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We present an instructional strategy called Challenging Constitutional Rights, in which high school civics students critically interacted with, and interpreted, constitutional rights. As an alternative assessment project, students used technologies to make visual and oral presentations on the relationship between a current event and a right detailed in an amendment to the U.S. constitution. In this article, we describe the process of the project, detail the strengths of the project organized around the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Vision of powerful teaching and learning, and conclude with reflections from the teacher who designed and implemented this project. Exemplars of student work are included.

The problem of handling promotional coupons, which come in all shapes, sizes, materials and values from hundreds of different manufacturers, provides an interesting case history of how computer aids can draw sense from a cat's cradle of miscellaneous data

Creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship are “buzz words” frequently used by American business professionals when discussing the question of how to adapt to our rapidly changing global economy. American companies are struggling to innovate in order to compete with foreign competitors, and senior managers are telling middle managers and supervisors, “Our people need to become more creative.”

The purpose of this study is to investigate contemporary pre-service English teacher education in the UK and the transition, for one individual, from pre-service into early-career English teacher. The investigation explores how standards-based education reforms are narrowing the scope of professional practice in UK schools, especially in regard to the creativity of teachers and students.

The authors use critical autobiography (Haug, 1992; Miller, 1995; Rosen, 1998) and dialogic storytelling strategies (Doecke and Parr, 2009; Parr et al., 2015), that are grounded in Bakhtinian (1981) theories of language, education and creativity.

The essay critically illustrates how standards-based reforms are narrowing the professional practice of English teachers in secondary classrooms in England and compares this with one account of pre-service teacher education in which prospective teachers are taught to appreciate the situated nature of teaching and learning and the power of creative practices to engage students in their learning and development.

The critical and creative use of dialogic storytelling strategies allows the authors to present rigorously contextualised accounts of English teacher education and English teaching in England. The reflexive accounts complement the increasing numbers of studies that are showing the injurious effects of standards-based education reforms on English teaching and learning in schools.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.