This chapter explores the urgent relevance of posthumanist theory and practice for democratizing creative educational experiences in 21st-century schools, universities, and informal learning enviro...

Black creative educational experiences (BCEEs) are participatory, performative cultural experiences created by or for students, centering Black artistic expression, aesthetics, and engagement. Usin...

This review brings together scholarship from creative educational experiences (CEE) and connected learning to describe a connected arts learning framework, reframing arts education in the 21st cent...

The movement from STEM to STEAM, with its emphasis on real-world applications, promises to meet the changing needs of a globally connected world. However, the potential of transdisciplinarity to in...

In response to the special issue on democratizing creative educational experiences (CEE), we conducted a thematic analysis of recent scholarship on creativity and decolonization (2010–2021) and ana...

This chapter provides a systematic, synthesizing, and critical review of the literature related to assessments of creativity in education from historical, theoretical, empirical, and practical stan...

Inquiring into the democratization of creative early educational experiences through the lens of the politics of belonging, this review of research asks: What does research reveal about creative early educational experiences as they pertain to history, race, and justice? Seeking to better understand the racialization of creative early educational experiences, this review undertakes a transformative

Traditional definitions and assessments of creativity often neglect to identify the complexity surrounding Black students’ brilliance, leading to lack of access and funding. Further, even when recognized, Black students are often funneled into programs that do not facilitate positive development of their racial-ethnic identity. Through our systematic review of 155 publications, we developed the BlackCreate

Environmental education seeks to foster meaningful connections to local and global environments through creative nature experiences. Responding to critiques of historical inequities, practitioners are prioritizing equitable access for historically marginalized youth, particularly from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities; this identity-centered prioritization, while essential, generates questions

Creativity is a vital topic of various educational discourses, yet the support it receives within the school system is insufficient. This chapter focuses on four particular ways of making creativit...

This chapter presents a broad interdisciplinary literature review linking artists’ economic precarity and need for but resistance to entrepreneurial skills, alongside colonial histories, structural...

In this review of literature, we attend to some of the ways that well-intentioned hopes for fostering creativity and encouraging greater inclusion may also rely on problematic premises that work to...

Creativity forms a part of educational curriculum and is an important element of education research. Clearly, creativity research of the past has made a great impact in the ways in which creativity has been integrated within education and educational practice. Yet how creativity has been studied and how the methodologies of these studies shape produced knowledge and impact educational practice are

Compulsory state-sanctioned schooling continues to be constructed as the “great equalizer,” and accordingly education research as a benevolent contributor to this material and ideological project of education. Following a Fanonian-Wynterian theoretical approach and cosmogonical-constellatory citation politics, I narrowed over 2,500 educational studies and reviewed approximately 150 articles and chapters

This chapter examines how studies focused on the same topic—disproportionality in special education—can generate vastly different conclusions about its sources and causes. By analyzing existing disagreements in the field, we explore essential questions about what constitutes high-quality and relevant evidence when seeking to understand how, when, for whom, and why disproportionality occurs. Using a

The evidence base for educational interventions for deaf students has been, and continues to be, called into question due to a lack of “gold standard” research available to support it. Yet the paucity of research in deaf education is not only in the volume of research that meets rigorous standards but also in its lack of attention to and inclusion of a deaf-centered perspective on the inferences made

For research evidence to inform decision making, an appraisal needs to be made of whether the claims are justified and whether they are useful to the decisions being made. This chapter provides a high level framework of core issues relevant to appraising the “fitness for purpose” of evidence claims. The framework includes (I) the variation in the nature of research, the evidence claims it produces

When a researcher tests an educational program, product, or policy in a randomized controlled trial and detects a significant effect on an outcome, the intervention is usually classified as something that “works.” When expected effects are not found, there is seldom an orderly and transparent analysis of plausible reasons why. Accumulating and learning from possible failure mechanisms is not standard

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) remains a priority area for public policy, internationally and in Australia. However, an analysis of empirical research published internationally up to 2008 has identified a bias toward positivist methodologies within a “scientific/psychological’ rather than educational perspective and with a focus on the interactions between preschoolers, family, and child

A reproducible analysis is one in which an independent entity, using the same data and the same statistical code, would obtain the exact same result as the previous analyst. Reproducible analyses utilize script-based analyses and open data to aid in the reproduction of the analysis. A reproducible analysis does not ensure the same results are obtained if another sample of data is obtained, often referred

In this chapter, we describe and compare the standards for evidence used by three entities that review studies of education interventions: Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, Social Programs that Work, and the What Works Clearinghouse. Based on direct comparisons of the evidence frameworks, we identify key differences in the level at which effectiveness ratings are granted (i.e., intervention

Though the concept of validity is rooted in positivism, recent scholars have expanded the definition of validity to reflect more progressive paradigms, opening the door to consideration of validity in qualitative education research. Despite this evolution, to date a review of validity evidence in qualitative research has yet to be undertaken even though products offering recommendations for using validity

