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For many years, research has supported the value of using real-life experiences as teaching opportunities (Noobanjong & Louhapensang, 2017; Powell, 2015). This is just as true of teaching writing as of anything else. In fact, when learners use writing (such as journaling) to share their experiences, they benefit in several ways, including their communication skills (Khanmohammad & Eilaghi, 2017). Writing workshops have been shown to be effective approaches to coaching writing at several different levels (Williams, 2014). Such workshops provide the opportunity to reflect on drafts, collaborate with peers and work through the writing process. They are, therefore, a highly effective context in which to integrate writing about real-life experiences. This, in turn, allows students to develop their writing and their content knowledge. In order to investigate the integration of real-life writing practices into the writing workshop, we focused on one important real-life setting: nature. We created a nature-based writer's workshop, Writing in Nature, for students in the upper-elementary/middle grades (ages 10-12). During the two-session workshop, we provided students with a natural setting. Then, we led them in a writing workshop. Results showed high student engagement and interest, both in the topic and in writing. Our findings suggest that using a natural setting for writing workshops is an effective real-life context for increasing engaged time, teaching content, and developing writing skills.

Community and city Facebook pages have proliferated in popularity in the last several years, offering a forum for residents to openly and publicly negotiate relations with urban wildlife, including coyotes. Contemporary shifts in North American coyote geographies (and the concomitant rise in community social media sites) thus open up interesting possibilities for exploring how public pedagogies might challenge problematic human-nature and urban-wild binaries. We begin this article by articulating why studying urban coyotes is an important task for the field of environmental education. Next, we develop our nascent theoretical framework of interspecies public pedagogy, which draws on theories of public pedagogy and naturecultures. We follow by methodologically situating this research within diverse ethnographic approaches, which we use to study Facebook community pages in two U.S. cities, Philadelphia, PA and Chino/Chino Hills, CA. Our analysis demonstrates how the pedagogical strategies residents employ encourage debates about how their lives are entangled with coyotes, land, and other people, and yet are limited in that they do not completely redefine the role of public urban spaces. Before discussing the implications of this research, we briefly explore some possibilities for interspecies public pedagogies in real-life public spaces, as well as in cyberspace.

Perspective taking has been identified as a critical skill in the development of scientifically literate citizenry. Despite the importance of the construct, operationalising and identifying effective pedagogical strategies to promote effective perspective taking have proven challenging. This study provides empirical evidence to support the theoretical Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences model for identifying effective perspective taking interventions in the science classroom. A modified perspective reading and writing intervention was imbedded within a postsecondary environmental science course examining the management of wolves in North America. Participants demonstrated more nuanced abilities to consider various perspectives and "identify" the complexity of managing wolves in Northern California.

Drawing on a multispecies ethnographic encounter with a physically disabled feral kitten, Whiskey, I take an intersectional theoretical approach to place disability studies in conversation with ecofeminist perspectives. In so doing I ask: How does a culture that produces disabled and unwanted humans render animals deserving of the same label? And how might we reconfigure this culture through "retying knots" in educational spaces so as to divest animals of these labels? To conclude, I draw on a vignette from my own ethnographic research and teaching at the university level to offer possibilities for "enabling" cultural work in educational settings that explicitly draws on and engages ecofeminist and disability studies paradigms.

A wide variety of out-of-school time (OST) programs across the U.S. offer science education opportunities that cover many scientific disciplines and use diverse pedagogical practices (National Research Council [NRC], 2009). However, to improve youth's scientific literacy, OST educators need to "have the disposition and repertoire of practices and tools at their disposal to help learners expand on their everyday knowledge and skill to learn science" (NRC, 2009, p. 309). Thus, OST educators need both essential pedagogical skills and high-quality curriculum materials. Development, evaluation, and use of effective professional development strategies are key components of the California 4-H SET Initiative. Examples grounded in literature on best practices in professional development of science educators are outlined in this article. The "Step-Up" Incremental Training Model targets 4-H teen volunteers who implement science curricula with 4-H youth (Smith & Enfield, 2002). A sequence of three workshops engages teen volunteers in hands-on, inquiry-based science activities and effective teaching techniques. The volunteers alternate between workshops and actual implementation of the curriculum. Allowing time for implementation between workshops provides opportunities for individuals and groups to reflect on their practice over several weeks. The California 4-H SET Initiative is advancing promising practices in OST science education through systematic research, development, and evaluation. These efforts not only are applicable to 4-H programming nationally but also can inform the work of other organizations looking to design and implement effective OST science programs for youth.

