set 2017: no. 3

Twice-exceptional (gifted with associated learning difficulties) students face complex learning challenges because of their varying combinations of high ability alongside domains of learning difficulty. There is currently little original empirical research in the New Zealand education setting specifically concerning twice-exceptional students. The problem of twice-exceptional student underachievement is, however, well documented in the international literature. Failure to identify and… Read more

This article considers the place of proof, as a mathematical process, in the primary classroom. It describes the struggle the author, a primary school educator, went through with defining what proof is, what the educational goals of proof are, how these educational goals feature implicitly in the primary classroom, and what pedagogical considerations are necessary for these goals to be realised. The article reviews relevant literature and argues that the educational goals of proof will be… Read more

In July 2015 Alfriston College—a Year 9–13 secondary school—was successful in winning funding from the Teacher Led Innovation Fund. Karyn White led the school’s inquiry and Rosemary Hipkins supported the in-school team with advice about research processes as needed. In this short article Karyn describes one aspect of what the team did and found out. Rose has added a brief commentary at the end that discusses the importance of strengthening perspective-taking capabilities as an outcome of… Read more

Developing activities which are effective in assessing what counts in social studies and showing progress is challenging for social-studies teachers. In this article, we explore the three dimensions of the social studies learning area which were identified in the Nature of Social Studies (NSS) scale developed by the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) 2014 study: conceptual understandings, exploring values and perspectives and active participation in society. A deeper… Read more

In Aotearoa New Zealand we need an informed educational response to the environmental crisis within and across all learning areas in the curriculum. One way of organising that response is through the concept of eco-literacy. This article explains the concept of eco-literacy developed within the TLRI project Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World, and introduces the collection of four articles from the project published in this issue of set. This introductory article outlines how the model… Read more

An important aim of the Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World project is to investigate ways in which the cultural and ecological perspectives of Māori can be recognised and developed within literacy practices in secondary schools. In this article we propose four significant aspects to engaging with Māori literacies in classroom pedagogy and practice: place and environment; the relation of the tangible and intangible; “capturing the being”; and the concept and practice of tohu. Attention… Read more

Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World is a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative-funded research project that considers what it might mean to read and write about/to/for the natural world within the secondary school context. This article explores ways in which students communicate a relationship and kinship with the natural world through The Arts. We examine a visual arts unit delivered in the first year of the project, highlighting the culturally responsive approach taken by the… Read more

This article describes and discusses a unit of work taught by Maria Iki, a Social Sciences teacher at James Cook High School in South Auckland. The unit was taught as part of the TLRI project Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World. The project is concerned to develop students’ eco-literacy and to help them to inform their environmental identities. This article: (1) provides readers with an account of how the issue of sea-level rise in the Pacific Island of Kiribati can be understood… Read more

In a time of environmental crisis we need a language to speak for nature. In our TLRI project Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World, we have been working with teachers to develop “3D literacy” practices responsive to both culture and environment and located in a rich language and ecology of place. This article will discuss vignettes from two teachers in two schools who experimented with creating ecological units of work for their English classes. The analysis of these vignettes leads to… Read more