.

Reimagining American education: Possible futures: A curriculum that promotes civic ends and meets developmental needs

If schools are to prepare students to participate more productively in civic life, schools will need to ensure that they have opportunities to practice the skills of civic reasoning, argues Carol Lee. Yet schools are challenged by the limits in the curriculum and the difficulty of addressing the different types of prior knowledge that students bring to the classroom. Lee suggests that when schools build their content and pedagogy on current understandings of human learning, they will be better able to enable students from all backgrounds to practice building the understandings they need, now and in the future.

Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures: What might we accomplish in 25 years?

The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning in the United States make 2021 a potent moment to reimagine American education. This article introduces an ongoing Kappan series in which scholars look ahead to imagine what K-12 education will look like in 25 years. Na’ilah Nasir, Megan Bang, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa discuss some of the factors that have created an environment ripe for transformation and some of their ideas for what the future should look like.