An important question regards how we use environmental boundaries to anchor spatial representations during navigation. Behavioral and neurophysiological models appear to provide conflicting predictions, and this question has been difficult to answer because of technical challenges with testing navigation in novel, large-scale, realistic spatial environments. We conducted an experiment in which participants freely ambulated on an omnidirectional treadmill while viewing novel, town-sized environments in virtual reality on a head-mounted display. Participants performed interspersed judgments of relative direction (JRD) to assay their spatial knowledge and to determine when during learning they employed environmental boundaries to anchor their spatial representations. We designed JRD questions that assayed directions aligned and misaligned with the axes of the surrounding rectangular boundaries and employed structural equation modeling to better understand the learning-dependent dynamics for aligned versus misaligned pointing. Pointing accuracy showed no initial directional bias to boundaries, although such "alignment effects" did emerge after the fourth block of learning. Preexposure to a map in Experiment 2 led to similar overall findings. A control experiment in which participants studied a map but did not navigate the environment, however, demonstrated alignment effects after a brief, initial learning experience. Our results help to bridge the gap between neurophysiological models of location-specific firing in rodents and human behavioral models of spatial navigation by emphasizing the experience-dependent accumulation of route-specific knowledge. In particular, our results suggest that the use of spatial boundaries as an organizing schema during navigation of large-scale space occurs in an experience-dependent fashion.

The theory of evolution by natural selection has revolutionized the biological sciences yet remains confusing and controversial to the public at large. This study explored how a particular segment of the public--visitors to a natural history museum--reason about evolution in the context of an interactive cladogram, or evolutionary tree. The participants were 49 children aged four to twelve and one accompanying parent. Together, they completed five activities using a touch-screen display of the phylogenetic relations among the 19 orders of mammals. Across activities, participants revealed similar misconceptions to those revealed by college undergraduates in previous studies. However, the frequency of those misconceptions was attenuated by the level of parental engagement, particularly the frequency of turn-taking between parents and children. Overall, these findings suggest that evolutionary reasoning may be improved by the kinds of collaborative discussions fostered by interactive museum displays, so long as the affordances of those displays encourage multi-user interactions.

Extending and challenging Arun Appadurai's anthropocentric "scapes," this article converses with feminist posthumanism, ecofeminism, and the political ecology of education to develop a more-than-human ecopedagogy in/for/with animalScapes. After outlining the article's theoretical framework, I briefly discuss the research cases informing ecopedagogies in/for/with animalScapes, each of which attends to embodiment, affect, and emotion, as well as the salience of political ecological/economic contexts. To conclude, I discuss the empirical and conceptual/theoretical limitations of this ecopedagogy, tentatively exploring how some of these limitations might be partially surpassed in practice, as well as in environmental education research tasking itself with decentering the human.

According to the American Association of University Professors and the "Chronicle of Higher Education," instances of targeted faculty harassment are rising. I therefore begin this article by discussing how I ended up on the receiving end of a sweeping harassment campaign because of my critical scholarship on environmental and social issues. I then employ an intersectional ecofeminist lens to analyze articles written about me as well as the ensuing reader comments. Next, I explore how academic institutions, professional associations, academic publishers, and personal relationships can support, at the local and the "cyber" level, academics who are most vulnerable to these kinds of retaliation in the deeply vitriolic sociopolitical contexts of cyberspace. I conclude by teasing out the implications of this incident for critical researchers in environmental education and beyond.

The Hmong are a group of people from Southern China, Laos, Northern Vietnam, and Thailand who have immigrated to the US and who have settled in rural counties in Central California. The literature suggests, the Hmong routinely use the services of shamans as part of their health care services. The purpose of this study was to determine the difference in the levels of satisfaction among Hmong clients who use shamans and their services in Fresno County with regard to factors associated with animal sacrifice, gender of the shaman and the practices inside or outside of the client's home. Data were collected from 115 study participants in a rural California county. Findings from this study suggest that clients who had shamans conduct the rituals at their own homes and those who used live animals were significantly more satisfied than those had to travel to meet the shaman and those whose shamans' use dead animals. There were no significant differences in clients' satisfaction by the gender of the shaman. (Contains 1 table.) [Abstract provided in both English and Spanish.]

