Search Results (134)

Urban community gardens are increasingly institutionalized through public land, infrastructure, and administrative recognition, yet the mechanisms through which formalized gardens retain—or lose—civic purpose remain insufficiently understood. This article examines Madrid through a qualitative comparative case study involving 33 participants: 30 participants across 13 community gardens and three contextual actors. A layered, multi-perspectival adaptation of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis combines idiographic interpretation with site-level and cross-case comparisons. An embedded quantitative content analysis of a transparent 12-garden transcript subsample (approximately 85,219 Spanish-language words) normalized six thematic dictionaries per 1000 words and used exploratory Mann–Whitney U tests. No thematic-rate difference reached statistical significance, suggesting that cultivation layout alone does not explain civic capacity. Cross-case analysis identifies five mediating processes: distributed roles, recurrent collective routines, knowledge translation, boundary-spanning partnerships, and accessible routes into participation and voice. Participants experienced gardens as therapeutic and relational counter-spaces, settings of agroecological learning, civic classrooms, modest forms of food autonomy, and negotiated commons. Food-security contributions were supplementary, whereas ecological literacy, practical competence, social connection, and collective agency were substantial. Adaptive Civic Commons is proposed as a framework for publicly anchored, community-led commons whose continuity depends on adaptation in governance, ecological practice, civic pedagogy, and public legitimacy. Full article

This study investigates instructional practices among 4228 UAE public school teachers using data from the 2024 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) of 15 self-reported teaching-practice items identified four distinguishable pedagogical profiles: (1) Comprehensive Practitioners (77.2%), reporting mildly above-average use of practices across all domains with no pronounced emphasis in any area; (2) Limited-Repertoire Teachers (10.1%), reporting the lowest use of nearly all practices; (3) Emerging-Repertoire Teachers (4.5%), showing a similar but less extreme pattern; and (4) Traditional Teachers (8.2%), reporting above-average classroom management alongside below-average cognitive activation and content-linking. The LPA was conducted using mclust (v. 6.1.3) in R. Classification quality was high (entropy = 0.987), although AIC, BIC, and ABIC continued to favour solutions with more than four profiles through the eight-profile models tested; the four-profile solution was retained for its comparatively high entropy, interpretability, and parsimony. The profile structure should therefore be treated as a description of self-reported practice patterns within this analysed, unweighted sample. By mapping diverse teaching behaviours, this study contributes to global discourse on evidence-based pedagogy and supports data-driven reform efforts aligned with the UAE’s national educational vision for world-class schooling. Full article

This study examines how school music teachers are represented in English-language television series and considers implications for professional identity, pedagogy and recruitment. Drawing on a novel, systematically coded database of 36 on-screen music educators from 28 television series from 1952 to 2026, quantitative description maps demographic attributes (age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status), narrative role (minor, major, protagonist), genre and institutional context. Our findings show music teachers are most often supporting characters, typically mid-career, male and predominantly white, with comedy—especially ensemble school comedy—dominating portrayals. Qualitative interpretation demonstrates persistent teacher archetypes and pedagogical tropes: the failed performer turned teacher, the inspirational mentor who singles out a talented student, and blurred teacher–student boundaries. These portrayals routinely privilege spectacle and rapid transformation over sequenced curriculum, assessment and routine labour, risking the creation of distorted public expectations about what music teaching entails. This article situates these findings within contemporary concerns about teacher shortages and declining occupational status in English-language contexts, arguing that mediated images may influence career choice, teacher retention and societal attitudes. Methodological advances include expanded time and geographic contexts of studied texts and detailed coding. The paper concludes by calling for reception and experimental studies to test causal effects on aspiring teachers and to inform teacher education curricula. Full article

Pediatric dental diseases, notably dental caries, malocclusion, and dental trauma, remain a significant public health challenge in China, exerting considerable impact on children’s oral and general health. Despite growing societal demand for pediatric dental care, China faces a critical shortage and uneven geographic distribution of pediatric dentists, alongside persistent urban–rural disparities in access to oral health services. These challenges underscore the urgent need for educational reforms, workforce policy adjustments, and assessment of the strengths and limitations of recent training initiatives to enhance pediatric dental service delivery. This narrative review aims to: (I) describe the current structure of pediatric dental education in China and recent reforms, notably the integration of degree education with standardized residency training; (II) summarize the epidemiological burden of dental diseases among Chinese children, together with contributing social and geographic factors; (III) outline national policy initiatives targeting children’s oral health and existing gaps in implementation; and (IV) discuss innovations in dental education, including student-centered pedagogies and humanities integration. This review provides a comprehensive overview of pediatric dentistry in China and offers strategic recommendations to strengthen workforce training, expand service access, and reduce the burden of pediatric oral diseases. Full article

