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Our action research explored the potentialities of dual language picturebooks related to language inquiries with preservice teachers. For six weeks, preservice teachers browsed picturebooks featuring English and another language, starting with a familiar language and moving to unfamiliar languages. After browsing, we shared our responses to the books, made connections across books, and engaged in experiences to think about language. Initial comments indicated that readers were not familiar with dual language picturebooks and connected to their own complex personal relationships with language. The preservice teachers engaged in inquiries around audience and book design, including issues such as Indigenous books signalling a resistance to prioritising English as a stance that differed from Spanish-English books where the design signalled a higher status to English. In this article, we discuss our findings using Ruiz's (1984) language-as-resource framework, showing how the preservice teachers used dual language picturebooks to develop their critical awareness of language-as-resource.

Books can provide compelling invitations for children to explore global cultures, but how those books are used influences whether readers connect information about a particular global community to that culture's deeper values. Our concerns about reducing the cultural richness of a global community and establishing stereotypes led us to explore engagements for children that encourage a cosmopolitan orientation. Through this orientation, children balance critical reflection on their own cultural loyalties with critical reflection on their openness to an unfamiliar global culture. This article focuses on our learning as teachers in an afterschool club and our recognition that books can close rather than open children's minds and build walls rather than bridges across cultures.

Children in our Global Cultures Club browsed picturebooks in Spanish and English, placing sticky notes on books that they connected with. The books include bilingual books in Spanish/English, such as [...]

Children continuously engage in developing theories about how the world works as they inquire through play and interactions with others. In this study, we investigated children's in-process thinking in the form of working theories about language as they participated in engagements around dual language picturebooks in an afterschool club. Our research is framed within sociocultural theories on knowledge building, inquiry acts and recent research on working theories, dual language picturebooks, and language awareness. Although dual language picturebooks are often associated with supporting bilingual learners in learning a language, we argue that these books can also encourage children in learning about language and language diversity. We analysed field notes, audio recordings, and children's artefacts to identify the kinds of working theories "about" language explored by children and their strategies for developing these theories. The findings show children explored working theories about what language is, what it means to know a language, and how language is learned. The strategies children used to develop these theories included demonstrations of peers and adults, the mediation of tools, talk as a tool of mind, and language play. This study contributes to understandings about how children develop working theories about language and language diversity through inquiry and suggests possibilities for classroom practice in opening spaces for children to connect to what they consider significant in engagements with dual language picturebooks.

Religion remains an aspect of culture often missing from picturebooks, based on the misunderstanding that religion has no place in U.S. public schools. This absence is particularly critical for books reflecting the lives of Muslim children, given the rising Islamophobia in the United States. A critical content analysis to examine representations of Muslim children in contemporary picturebooks set in the United States was conducted through a postcolonial lens. Islamic religious practices are integrated into the daily lives of Muslim children in these books for an audience of Muslim and non-Muslim readers. The books represent Muslim children and their families as culturally and religiously diverse, portray religious differences as resources for communities, and reflect the hybrid identities of Muslim children. The books serve as counternarratives, creating a space for Muslim authors and illustrators to voice and validate their life experiences for a broad audience of readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated how children make meaning as they read historical fiction picturebooks. Three teachers and a total of 61 students from three different regions of Indonesia participated. We collected field notes, video recordings, and artifacts through read-alouds and subsequent response activities. The findings show that students explored the books by actively engaging in conversations about misconceptions of gender and schooling, connections of the past and the present, and negotiation of moral values and emotions within the fabric of Aceh Province’s history and Indonesian society. It highlights that historical fiction picturebooks can encourage students to think critically about their history and culture to make sense of the world they live in today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the education sector has been referred to as the "de facto" mental health system for children and adolescents, such statements obscure the tremendous heterogeneity of school-based mental health (SMH) initiatives. This study asked how different school contexts and SMH provider types may influence different aspects of SMH service delivery. Data are derived from results of evaluations of implementation and outcomes of a research-based practice model (the Brief Intervention for School Clinicians [BRISC]) tested in two common but quite different SMH contexts. In one context, BRISC was implemented in a large urban school district by externally employed practitioners working in schools (n = 5); in the second context, BRISC was implemented across a large Canadian province by school-employed mental health practitioners (n = 24). Results suggest that certain variables showed small differences across contexts, including intervention adherence, and perceived relevance, acceptability, and feasibility of BRISC. Other variables varied much more substantively, such as baseline seriousness of mental health needs, rate of out referral of students to alternative community-based services, and student mental health outcomes. Although exploratory, the current study focuses a useful lens on practice patterns across SMH contexts in secondary schools and underscores the importance of considering contextual factors early in an implementation process.

