Historically, public schools have been assumed a priori to prepare students for civic life. They've had a civic mandate to fortify the democratic systems in which they are embedded. Indeed, politicians, philosophers, and educational reformers usually assume that education serves more than intellectual or vocational purposes. From Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey, leaders have perennially cited public schools as one of our most potent instruments for inculcating the skills and values necessary to preserve the common good and prioritize the needs of our...
The Nor-WISE project will take advantage of international expertise to strengthen technology-enhanced science learning. We will compare the success of promising designs for collaboration and for use of visualizations in Norwegian and US settings. The researchers will implement two units, one originating in the US and the other originating in Norway in the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE). WISE logs pretests, embedded assessments, posttests, student navigation, and teacher interactions to document the impact of instructional activities. The project...
In light of the rapid and continuing development of information and communication technology (ICT), students and workers need to continuously adopt and adapt to new technologies (Olivier and Shapiro, 1993) to solve problems in digital environments . . .
The "Knowledge Analysis in Coupled Social-Ecological Systems" project proposes to combine the fields of learning sciences with model-based policy analysis and design in climate change, agriculture and food security. This combination results in the development and implementation of a framework for studying integration of local knowledge held by smallholder farmers in Zambia and science-based knowledge held for example by food systems modeling researchers. Growing evidence shows that a combination of science-based and local knowledge is required for improving...
This proposal links pre-service teacher education programs at UiT and UCB with the Norwegian Center for Human Rights at UiO to explore effective integrations of technology, culture, and human rights perspectives to improve students' academic learning and understanding of global issues. It culminates in a spring 2016 conference where pre-service teachers from UiT and UCB meet in Berkeley with all the members of the project team. During the fall of 2015, all three collaborating institutions will have a series of virtual intellectual exchanges and develop six...
Scholarship on educational policy and leadership offers scant empirical evidence of what happens when social justice-oriented principals enter the field and attempt to apply their theoretical knowledge to practice. Studies that consider how different contextual realities shape these leaders' enactment of their academic learning are still needed.
In this pilot study, we explore the impacts of two value-oriented principal preparation programs on school leaders' practice, one in the USA and one in Norway. The American program has chosen social justice as...