The future of the planet depends largely on human beings, who currently occupy a dominant position among living species. This condition highlights the importance of global efforts to ensure that the sustainability of life on Earth remains a central priority, as articulated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper investigates how sustainability and education have been represented in research publications in Indonesia. This study reviews the development of sustainability and education research in Indonesia using a systematic literature review (SLR) supported by structured content analysis and descriptive mapping. A total of 362 documents were retrieved from the Scopus database using specific keywords. The systematic review reveals an upward trend in publications over the past nine years, with universities in Java playing a dominant role, and a significant acceleration in knowledge production during the last five years. This increase is accompanied by growing diversity in research topics, domains, keywords, and methodological approaches. One of the most notable findings is the prominence of service-based learning (SBL), which appears to be a distinctive feature of higher education pedagogy in Indonesia. Full article

This article examines the Golan Archaeological Museum as a site where archaeology, museum pedagogy, and political power intersect in producing historical knowledge. Established after the Six-Day War and inaugurated shortly after Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, the museum emerged from archaeological practices conducted alongside military occupation and territorial consolidation. Drawing on archival documents, excavation reports, museum display analysis, and theories of visuality and heritage, the article argues that the museum functions as a continuation of wartime practices of erasure through curatorial and pedagogical means. The study shows how archaeological material is selectively transformed into a narrative of continuous Jewish presence in the region, while Islamic and Syrian histories are marginalized or rendered invisible despite their substantial presence in the archaeological record. Through exhibition design, visual framing, and educational mediation, the museum constructs a singular historical narrative that aligns archaeological evidence with contemporary territorial sovereignty. The article contends that the museum operates not only as a cultural institution but also as an agent of political visuality, shaping the boundaries of historical consciousness, democratic representation, and public memory in a contested landscape. Full article

In an era where entertainment media increasingly functions as public pedagogy, higher education instructors must navigate how these platforms shape students’ perceptions of social and political issues. This study explores the possibilities of integrating the sitcom Abbott Elementary into an undergraduate interdisciplinary Honors seminar to challenge deficit-based perspectives on urban education and shift student focus toward systemic policy analysis. Using a qualitative exploratory design, this localized course design inquiry analyzed Initial and Final Reflections from 24 students with diverse academic backgrounds. The curriculum employed a multiperspectival analysis, pairing television episodes with scholarly research and authentic community voices. Findings reveal a qualitative thematic shift in student discourse: participants moved from articulating hegemonic, deficit-oriented views toward more humanizing and complex conceptualizations of critical issues shaping urban education. Students increasingly identified policy-driven factors over individual community “failures”. These results suggest that leveraging contemporary popular culture as a primary academic text provides a useful framework for fostering critical thinking and policy literacy. Consequently, interdisciplinary media-based pedagogy serves as an engaging tool for involving diverse student populations in educational equity discourse. Full article

Education systems face increasing pressure to adopt evidence-informed innovations that respond to learner diversity. In early childhood, understanding neuroplasticity is foundational for developing inclusive pedagogies, yet translating basic neuroscience into teacher professional development remains complex. This study presents a descriptive and exploratory bibliometric analysis characterizing the intersection of neuroplasticity, neuropedagogy, and early childhood to map how research evidence is organized. A corpus of 2937 documents spanning from 1975 to early 2026 was analyzed to identify publication trends, global collaboration networks, and thematic structures. Results indicate exponential growth in the field, with the United States leading in volume but European and South American nations demonstrating higher international collaboration rates. Thematic mapping reveals a structural separation between applied human studies and mechanistic basic science. This translational distance, combined with the documented prevalence of neuromyths among educators, presents a significant barrier to evidence-informed inclusive education. These findings provide researchers and policymakers with a diagnostic map of the field, outlining specific implications for the content, design, implementation, and evaluation of future teacher professional development to responsibly advance educational equity and inclusion. Full article

