Interesting reads

With eyes closed and deep breaths, students are learning a new method to reduce anxiety, conflict, and attention disorders. A growing number of schools are using “mindfulness trainings” in an effort to combat increasing levels of anxiety, social conflict, and attention disorder among children.

Through What did you do in school today?: Transforming Classrooms through Social, Academic and Intellectual Engagement , the Canadian Education Association, in partnership with the Canadian Council on Learning and school districts across Canada, are bringing life to the idea of student engagement in the classroom, and exploring its powerful relationship with adolescent learning, student achievement, and effective teaching.

A first look at the initiative’s results are presented in the initiative’s first national report – _What did you do in school today?: Transforming Classrooms thro

This handbook aims to offer evidence, insights, ideas and recommendations that can be built upon to support and nurture a culture of transformative innovation within education.

Increasingly it is recognised that there is a need to innovate to enable greater creativity, flexibility, learner input and so forth, and to deliver a more personalised educational system and foster new skills amongst learners.

In the math class of veteran teacher Steve Norton, students cut pizza into precise triangles, calculate the volume of ice cream cones (filling them with real ice cream), and throw water balloons at their teacher. Norton wants to show his grade 8 students that algebra can be fun and engage them in ‘learning through doing’. It’s a constructionist approach that engages students in the learning experience, in part, by allowing them to actually construct or do something ‘real’.

“Every kid is different. Why force each mind to fit the same timetable?” asks this article written by a British Columbia teacher. If individuals learn in a variety of styles and on different schedules, who benefits from the formal rigidity of current school timetable? And if we know that learning is not confined to the classroom, couldn’t we ‘do’ school differently?

The second edition of Historical Statistics of Canada was jointly produced by the Social Science Federation of Canada and Statistics Canada in 1983. This volume contains about 1,088 statistical tables on the social, economic and institutional conditions of Canada from the start of the Confederation in 1867 to the mid-1970s.

The Homeroom is a gateway to information about the history of education and schools in British Columbia. Launched in 1997, this web site has been developed with contributions from teachers and students at British Columbia schools, colleges, and universities, and from independent scholars and writers. The British Columbia Archives and the Royal British Columbia Museum have also been important to The Homeroom.

This web site is edited by Dr. Patrick A. Dunae and hosted by Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.

For more than 100 years, Canadian women have been struggling for equal access to education. Herstory has recorded a few of the “firsts” in that struggle. Although we know the names of these women because they were first, many others, whose names we have forgotten, persisted in the struggle. To them modern women owe their opportunities to study where they please.

A Masters thesis that sets the developments in New Brunswick education against the social, political, and economic background of the province, and relates these developments to the wider field of educational movements in Britain, Europe, the United States, and other parts of British North America.

Katherine F.C. MacNaughton, University of New Brunswick, 1947