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Education for young adolescents must be challenging, relevant, integrative, and exploratory. Integrative teaching (e.g., interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, etc.) benefits middle-level learners as it potentially increases student engagement, motivation, and achievement. It provides learners with the opportunity to synthesize knowledge by exploring topics and ideas through multiple lenses. While the middle school concept certainly highlights the critical role of integrative teaching, many middle-level structures such as integrated teaching are \"limited, absent, or not fully implemented\". Given the reality in which we work (without a fully articulated middle level teacher education program), the faculty of elementary and secondary education are responsible for preparing future middle-level teachers. This article provides a description of how faculty in one university are preparing secondary education teacher candidates for the middle-level classroom through interdisciplinary collaboration.

Educators from Europe, Latin America, and the United States convened to explore issues inherent in democratic citizenship. Media literacy, a central component of democratic citizenship, was studied in depth. Data from the camp were examined for evidence of the participants' understandings of media literacy and how it might be taught. Results revealed that the camp participants developed a deeper understanding of media literacy, the importance of its teaching, and ways to teach it.

The authors, former middle and high school English teachers, review the rationale for using humor and fun in the classroom and provide detailed descriptions for teaching practices and activities that confer enjoyment and learning for language arts students. Although fun activities, these methods foster vocabulary development, grammar instruction, and techniques for illustrating the importance of word choice and clarity in composition.

The \"Education for Democracy Act,\" authorized by the United States Congress, provides funding through the U.S. Department of Education to support programs designed to assist educators in creating and implementing civic education programs both at home and abroad. One such program is Civitas: An International Civic Education Exchange Program. Much of the work undertaken by Civitas is conducted through the various partnerships that exist between and among some 30 U.S. states and 26 new and emerging democracies. One such partnership is the Florida-Texas-Mississippi-Hungary-Romania partnership. Established in 1995, the partnership has provided cross-cultural exchange opportunities for students, teachers, university faculty, civic leaders, and elected officials from each of the five partner countries and states. Teaching effectively for and about democratic citizenship is demanding, and educators must be energetic and imaginative in their approach to teaching about it. A recent example of the partnership's efforts to meet this demand and enhance civic education around the world is the staging of an annual democracy camp. The camp provided a weeklong opportunity for the educators to explore, discuss, and debate issues related to teaching for and about democratic citizenship. The international design of the camp afforded the participants a unique experience to examine and reflect upon the combined challenges for teaching for and about democratic citizenship in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Pre and post surveys were conducted during the camp to determine differences in views within and among the groups. The findings of the survey research provided evidence that the participants changed their definitions of democratic citizenship to more global definitions after their week-long cross-cultural interactions. The findings of the study also indicated that as a result of their experiences during the camp, the educators further affirmed their commitment to the importance of teaching for and about citizenship in a democratic society. Additionally, they became more inclined to teach the concept of democratic citizenship in explicit, rather than implicit, terms. (Contains 2 tables, 3 graphs and 8 notes.)

For many mathematically challenged students, the thought of working a mathematics problem evokes fear, a tightening of the stomach, and overpowering feelings of anxiety. Such anxiety is just one of the factors contributing to many students' struggle to learn mathematics. Thus, one solution may be to create a classroom where fears can be left at the door and immersion in the language of mathematics can occur. Here, Jones et al describes how mathematics can be defined as a second language and the instructional methods that result from this perspective.

The Civitas Democracy Camp for Teachers provides professional development for educators to collaboratively explore ideals of citizenship and citizenship education in democratic societies. Reported herein are the findings of a study of the camp experience of a cross-cultural group of educators who examined the concept of social justice and ways to teach their students about it. Results of the study indicate that the participants broadened their definitions of social justice, expanded their recognition of the importance of teaching about social justice, and enhanced their understandings of approaches for teaching about social justice. Further, the findings indicate that cross-cultural professional development can have positive effects in altering and expanding educators' content and pedagogical knowledge of important international issues such as social justice.

[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.

According to Theodore Kaltsounis, this power of the people is a fragile entity, its enemies are many, and the worst enemy of democracy is a lack of education.2 Without a sound education in democratic principles and practices, citizens cannot fully or effectively participate in a democracy, nor can they benefit from the rights and responsibilities bestowed upon them by virtue of their citizenship. [...] training students in how to sustain a democracy must not be a generally agreed upon tradition of conventional education, but the mission of education in holistic and undisputed terms.

Most research into metacognition has used populations of children. Therefore, the purpose of this was to extend general knowledge about metacognition based on child data to adult populations. Previous research into adult metacognitive abilities has focused on academically stable college populations. For this reason, an adult population of academically at-risk college students was chosen to examine the effects of reading instruction on one aspect of metacognition, calibration. Calibration is a self-monitoring aspect of metacognition and is defined as the ability to predict performance on an academic task. A better understanding of metacognition in an adult at-risk population is important since metacognition plays a significant role in reading comprehension and successful learning in general. Subjects included all academically at-risk students in two ability levels of college reading classes. Reading ability of each subject was determined using the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT) as a pre- and post-test. Subjects were asked to predict performance on both vocabulary subtests of the NDRT as a measure of calibration skills. Change in reading ability and calibration ability as a result of one semester of reading instruction was calculated. Other variables investigated within the two class levels were age, gender, and confidence judgements. Correlation matrixes representing a sampling over time were run for all variables. Results indicate that reading instruction, or more specifically, exposure to print, does not increase calibration skills significantly without direct instructional intervention. Further research into calibration ability in adult at-risk populations is warranted, especially research designed to determine what type of instruction increases calibration ability.