Higher education policy on generative artificial intelligence has developed rapidly, yet much of this development remains stronger on governance, permission, disclosure, and assurance than on pedagogy. Universities increasingly move beyond blanket prohibition by distinguishing between restricted and permitted contexts, requiring acknowledgement of tool use, and introducing verification mechanisms to protect authorship and understanding. However, publicly visible institutional approaches appear less developed in providing structured, student-facing workflows that guide responsible AI engagement during assessment completion. This article, informed by a bounded qualitative document analysis, uses the term pedagogical middle layer to describe the process guidance needed between institutional permission settings and academic-integrity or misconduct procedures. Drawing on recent literature and a purposive scan of selected publicly available university policy and guidance documents, the paper argues that current public-facing models are often effective at defining boundaries but less explicit in guiding disciplined, transparent, and defensible forms of human–AI collaboration. In response, the paper presents the Structured AI-Guided Education Assessment Policy (SAGE-AP) as a theoretically grounded policy proposal for AI-assisted assessment, rather than as an empirically validated policy intervention. SAGE-AP frames assessment as a staged process in which students begin from their own understanding, engage with AI critically, document evaluative decisions, refine outputs responsibly, and defend the reasoning represented in the final submission. The paper contributes to institutional policy development by clarifying how permission settings may be complemented by pedagogical process guidance in the generative AI era. Full article

The concept of technological singularity is discussed here in the context of architecture (of buildings, not software). This is the point at which non-human intelligence is conjectured to surpass ordinary human cognitive limits. Empirically constrained AI may already offer a useful corrective to mainstream architectural culture in one crucial aspect—its capacity to evaluate design that adapts to human emotional health. Postwar building architecture as an institutional power system rewards abstraction and stylistic conformity through media prestige while not always accounting for embodied human experience. By narrowing judgment criteria, architectural studio pedagogy trains tacitly for imitation, not seeking evidence that conflicts with dominant formal ideologies. Yet findings from environmental psychology, health-related design research, neuroscience, and recent AI-based studies show that built form measurably affects empathic response and user well-being. This paper examines what effects dominant architectural culture could impose on the public by producing informationally impoverished, stressful environments. We argue that built environment design may suffer from an epistemic closure because (i) architectural education does not foster curiosity in how design affects users—the core mechanism for intelligence development—and (ii) architectural media may legitimate non-adaptive form languages by habituating populations to ignore distress signals from geometries associated with elevated stress markers. However, empirically constrained AI can now be directed to apply that relevant knowledge base to improve the built environment. The most suggestive evidence in the paper is that LLM emotional scores, LLM geometric scores, human eye-tracking, and large public surveys converge on the same designs. In this sense, the AI singularity can be framed as a domain-specific, testable hypothesis in architecture. This paper does not report new generated results derived from Empirically Constrained Scaffolding (ECS), which appear in prior applications, but reproduces the original prompts as an illustration of the method. Full article

According to “queer pedagogy”, schools must show and address different forms of family relationships if they wish to reflect the society we live in and contribute to a world that is more respectful of differences. Based on the hypothesis that reading and producing texts with LGTBQ+ content from the earliest stages of education allows students to be shown and to develop awareness of the different realities of affective-sexual diversity so that they understand and respect them, a study was conducted in the sixth-grade classroom of two public schools in Spain, with 77 students, to verify the students’ acceptance of this diversity. This study followed the reading of the literature with LGTBQ+ themes throughout the school year and creative writing practices. The quasi-experimental research provides concrete data that highlight the usefulness of reading and writing these types of texts in the experimental group, confirming the hypothesis that students who have read and written texts on this topic show greater acceptance of the possibility of having a diverse identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, they also show greater acceptance of diversity in others. Students who read and write about diversity are better able to address issues of inclusion. Full article

