This book explores the significance of silence within and beyond pedagogical contexts. Silence is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon for everyday life: since schools mirror society, it is also significant in education. While silence can be experienced in a multitude of different ways, the author reflects on whether silence itself can bear a message: is there an aspect of dialogue in silence, or is it a language all of its own? This book examines a variety of silences essential for education, examining such topics as silence and aspects of power, silent students, and the relationship between listening and silence. Drawing on a range of empirical data, the author elucidates the significance of silence in pedagogical contexts.

Teaching kids stress management skills early in life will help them to grow into happy and healthy adults. And if you work with children or adolescents, you know that kids today need these skills more than ever. The pressures they face in the classroom, on the playground, in their extracurricular activities, and at home can sometimes be overwhelming. So how can you help lay the groundwork for their success? A Still Quiet Place presents an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program that therapists, teachers, and other professionals can use to help children and adolescents manage stress and anxiety in their lives, and develop their natural capacities for emotional fluency, respectful communication, and compassionate action. The program detailed in this book is based on author Amy Saltzman’s original curriculum, which has helped countless children and adolescents achieve significant improvements in attention and reduced anxiety. One of the easiest ways to find the still quiet place within is to practice mindfulness—paying attention to your life experience here and now with kindness and curiosity. The easy-to-implement mindfulness practices in this guide are designed to help increase children and adolescents’ attention, learning, resiliency, and compassion by showing them how to experience the natural quietness that can be found within. The still quiet place is a place of peace and happiness that is alive inside all of us, and you can find it just by closing your eyes and breathing. For more information, visit www.stillquietplace.com.

This book is a performance of listening to the sounds of educational contexts and pedagogical interactions as dynamic features of teaching and learning.

This edited volume includes contributions on education within a world of challenges by authors with diverse experiences and perspectives. Together, the authors reflect on educational initiatives and life in democratic societies, arguing for an increased awareness of the educational processes at work within our contexts, places, and personal lives. Chapters argue that authority and knowledge belong to everyone and that these are found on every level of perceived educational hierarchies. This book calls for attention to be paid to the voices of teachers in school, students in the classroom, participants in a project, and researchers embedded in a community—highlighting that they all have something to teach about understanding the world all are working to create in an uncertain educational future.

This book encourages readers to explore significant aspects of current thinking in primary education (for ages three to 13 years) focusing on pedagogy: the study of processes of teaching. The authors consider contexts, knowledge, skills and curriculum within a framework of practice. A distinctive feature is the voices of teachers, children, parents, advisors and inspectors. The book covers: learning, knowledge and pedagogy; pedagogic issues, application of practice. The authors also present a discussion of national strategies and The National Curriculum update for 2000, discussions of a world-wide curriculum, and ICT and citizenship viewed as tools for developing aspects of pedagogy.