When the authors began working with the editorial team for a major journal in their field, they decided to go beyond commitment to taking action by establishing support structures for teacher researchers who were novice writers and who wanted to publish their work in professional journals. Through their interactions with many teacher researchers and their manuscripts, they gained insights into the major struggles that are encountered in trying to shape ideas into a publishable manuscript. This article focuses on identifying these struggles and sharing the ways in which the authors worked with teacher researchers to respond to the obstacles they faced, both in writing a strong manuscript for submission and in making their way through the review process. Their work focused around issues such as using a teacher voice, writing from a point of tension, integrating theory within the manuscript, reflecting on research findings, having a central focus, using supportive classroom examples, avoiding teacher heroism, and considering the broader implications of the research. The authors first establish a context for this work through examining the role of writing for teacher researchers and describing the project within which this work took place.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada supported a comprehensive research project to determine the current state of mental health and substance use programs and practices in Canadian schools. The School-Based Mental Health and Substance Abuse Consortium is made up of a group of 40 leading Canadian researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. The Consortium systematically reviewed literature from around the world, conducted a program scan (147 programs) of current practices in Canadian schools, and distributed a national survey to school boards (n = 177) and schools (n = 643) seeking input on the state of knowledge and practice in child and youth mental health and substance abuse. This information is being shared with policy makers and school boards to help inform the delivery of future mental health services in Canada's schools.

Stories are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it's easy to overlook their significance in framing how we think about ourselves and the world. Stories are meaning making, providing a means of structuring and reflecting on our experiences in order to understand their significance. Story is also life making, a way of knowing. Educators are often so focused on using literature to teach something else that they lose sight of literature as having value in and of itself in illuminating what it means to be human. In addition, story is world making, inviting readers to participate in another's vision of the world and to "live through," not just gain knowledge about, life. This vision provides a way for students to imagine and live within and across global cultures. Finally, story defines our professional identities and possibilities as teachers, creating the basis for a true democracy of the intellect.

The myth of home is what distinguishes children's literature from adult novels (Wolf 1990). Nodelman and Reimer ("The Pleasures of Children's Literature," 2003) write that while "the home/away/home pattern is the most common story line in children's literature, adult fiction that deals with young people who leave home usually ends with the child choosing to stay away" (pp. 197-198). In a critical content analysis of recent award-winning middle reader novels from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, a new pattern was observed. This pattern, called a postmodern metaplot, begins with the child being abandoned, rather than the child leaving the home. The child's journey is to construct a home within a postmodern milieu complete with competing truths and failed adults. Ultimately, the child's postmodern journey ends with very modern ideal of the child leading the adults to a hopeful ending, a home. The article explores the changing roles of childhood and adulthood in children's literature and questions if the mythology of home can be undone.

A two-part screening procedure was used to assess school-age children's experience with bullying. In the first part 16,799 students (8,195 girls, 8,604 boys) in grades 4 to 12 were provided with a definition of bullying and then asked about their experiences using two general questions from the Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire (1996). In the second part, students were asked about their experiences with specific types of bullying: physical, verbal, social, and cyber. For each form of bullying, students were provided with several examples of what constituted such behavior. Results indicated that the general screener has good specificity but poor sensitivity, suggesting that the general screening questions were good at classifying noninvolved students but performed less well when identifying true cases of bullying. Accordingly, reports from the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the United Nations may underestimate the prevalence of bullying among school-aged children world-wide. (Contains 3 tables.)

Students' perceptions of school safety and experiences with bullying were examined in a large Canadian cohort of 5,493 girls and 5,659 boys in Grades 4 to 12. Results indicate notable differences in when and where students felt safe based on their own perceptions of safety and their own experiences with bullying, particularly across elementary and secondary schools. For elementary students, especially those involved in bullying, the playground/school yard and outside recess/break time were particularly hazardous, whereas for secondary students involved in bullying, the hallways, school lunchroom/cafeteria, and outside recess/break were considered especially dangerous. The commonality across student-identified unsafe areas is that they tend to not be well supervised by school personnel. Accordingly, the present results underscore the need to increase adult supervision in areas in which an overwhelming majority of students report feeling unsafe. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)

A desire to encourage preservice teachers to respond personally and critically to literature created the tensions that led to the curricular explorations discussed in this article. First is a description of the course context, the curricular, and theoretical frame for inquiry through literature. In particular, the use of a broad theme, Journeys, is highlighted to provide coherence and connection across course experiences and to move to a conceptually-based course framework. Following this is a description of the specific course engagements, highlighting the responses to Ursula LeGuin's "A Wizard of Earthsea" to demonstrate some of the ways in which this broad theme framed the thinking of the preservice teachers in the course. (Contains 3 figures.)

Explores how students take what they understand through reading and talking about literature and express their ideas in art, drama, music, or math. Argues that one way learners push their understandings and create more complex meanings is through such transmediation. Offers examples of responding to literature through multiple sign systems. (SR)

Proposes a curricular framework that provides an alternative view of "balance" in guided reading and literature discussion groups. Suggests several possible scenarios for the future of literature in classroom instruction. Presents a curricular model for a literature-rich classroom. (NH)

Investigates how teacher talk and social interaction influence children's discussions, by comparing the talk occurring within literature circles in fourth-grade classrooms where teachers were and were not present. Discusses the four roles teachers took (facilitators, participants, mediators, and active listeners). Notes strategies students used to generate and facilitate their discussions that related to teacher roles within the classroom. (SR)