This study investigated the prevalence of increasingly popular animal-assisted stress relief programs at higher education institutions across the United States. Although research on animal-assisted programs is increasing, there is still a lack of information documenting implementation of these programs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the prevalence, structure, and policies around animal-assisted programs. Data from 68 schools across the U.S. revealed that animal visitation at higher education institutions is popular, and some schools have instituted formalized programs. However, there is an overall lack of knowledge regarding standards and requirements that would increase the safety and effectiveness of these programs.

This article invokes a neoliberal and disciplinary governmentality lens in a political ecology of education framework to analyze educational programming at Long Beach, California's Aquarium of the Pacific. I begin by briefly describing governmentality as Foucault and neo-Foucauldian scholars have theorized the concept, followed by a discussion of the emergence of green governmentality and environmentality in political ecology. Next, I invoke a political ecology of education framework informed by neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality to analyze institutional and teaching practice at the Aquarium. In this analysis, I demonstrate how the institution's funding structure, placement within the entertainment markets of the southern California area, and commitment to ocean conservation education all influence how the Aquarium conceptualizes itself and its work. I focus on the case of the Blue Cavern Show and the Seafood for the Future program, which work in tandem to define a problem (declining fish stocks; possible seafood shortages) and then structure a neoliberal solution through the market (sustainable seafood consumption). I conclude by discussing the implications of this research for environmental education, which include unpacking how neoliberalism impacts teaching practice, especially as it relates to notions of framing environmentally responsible action.

A multiweek protein purification suite, suitable for upper-division biochemistry or biotechnology undergraduate students, is described. Students work in small teams to isolate the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) from a nontraditional tissue source, mammalian blood, using a sequence of three column chromatographic procedures: ion-exchange, size exclusion, and affinity chromatography. Protein and enzyme activity elution profiles are determined by graphical analysis of assay data collected using rapid microplate spectrophotometric assays. Students perform quantitative assays on LDH pools and use these data to build a purification table for use in evaluating the protocol. The protocol typically generates final overall fold-purifications from 1500 to 2500 and activity recoveries of 45-60%. Electrophoretic separations in both denaturing and native-gel format are analyzed both visually and by use of commercial digital analysis software to assess the isoenzyme pattern of isolated LDH and to further evaluate the purification. Assessment of student work revealed a high level of achievement of course learning goals that include development of critical thinking skills required to (1) critically evaluate an experimental protocol and (2) draw conclusions based on a variety of forms of experimental data.

Having the ability to assess pest problems in schools is essential for a successful integrated pest management (IPM) program. However, such expertise can be costly and is not available to all school districts across the United States. The web-based IPM Calculator was developed to address this problem. By answering questions about the condition of a building and the behaviors of individuals who use it, any pest management professional or building manager can use the IPM Calculator to assess pest risk at a school campus and obtain IPM-based solutions to reduce that pest risk. This new tool is available online at http://ipmcalculator.com.

Research has demonstrated that conversations among museum, aquarium, and zoo visitors can be a clear indication of active learning, engagement, and participation in scientific reasoning. This descriptive study sought to determine the extent of talk about ecology-related topics exhibited by family groups visiting marine touch tanks at four Pacific coast aquariums. In particular, conversations were examined to determine the kinds of ecology topics discussed and the influence of exhibit features such as tank format and interpretive staff interactions on the extent of talk about ecological topics. Findings suggest limited talk about ecology by families during their visit to the exhibit--regardless of whether the tank resembled a real tidepool habitat or not. However, data revealed that talk about ecology between guests and staff was significantly longer than was ecology-talk among guests only, suggesting that supplemental interpretation by staff members or volunteers may be necessary to explicitly encourage such discourse at touch tanks.

A collaborative effort between a junior high school and a nearby university allowed 40 eighth-grade honors students to engage in a scientific investigation within a university laboratory. These students, with their science teachers and university researchers, gathered data on egg cannibalism in a beach-spawning fish and thereby contributed to an ongoing research project. Our objectives were to provide a scientific learning experience for the students and introduce them to a college setting. A survey, given 2.5 years after the investigation, found that most of the students had increased their interest in studying science in college.