This chapter reviews recent qualitative studies on personalized learning in middle/secondary school settings to analyze the role of culture in how this concept is enacted and researched. Personalized learning is posited as a pedagogical approach that aims to revolutionize schooling and challenge educational inequity by foregrounding learners’ agency in what and how they learn, tailoring pedagogy and

The contemporary social, economic, and cultural conditions within and outside the academy prompt important questions about the role of research in education policy and practice. Scholars have framed research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as a strategy to promote evidence-based decision-making in education. In this chapter, I interrogate the notion that RPPs offer an insightful framework to consider

The research community focuses on conducting research with the purported goal of improving educational practice, yet the two communities largely remain disjointed. This chapter explores the major disconnects between research and practice from the perspectives of both the practice and the research communities, and we present strategies for establishing stronger connections based on the results of our

This chapter calls for researchers to reconceptualize research quality from the perspective of its expected use, attending to power dynamics that influence how knowledge is defined, constructed, and validated through the research enterprise. Addressing these concerns when designing and conducting education research can yield more useful research evidence for building more equitable education systems

This chapter presents an innovative, cross-disciplinary methodological approach to systematically reviewing and comparing large bodies of literature using big data, Natural Language Processing, network analysis, and supplementary qualitative analysis. The approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the literature surrounding four common concepts within the scholarship related to the global turn

As a result of the frustration with the dominant “What Works” paradigm of large-scale research-based improvement, practitioners, researchers, foundations, and policymakers are increasingly embracing a set of ideas and practices that can be collectively labeled continuous improvement (CI) methods. This chapter provides a comparative review of these methods, paying particular attention to CI methods’

A robust body of geographic education policy research has been amassing over the past 25 years, as researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds have recognized the value of examining education phenomena from a spatial perspective. In this chapter, I synthesize 42 studies that examine education issues using a geographic information system, or GIS. The review is framed by the major thread that

Counter-narrative has recently emerged in education research as a promising tool to stimulate educational equity in our increasingly diverse schools and communities. Grounded in critical race theory and approaches to discourse study including narrative inquiry, life history, and autoethnography, counter-narratives have found a home in multicultural education, culturally sensitive pedagogy, and other

Connecting teachers’ perspectives with their practice is an enduring challenge shaping what and how we understand teaching. Researchers tend to bifurcate teachers’ work between their private and their public lives. These “worlds” bring particular meanings that are rendered through the analyses of visual documentations of teaching and teachers’ language-based accounts of their teaching. Combining these

Research syntheses provide one means of managing the proliferation of research knowledge by integrating learnings across primary research studies. What it means to appropriately synthesize research, however, remains a matter of debate: Syntheses can assume a variety of forms, each with important implications for the shape knowledge takes and the interests it serves. To help shed light on these differences

Measuring race and ethnicity for administrative data sets and then analyzing these data to understand racial/ethnic disparities present many logistical and theoretical challenges. In this chapter, we conduct a synthetic review of studies on how to effectively measure race/ethnicity for administrative data purposes and then utilize these measures in analyses. Recommendations based on this synthesis

Place is an inescapable aspect of daily life and is intimately linked to our life experiences. An expanding body of research has investigated how place shapes the “geography of opportunity” as well as students’, families’, and stakeholders’ experiences in and around schools. While researchers have begun to investigate the spatial context of education, the notion of place remains somewhat underconceptualized

This review presents theoretical underpinnings supporting microethnographic-discourse analytic (ME/DA) approaches to studying educational phenomena. The review is presented in two parts. Part 1 provides an analytic review of two seminal reviews of literature that frame theoretical and methodological developments of microethnography and functions language in classrooms with diverse learners. Part 2

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is a set-theoretic configurational approach that uses the logic of Boolean algebra to conceptualize and empirically examine potentially complex causal relations. The potential of this methodological innovation to draw innovative insights toward answering enduring questions and to foster novel research has increasingly been realized in several social science disciplines

I 2002, the National Research Council (NRC) released a report that articulated its vision about education research (Eisenhart & Towne, 2003; Feuer et al., 2002), which focused on scientifically based research methods. The release of the report was followed by an extensive debate and is broadly understood as part of the long-standing “paradigm war”1 in the field (Fischman & Tefera, 2014; Munoz-Najar

In the past few decades, we have seen a rapid proliferation in the use of quasi-experimental research designs in education research. This trend, stemming in part from the “credibility revolution” in the social sciences, particularly economics, is notable along with the increasing use of randomized controlled trials in the strive toward rigorous causal inference. The overarching purpose of this chapter

The emergence of big data in educational contexts has led to new data-driven approaches to support informed decision making and efforts to improve educational effectiveness. Digital traces of student behavior promise more scalable and finer-grained understanding and support of learning processes, which were previously too costly to obtain with traditional data sources and methodologies. This synthetic

Social network analysis (SNA) is becoming a prevalent method in education research and practice. But criticism has been voiced against the heavy reliance on quantification within SNA. Recent work suggests combining quantitative and qualitative approaches in SNA—mixed methods social network analysis (MMSNA)—as a remedy. MMSNA is helpful for addressing research questions related to the formal or structural