This article examines Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex (1995) and his culminating public artwork, Mobile Homestead (2005–2013), as speculative architectures that negotiate the fraught intersections of pedagogy, memory, and public engagement. While Educational Complex mobilizes the language of architectural models and dioramas to materialize “blanks” as forms of pedagogical repression and institutional affiliation, Mobile Homestead extends this inquiry into public space through a community-oriented artwork that simultaneously invites access and withholds subterranean, private zones. Situating these projects within discourses of socially engaged and public art, the article argues that Kelley stages a productive paradox: his sustained skepticism toward public art’s political agency is folded into works that nonetheless generate collective encounters, informal pedagogies, and disaffiliated publics. Read together, these speculative architectures reconceptualize failure, disobedience, and disaffiliation not as negations of public engagement, but as critical strategies for exposing institutional complicity while constructing alternative architectures of memory, play, and social relation. By repositioning Kelley—often read primarily through psychoanalytic frameworks—as a pivotal yet overlooked figure in the histories of socially engaged and public art, the article unsettles prevailing narratives of community, resistance, and the public good. Full article

The paper explores the implementation of inclusive, student-centered pedagogies in an internationally co-taught EAP course. Designed within the Erasmus+ W.I.D.E. framework, the course brought together students from Italy and Israel to collaboratively work on academic conference presentations delivered in English as a lingua franca. The study employs an Action Research and Case Study approach, allowing iterative cycles of planning, implementation, observation, and reflection to inform pedagogical decisions. This embraces three intersecting priorities in contemporary higher education: preparing students for global academic participation, fostering inclusive and supportive learning environments, and cultivating intercultural competence in digitally mediated settings. More specifically, drawing on a project-based teaching framework, the study examines how students are socialized into academic discourse through delivering presentations, engaging in intercultural dialogue, and developing cross-curricular soft skills. Our findings suggest that project-based work in small multicultural teams can support both autonomy and cooperation, while contributing to the development of critical thinking, mediation and confidence in public speaking, essential for participation in international academic communities. The findings also point to the potential role of responsive and compassionate pedagogy in digital collaboration. The study offers a practice-informed model that may be adaptable to similar contexts for bridging EAP and international research practices, highlighting implications for intercultural academic communication, virtual mobility, and inclusive language education. Full article

This article presents an integrated design studio pedagogy for flood-resilient urban waterfronts that employs groundscape strategies, treating the ground as an active design medium to generate hybrid structures integrating landscape, architecture, and infrastructure. Implemented at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design (Fall 2024), the studio challenged students to transform North Little Rock’s flood-vulnerable riverfront by replacing conventional levee infrastructure with ground-based public architectural interventions. The study adopts a pedagogical case-study approach, examining a studio cohort in which all projects were developed under shared site conditions, design constraints, and instructional frameworks. Five assignments progressed from collaborative precedent analysis to individual technical development, integrating computational modeling, performance simulations, and expert consultations across structural, envelope, MEP, and site engineering. Student work is analyzed through comparative sectional diagrams and selected in-depth project studies to evaluate how groundscape functioned as a shared solution type for multiscalar integration. The results show that groundscape operates productively when tested against specific site constraints rather than deployed as a generalized esthetic. In response to flood elevations, degraded ecology, and limited public access, students developed distinct ground-based operations—such as embedding, lifting, and integrating flood walls as spatial thresholds—demonstrating architecture’s capacity to mediate between civic space, environmental performance, and flood protection. By situating groundscape within a problem-oriented pedagogy, the study consolidates modernist, postmodern, and contemporary groundscape discourse and demonstrates how architectural education can engage productively with climate-adaptation challenges. Full article

The inception of Jamaica’s education system was built based on European settler colonial ideologies and White supremacist logic. Almost two centuries after the abolition of slavery and over six decades after independence from British rule, colonial vestiges pervade Jamaican education policy and practice, resulting in the continued marginalisation of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Despite the commissioning of multiple reports on the state of the education system, these racist and classist injustices persist. In this article, we examine social justice issues at the nexus of national education policy and school leadership practice in Jamaican public schools based on our reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with two Jamaican education policymakers, five education researchers and four public school leaders, alongside Jamaica’s National Student Dress and Grooming Policy Guidelines 2018. Our findings highlight a hierarchical relationship among stakeholder groups in the creation and implementation of Jamaican education policy. Our findings also highlight four themes suggesting that this results from deeply ingrained valorisation of Eurocentric values in policy design that leads to heightened tensions between the Ministry of Education and Youth (MOEY) and school administrators at the level of policy implementation, distraction of school staff from teaching and learning, and disproportionate exclusion of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Implications from our study are the need for stronger cohesion among education policy stakeholders, the incorporation of social justice in teacher and leader preparation and the integration of critical pedagogies at all levels of the Jamaican education system. Full article