Compare and contrast strategies remain common pedagogical practices within physiological education. With the support of an American Physiological Society Teaching Career Enhancement Award, we have developed a junior- or senior-level undergraduate curriculum for exercise physiology that compares and contrasts the physiological adaptations of chronic terrestrial exercise (TEx) and microgravity ([mu]G). We used a series of peer-reviewed publications to demonstrate that many of the physiological adaptations to TEx and [mu]G are opposite. For example, TEx typically improves cardiovascular function and orthostatic tolerance, whereas [mu]G can lead to declines in both. TEx leads to muscle hypertrophy, and [mu]G elicits muscle atrophy. TEx increases bone mineral density and red blood cell mass, whereas [mu]G decreases bone mineral density and red blood cell mass. Importantly, exercise during spaceflight remains a crucial countermeasure to limit some of these adverse physiological adaptations to [mu]G. This curriculum develops critical thinking skills by dissecting peer-reviewed articles and discussing the strengths and weaknesses associated with simulated and actual [mu]G studies. Moreover, the curriculum includes studies on both animals and humans, providing a strong translational component to the curriculum. In summary, we have developed a novel space physiology curriculum delivered during the final weeks of an exercise physiology course in which students gain critical new knowledge that reinforces key concepts presented throughout the semester.

The University of California Cooperative Extension used social media to solicit donations to support research on the Pacific fisher, a rare forest-dwelling weasel, conducted by UC scientists. The social media campaign included blog and Facebook postings, news releases, and tweets requesting donations of single socks. Socks were donated from around the state and nation, with 82% coming from urban areas. The drive was successful at securing resources to support wildlife research while at the same time extending outreach to new non-local audiences. The major challenge was developing the local logistical support to deal with the overwhelming influx of donations.

Nationally, both science and agricultural education professional organizations have identified agriculture as a fundamental technology to be studied by students, with the goal of achieving an understanding of the agri-food system necessary for democratic participation. Benchmarks representing the content that K-12 children need to understand about the scientific and technological underpinnings of the agri-food system have been developed by agricultural and science educators. However, the benchmarks were developed without empirically based evidence on what existing agri-food system knowledge students held. This study examines students' understandings about science and technology concepts underpinning benchmarks for agricultural literacy. Urban upper elementary student concepts of the origins of food, the selection of plants and animals used for production, how people living in harsh environments obtain crops, and the prevention of food spoilage were probed. Using Piaget's theory of schema development, students' understanding of agricultural technology were compared to grade-specific benchmarks for agricultural literacy and examined for relationship to students' backgrounds and experiences. In comparison to the benchmark goals for the age group, informants' schema for the role that science and technology plays in the agri-food industry was nearly nonexistent. This study suggests that existing agricultural literacy benchmarks, as designed, may not be age and/or developmentally appropriate. Additional suggestions indicate that underlying sub-concepts needed for learner understanding may only be loosely connected to any meaningful experience of urban elementary students. (Contains 6 tables.)

While the opportunity to engage in scientific reasoning has been identified as an important aspect of informal science learning (National Research Council, 2009), most studies have examined this strand of science learning within the context of physics-based science exhibits. Few have examined the presence of such activity in conjunction with live animal exhibits at zoos and aquariums. A video study of 41 families at four touch-tank exhibits, where visitors can observe and interact with live marine species, revealed that families engaged in making claims, challenging claims, and confirming claims as well as other actions associated with scientific reasoning such as applying prior knowledge, making and testing predictions and hypotheses, and constructing arguments. We provide examples of scientific reasoning and examine the role of claims in promoting scientific reasoning. Implications for rethinking learning opportunities and interpretational approaches at touch tanks, as well as examination of the unique characteristics of these and similar exhibits, are discussed. (Contains 4 tables.)

The diaries, letters, and guidebooks written by the emigrants who crossed North America on the overland trails during the mid-nineteenth century reveal a new awareness of the animals that journeyed with them. Often written as advice to those who might follow them, the travelers worried about their animals in ways beyond what theologians and philosophers would have expected or anticipated. Borne out of the need to get to California, Oregon, or Utah safely, emigrants learned a new standard of care required for the animals that hauled them across the continent. Their writings add to the knowledge not only of the rigors and challenges along the overland trails but also of how the emigrants manifested a new relationship with their livestock.