In this chapter, we examine a significant shift in research in the learning sciences, mathematics education, and science education that increasingly attends to the co-construction of power and learning. We review articles in these fields that embody a new sense of theoretical and methodological possibilities and dilemmas, brewing at the intersections of critical social theory and the methodological

The community school strategy calls on teachers, families, and school staff to take on new and more challenging roles to collaboratively address existing educational inequities. For example, deepened family and community engagement in the schools can help incorporate the rich funds of community knowledge and experience, both in the classroom and in making plans and decisions about the school. As school

If students are to be successful in school, at work, and in their personal lives, they must learn to write. This requires that they receive adequate practice and instruction in writing, as this complex skill does not develop naturally. A basic goal of schooling then is to teach students to use this versatile tool effectively and flexibly. Many schools across the world do not achieve this objective

This chapter reviews actionable data use—both as an umbrella term and as a specific concept—developed in three different traditions that data/information can inform and guide P–20 educational practice toward better outcomes. The literatures reviewed are known as data-driven decision making (DDDM), education data mining (EDM), and learning analytics (LA). DDDM is grounded in K–12 settings, has a social

Attention to childhood trauma and the need for trauma-informed care has contributed to the emerging discourse in schools related to teaching practices, school climate, and the delivery of trauma-related in-service and preservice teacher education. However, though trauma-informed systems of care include schools, empirical work informing trauma-informed teaching and teacher education that is reflected

This historiography chronicles educators’ efforts to teach for diversity through heightening awareness of immigrant experiences as well as discrimination against minoritized religious and racial groups in public school classrooms from the 1920s through the 1970s. This curriculum and pedagogical work was couched under various terms, such as intercultural education, intergroup education, human relations

Sensemaking entails being active, self-conscious, motivated, and purposeful in the world. It is an activity that is always situated within the cultural and historical contexts in which we interact with others and with the aid of tools. In this chapter, we contrast everyday sensemaking with academic sensemaking and treat academic sensemaking in a disciplinary-specific manner, exploring how teachers

This chapter provides a critical and synthesizing review of the literature on issues related to preparing teachers for diverse learners from historical and theoretical standpoints, reviewing more than 50 years of calls for teacher education reform and efforts to prepare White teachers and teachers of color for racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in schools and communities. It finds that the limited

Only 25% to 38% of secondary education graduates in the United States are proficient readers or writers but many continue to postsecondary education, where they take developmental education courses designed to help them improve their basic academic skills. However, outcomes are poor for this population, and one problem may be that approaches to teaching need to change. This chapter discusses approaches

Action research shifts the paradigm of contemporary educational reform by emphasizing inquiry and placing teachers at the center of research-into-practice. By situating teachers as learners, action research offers a systematic and intentional approach to changing teaching. When working as part of a community of practice, action researchers engage in sustained professional learning activities. They

In the early 1990s, the logic and policies of systemic reform launched a press to coordinate the pursuit of excellence and equity in U.S. public education, with each other and with classroom instruction. There was little in that policy moment to predict that these reforms would sustain, and much to predict otherwise. Yet, nearly three decades hence, many public school districts are working earnestly

While teacher effectiveness has been a particular focus of federal education policy, and districts allocate significant resources toward professional development for teachers, these efforts are guided by an unexplored assumption that classroom practice can be improved through intervention. Yet even assuming classroom practice is responsive, little information is available to inform stakeholder expectations

This chapter examines research on professional development, or PD, focusing specifically on underlying assumptions about the nature of teaching and the nature of teacher learning. It examines PD programs according to their assumptions about what teachers need to learn, and it examines PD studies according to how and when they expect to see evidence of teacher learning. The chapter seeks to provide

Despite evidence of promise, the adoption of culturally relevant educational (CRE) approaches to teaching and learning remains sporadic and underwhelming. In this chapter, we question this state of affairs by investigating teacher resistance to CRE. Through our examination of the literature, we have come to understand teacher resistance to CRE as a multilevel learning problem that stems from (a) limited

In this review of research, we offer a meta-analysis of young children’s learning and development within and across psychology, education, and linguistics. Engaging with Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, we mapped young children’s learning and development transdisciplinarily, seeking to (re)conceptualize early childhood teaching in ways that are answerable to intersectionally minoritized children, families

This rigorous literature review analyzed how 28 U.S.-based research studies conducted between 2001 and 2015 have defined, described, and measured changes in teaching practices related to implementation of Differentiated Instruction (DI) in P–12 classrooms. Research questions examined frameworks that defined DI, classroom operationalization of DI, key barriers and facilitators, and how changes in teacher

Utilizing a complex theory of teacher learning and practice, this chapter analyzes ~120 empirical studies of content teacher development (both preservice and in-service) for working with multilingual learners as well as research on content teaching for multilingual students. Our analysis identified three dimensions of quality content teaching for multilingual learners that are complex and intricately