Rohit Mehta

California State University, Fresno | Fresno State · Department of Curriculum and Instruction

In this chapter, the authors take a multifaceted critical approach to understanding and deconstructing the term 21st-century skills, especially in regard to technology and the role of corporations in the discourses about education. They also consider a range of cultural and political influences in our exploration of the social and academic meanings...

Purpose In this paper, the authors draw on theories of critical pedagogy to interrogate recent trends in online education scholarship, calling for more humanizing pedagogies. By using vignettes from their own teaching experiences, the paper illustrates tensions between autonomous and ideological visions of humanizing approaches, particularly how th...

This chapter aims to provide an overview of neoliberalism’s impact on literacy education—how it intersects with ethnonationalism to produce new configurations of inequality and discrimination along old lines of ethno-linguistic and racial difference. We first define key concepts, review the extant literature on the role of neoliberalism in educatio...

With the emergence of Western posthuman understandings, new materialism, artificial intelligence (AI), and the growing acknowledgment of Indigenous epistemologies, an ongoing rethinking of existing assumptions and meanings about creativity is needed. The intersection of new technologies and philosophical stances that upend human-centered views of r...

In response to the special issue on democratizing creative educational experiences (CEE), we conducted a thematic analysis of recent scholarship on creativity and decolonization (2010-2021) and analyzed recurring tensions across literature grounded in Indigenous, Black, feminist, and non-western epistemological perspectives on creativity. We found...

In this introduction to the special issue on “A pedagogy of care”, we, the special issue editors, share our own critical approaches to humanizing teaching with technology in the past few years – going back to before the pandemic – that led to the special issue. As the world “pivoted online”, and technology was taken for granted as essential in educ...

Empathetic design is the ability for the designer to predict the cognitive and emotional experience of learners as they engage with the design product and process. It aims to center sensitivity toward learners, and the design process as a whole, which suggests potential application in educational settings. In the shift to digital, empathetic design...

With the shift to online learning in the wake of COVID-19, teacher educators (TEs) risk becoming swept up in a “cult of efficiency” that can dehumanize the learning process for teachers and students. In this chapter, we share how we, four TEs, use new technologies to implement critical humanizing pedagogies. This involves pushing beyond purely cogn...

While the responsibility of educational change for equity is often put on people of color, there is a need for this burden to be shared by communities that are often conveniently left out of the conversations on social justice. In an attempt to foster discussions on inclusive literacies and humanizing practice in predominantly white school settings...

In an era when standardization, surveillance, and ideological colonization are increasingly digitized and proliferated across educational institutions, our teaching practices can easily become swept up in what Callahan (1964) has called the “cult of efficiency” in education. Such a model, which centers a Western approach to efficient delivery of “c...

Much burden for integrating inclusive practices in on-going discourses is still put on “urban” schools and teachers, leaving predominantly white contexts out of the discussion and responsibility of socio-cultural progress (Sleeter, 2001). Like Au (2009), I argue that the burden of change—at least as much, if not more—lies on the people who benefit...

Steen and colleagues [43] made their Case for Quantitative Literacy based on the premise that the 21st century, primarily due to technology changes, is a significantly more quantitative environment than any previous time in history. The design team who wrote the case made rhetorical observations about the increasing prevalence of numbers in society...

New ed-tech tools crop up frequently, leaving teachers little to no time to become familiar with them or adapt them to learning. Professional development that focuses on tool-centered approaches are often insufficient to meet teachers' needs in contemporary classrooms. Therefore, teachers need to develop a level of comfort with using new technology...

In this chapter, we present a multi-threaded argument to suggest how design thinking can be an excellent framework for developing STEAM education. We note that STEAM is broader than mere arts integration in STEM. It reflects a view of education that is more creative, real-world-driven, and problem- or project-based in nature. To develop learning co...

Beauty, curiosity, wonder, awe, and the inherent pleasure of figuring things out are aesthetic attributes that scientists, mathematicians, and engineers often speak about when describing their motivations for engaging in STEM. In contrast, despite the robustness of evidence for the importance of the aesthetic, most arguments for learning science ha...

This article describes the development of a trans-disciplinary framework for creative teaching using technology. In recent years, the authors of this paper (and collaborators) have sought to better understand the role of creativity in educational technology. Our approach seeks to inform theory, research, and practice. In this piece we step back to...

Teacher confidence with technology is essential during times of rapid changes in digital technologies. In this study, we draw on theoretical accounts from creativity research and the educational technology literature to characterize an approach to teaching—a creatively focused technology fluent (CFTF) mindset. Following our work with five cohorts o...

In this article series, we have engaged in interviews with creativity scholars, researchers, and thinkers across domains. In seeking to give voice to the diversity of perspectives on creativity, our work has spanned disciplines and viewpoints, from neuroscience to design, or education to business, and more. In this article, we extend that voice to...

In online and video/television spaces, news media discourses incorporate multimodal design as a discursive move capable of steering meaning toward desirable implications. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, while polarized news outlets made their positionality on the candidates obvious, more neutral or central news outlets revealed their p...