While most studies of Mexican American suburbanization since the 1970s focus on the transformation of residential (private) space, it is in suburban public space that some of the most important struggles over belonging and rights have occurred. This article builds a theoretical framework to analyze the relationships between public space, democracy, and cultural citizenship for historically marginalized groups in suburbia. It applies the framework to the efforts by two groups of charros (ethnic Mexican cowboys) who tried to hold charreadas (events similar to rodeos) on land leased from municipal governments in suburban Los Angeles during the 1970s. These cases demonstrate that localized histories of racialization intersect with distinct political geographies to shape unequal possibilities for the effective exercise of Latino cultural citizenship in suburbia. Where ethnic Mexican suburbanites resided in isolated neighborhoods, were disconnected from the urban barrio, and struggled for political representation in vast urban districts, they were unlikely to be successful in claiming public space. But in independently incorporated suburbs with historic webs of Mexican settlements and strong ties to the barrio, ethnic Mexican suburbanites succeeded in challenging suburban exclusion and claiming a more inclusive, transformative "right to the suburb." (Contains 3 figures and 5 notes.)

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has shown that retrieval can cause the forgetting of related or competing items in memory (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). In the present research, we examined whether an analogous phenomenon occurs in the context of creative problem solving. Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962), we found that attempting to generate a novel common associate to 3 cue words caused the forgetting of other strong associates related to those cue words. This problem-solving-induced forgetting effect occurred even when participants failed to generate a viable solution, increased in magnitude when participants spent additional time problem solving, and was positively correlated with problem-solving success on a separate set of RAT problems. These results implicate a role for forgetting in overcoming fixation in creative problem solving. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Visual working memory (VWM) is widely thought to contain specialized buffers for retaining spatial and object information: a "spatial-object architecture." However, studies of adults, infants, and nonhuman animals show that visual cognition builds on core knowledge systems that retain more specialized representations: (1) spatiotemporal representations for object tracking, (2) object identity representations for object recognition, and (3) view-dependent snapshots for place recognition. In principle, these core knowledge systems may retain information separately from one another. Consistent with this hypothesis, this study provides evidence that these three types of information are subject to independent working memory storage limits. These results, combined with those from previous studies, indicate that VWM contains three specialized buffers for retaining spatiotemporal information, object identity information, and snapshot information. Thus, VWM buffers parallel core knowledge systems. This "core knowledge architecture" links the study of visual working memory to the study of the biological foundations of visual cognition. (Contains 7 figures and 6 footnotes.)

This article explores Vygtosky's (1978) notion of the imaginary situation through analysis of interaction and activity in a Fifth Dimension after-school setting, one of a network of programs designed with an aim to realize developmental concepts proposed by Vygotsky and others in the cultural-historical tradition (see, e.g., Cole & the Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006). The discussion centers on intergenerational interaction between a child and undergraduate as they engage in activities that represent two varieties of the imaginary situation proposed by Vygotsky: Playing a game and orienting to the "mythical figurehead," a fantasy figure common to all Fifth Dimension sites. Analysis focuses on the interplay of spoken interaction with literacy-based artifacts that mediate the participants' activity and serve as points of departure for imagination-related talk. As the interaction unfolds, child and undergraduate are seen to engage creatively with both game and site rules as they create a collaborative and increasingly complex representation of the mythical figurehead. The participants' engagement with rules, a crucial element in Vygotsky's notion of the imaginary situation, provides the child with multiple opportunities, together with those prompted by the site artifacts, to affect and negotiate the Fifth Dimension experience. (Contains 1 figure.)

This article describes a research study in which a biologist and his research on Antarctic seabirds became part of an integrated science course for prospective elementary teachers. Students used the scientist's database on seabird chick growth rates for an experimental design investigation while the "regular" classes had a single science educator as their instructor and did not use the database but completed an investigation of their own choosing. Understandings of the nature of science before and after the course, and between classes that experienced the scientist-science educator collaboration and those that did not, were assessed using the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey. An attitude scale and interviews with students who used the seabird database were also used to collect data. Interviews revealed scientific habits of mind that could not be quantified with a questionnaire as well as understandings of aspects of the nature of science that have not been discussed in prior research. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Young and nondemented older adults were tested on a continuous recognition memory task requiring visual pattern separation. During the task, some objects were repeated across trials and some objects, referred to as lures, were presented that were similar to previously presented objects. The lures resulted in increased interference and an increased need for pattern separation. For each object, the participant was asked to indicate whether (1) this was the first time the object was seen (new), (2) the object was seen previously (old), or (3) the object was similar to a previous object (similar). Older adults were able to correctly identify objects as old or new as well as young adults; however, older adults were impaired when identifying lures as similar. Therefore, pattern separation may be less efficient in older adults resulting in poorer recognition memory performance when interference is increased. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