This article explores peer instruction in the science classroom. The authors use research in science education to illustrate, practically, how teachers can work with their students to increase learning using peer instruction.

In the new National Education Technology Plan from U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology, a claim is made that school districts cannot consistently count on teacher educators to help new teachers develop their ability to teach with technology. This panel presentation examines five innovative approaches to addressing this con...

Creativity, as a social and cognitive construct, has often challenged normative notions of intellect. While much creativity scholarship has focused on internal, psychological, psychometric, individualistic, and giftedness applications-the realities of creative work and practice through history have gone beyond this, toward social, contextual and in...

In this article, we argue that science education is more than the high stakes, rigorous practices and methodology that students often find dull and uninspiring. We present that aesthetic and humanistic motivations, such as wonder, curiosity, and social justice, are also inherent reasons for doing science. In the MSUrbanSTEM program, we designed an...

The MSUrbanSTEM fellowship program provides exemplary urban STEM teachers the opportunity to engage in transfor-mative instructional and leadership experiences that support the advancement of their teaching practice. In this article, we provide an examination of the development and implementation of a curriculum for this innovative program. This in...

Creativity is essential to effective thinking and learning across disciplines. It is increasingly viewed as a vital skill for working, thinking, and living in the 21st century. Yet, there remains little understanding of effective applications of creative teaching in mathematics classrooms. This is reflected in the lack of a consistent understan...

Technology, such as the Internet, is making newer forms of literacies more affordable; creating virtual spaces for engagement and participation more accessible. One such tool-social media-has quickly become a virtual space for the exchange of ideas, perspectives, and debates on social matters of critical importance to people. The younger generation...

Twenty-first-century learning and how it differs from prior conceptions of learning have received significant attention lately. Kereluik, Mishra, Fahnoe, and Terry (2013) offered a synthesis of multiple expert frameworks and perspectives on 21st-century learning, summarizing them in nine forms of knowledge (under three broad categories: foundationa...

In this paper we reviewed what 49 large urban public school district STEM teachers enrolled in a year-long graduate certificate and fellowship program at a large Midwestern university considered as their amazing teaching moments. They were asked to share their amazing teaching moments that would make an Ultimate Lesson Plan in STEM. In smaller grou...

We live in a world immersed in a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic modes of representation. As we extend the poststructuralist definition of text to new media, it is important that we extend our research on intertextuality and meaning-making to new media such as video. In this qualitative study, we focus on the nature of meaning making by 6 p...

In this paper we reviewed what 49 large urban public school district SteM teachers enrolled in a year-long graduate cer-tificate and fellowship program at a large Midwestern uni-versity considered as their amazing teaching moments. they were asked to share their amazing teaching moments that would make an ultimate lesson Plan in SteM. in smaller gr...

In this article, we argue that an aesthetic appreciation and motivation for understanding science is missing in the majority of discussions about learning today, which are instead focused on more instrumental perspectives. We introduce a four-pronged formative framework to aid our understanding of the value of aesthetic experiences in science, and...

Our media-saturated society is immersed within a variety of modes of representation that consist of linguistic and nonlinguistic texts. To make sense of our world, we make meaning of these texts by making connections between and within them, based on our prior knowledge and experience with texts (Cairney, 1988, 1990, 1992). Considering video’s rese...

Creativity is increasingly viewed as an important 21st century skill that should be taught in schools. this emphasis on creativity is often reflected by having students engage in open-ended, project based activities and assignments. a key challenge faced by educators is how such assignments are to be evaluated. an in-depth review of existing tests...

This article describes the development of a Trans-Disciplinary framework for creative teaching using technology. In recent years, the authors of this paper (and collaborators) have sought to better understand the role of creativity in educational technology. Our approach seeks to inform theory, research, and practice. In this piece we step back to...

This paper presents the findings of a phenomenological study of the television-based documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (Braga & Druyan, 2014). The study involved analysis of the general scientific discourse presented in the documentary series to examine the ways in which science as a discipline and scientists themselves were portrayed...

We teach who we are (Henriksen, 2011; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999). Based on this concept, we designed a three-part assignment series called ‘Creative ‘I’: Developing and Bringing it Together’ for our course on Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This assignment series afforded a space for our students to explore their definition of crea...

With the proliferation of online and hybrid (partially-online) doctoral programs, academic institutions face new challenges related to student engagement, retention, and graduation. Institutions are working at finding new ways to engage their online students to mitigate attrition rates with the help of social media. Stakeholders from an educational...

In their book, Sparks of Genius, Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein (1999) described the ways that creative scientists and artists generally use a key set of cognitive skills that cut across disciplinary boundaries. As they wrote: …at the level of the creative process, scientists, artists, mathematicians, composers, writers, and sculptors use…what w...

Educational researchers have rarely, if ever, focused attention on the public perception of educational technology, even though these popular/societal perceptions may drive investment and implementation at broader levels. In this paper we seek to provide an understanding of this phenomena through a thematic analysis of how educational technology is...