We examined the effect of 4-month-old infants' previous experience with dogs, cats, or both and their online looking behavior on their learning of the adult-defined category of "cat" in a visual familiarization task. Four-month-old infants' (N = 123) learning in the laboratory was jointly determined by whether or not they had experience with pets at home and how much they shifted their gaze back and forth between the stimuli during familiarization. Specifically, only infants with pets at home who also exhibited high levels of switching during familiarization remembered the individual cat exemplars or formed a summary representation of those cats. These results are consistent with recent theorizing about the processes of how infants' categorical representations are formed, and provide new understanding into how infants' categorization unfolds over time. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

In this study I rely on sociocultural views of learning and teaching to describe how fifth- sixth-grade students in a Fostering a Community of Learners (FCL) classroom gradually adopted scientific ideas and language in a socially complex classroom. Students practiced talking science together, using everyday, scientific, and hybrid discourses as they studied endangered species. Students' overarching content themes, or "thematic continuities," acted as generative scaffolds for developing complex lines of inquiry, leading ultimately to the appropriation of aspects of the biological principle of adaptation. Thematic continuities provided an organizing framework for thinking and talking about previously disconnected science facts, and set the stage for the adaptationist stance. Mixed method data analyses relied on written assessments, in-depth guided clinical interviews, video and audiotaping of small and large group participant structures, in-class student work, and ethnographic notes. Data analysis included two discrete levels, the macro (whole and half class) and the intermediate (case study of one small group) to capture both holistic and detailed aspects of dialogue. (Contains 2 figures and 6 tables.)

Is California's Imperial Valley a watershed? If so, at what level and by what topographic logic? Is it a region? If so, at what level and by what geographic logic? Are its boundaries natural, political, or multivalent on different scales? In short, this essay looks at the special (re)production of environmental conditions within a cyborg world. Here, the Valley is comprised of (a) Colorado River water; (2) migratory waterfowl; (3) the accidentally manufactured, but intentionally seeded food chain of the Salton Sea (3) the San Andreas Fault, (4) Mexican field labor; (5) public universities extension services; (6) global markets and supply chains; (7) international biotechnology, chemical and seed conglomerates, and (8) state and federal regulation of water rights, regulations and markets. The Valley is a cyborg, a historical entity comprised interdependently of nature, technoscience and humanity. This, characterization, however, raises problems with conceptions of the massive losses of migratory waterfowl from avian cholera at the Salton Sea, the agroecological devastation caused by the unintentional introduction of the Silver Leaf whitefly, and the ''wastage'' of constrained water rights as environmental crises of nature. The articulation of a cyborg perspective sees the environmental conditions of the Valley as the product of relations comprised of uneven and indeterminate ecological process, technoscientific trajectories, and human practices. Extending the cyborg's integration of nature, technology and social agency, a relational reading of James O'Connor's second contradiction of capitalism thesis is developed. O'Connor's political ecology and Haraway material semiotics, while broadly operating at different levels of analysis, prove surprisingly resonant.

Generalizing or making claims that extend beyond particular situations is a central mathematical practice and a focus of classroom mathematics instruction. This study examines how aspects of generality are produced through the situated activities of a group of middle school mathematics students working on an 8-week population-modeling project. The project involved creating and analyzing mathematical models of population growth. Two classroom episodes are presented that focus on students' activities across curricular tasks in which they discuss the category of sensible models of population growth and describe a pattern of guppy population growth in a natural environment. Participation frameworks introduced in the context of the episodes describe how students compare situations to determine if they belong to the same general category and predict and justify the behavior of modeled phenomena. The analysis suggests that mathematical generalizing is the outcome of processes distributed across students, tasks, embodied activity, and modeling tools. (Contains 4 figures and 4 footnotes.)