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Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) have been found to benefit human emotional state and cognitive performance. Recent applications of AAI have extended to classrooms with a range of intentions including to improve literacy. This Canadian study sought to examine differences in reading performance and behaviour in early readers identified as requiring extra supports following exposure to a canine-assisted and adult-assisted reading support. Twenty-four 7- to 8-year-olds experienced both supports in random order. At the start of the study and after completion of either support learners' oral reading, reading comprehension, social functioning, and reading affect were assessed. Parents, teachers, and children were also asked a range of closed- and open-ended questions. Findings showed evidence of improvement in reading performance, particularly after reading to a dog. There was also evidence of improved social competence overall and decreased problematic behaviour, although this was dependent on order of exposure. Teacher and parent reports showed they believed both supports to improve learner skills and affect for reading, and that teachers made more distinctions here. Implications for the practical application and relevance of methodological detail for future work are discussed.

This exploratory study assessed links among children's moral concern and their ideas about the rights and protection of companion, farm, wild animals and ecosystems. Sixty-one children responded to three interview questions that were coded as either anthropocentric or biocentric in orientation. Results revealed unique links among children's moral concern and their ideas about the rights and protection of different types of animals and ecosystems. Biocentric moral concern was associated with two protection strategies: 1) advocacy to protect companion animals and ecosystems, and 2) the need for peer support to help protect wild animals. Overall, results revealed the nuanced diversity of children's moral concern and ideas about the rights and protection of all types of animals and ecosystems. Implications for moral education programs include a balanced approach to foster compassion, environmental awareness, and social justice among youth.

Engaging and motivating students in undergraduate statistics courses can be enhanced by using topical peer-reviewed publications for analyses as part of course assignments. Given the popularity of on-campus therapy dog stress-reduction programs, this topic fosters buy-in from students whilst providing information regarding the importance of mental health and well-being as it impacts learning. This article describes how instructors can use a study on the benefits of human-dog interactions to teach students about study design, data collection and ethics, and hypothesis testing. The data and research questions are accessible to students without requiring detailed subject-area knowledge. Students can think carefully about how to collect and analyze data from a randomized controlled trial with two-sample hypothesis tests. Instructors can use these data for short in-class examples or longer assignments and assessments, and throughout this article, we suggest activities and discussion questions. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We give an unconventional, mythopoetic response to the question of Why teach mathematics to all learners in school? In our work with pre-service teachers, we attempt to teach how to value the vulnerability of the multispecies world in a relational, anti-colonial way through passionate immersion, and to use mathematics education towards the ends of promoting its and our own (human) flourishing through taking on relationships of curatorial care. Our contribution includes the novel theoretical assemblage and elaboration of the metaphors of plot and curating as "medicine" [Doolittle, E. (2007). Mathematics as medicine -- plenary lecture. In P. Liljedahl (Ed.), "Proceedings of the 2006 CMESG Annual Meeting (17-25), Burnaby, BC, Canada."] for addressing challenging ethical questions for mathematics education [Karrow, D., Khan, S., & Fleener, Y. (2017). Mathematics education's ethical relation with and response to climate change. "Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal," 32 (Special Issues on Mathematics Education and the Living World: Responses to Ecological Crisis). ISBN: 1465-2978.] of its ongoing relationship with the precarity produced by unexamined plantation commitments.

As significant numbers of university students report high levels of stress, post-secondary institutions are seeking accessible mental health and wellness supports. The outreach program presented integrates therapy dogs, therapeutic horticulture, and art making interventions. Over 170 participants completed questionnaires surveying demographic variables, frequency of attendance and engagement, and self-reported reductions in stress and anxiety. Open-ended questions explored students' program experience, their explanations for stress reductions, and recommendations for the program. The vast majority of participants reported a considerable decrease in stress and indicated that the program helped them destress, feel calmer and more relaxed, reduced their anxiety, and helped them feel more in control of their emotions. Participant recommendations included investing in expansion, further development and adequate resourcing of the program. Findings highlight the potential of integrated wellness initiatives to support large and diverse groups of students while decreasing support stigma and contributing to healthy campus goals.

Since the 1990s, scientists and Indigenous peoples have worked together across Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homeland in Canada) to conduct research on contaminants in ringed seals ("Pusa hispida"; "natsiq," "natchiq" or [foreign characters ommitted] in Inuktut), a species of high cultural, economic and nutritional importance among Inuit. Developing innovative ways of engaging Indigenous communities in research has become essential. Here we examine a science outreach and knowledge mobilization project that was developed as part of a long-term contaminant monitoring program on ringed seals in the Canadian Arctic. This project engaged Inuit school students, youth and communities through workshops on ringed seal ecology and contaminants. We present our approach to workshop planning and delivery, discuss results from a workshop assessment, and reflect on lessons learned and best practices. We also assess the potential of school workshops that braid Western science and Inuit knowledge to support the meaningful engagement of Inuit youth in environmental research.

Today, outdoor therapies are practiced in many nations around the world, with a broad diversity of philosophies, theories, methods, functions, and formats (Norton et al., 2015). The field of therapy within the outdoors has been much discussed and debated within the experiential profession (Itin, 1998). The disputes and deliberations have centred on topics such as the difference between therapy and therapeutic, primary or adjunctive treatment, licensed clinician or outdoor leader, and more. These disagreements have given several forms of outdoor therapy: adventure, wilderness, outdoor behavioral health care, bush, bush adventure, forest, nature-based/eco, land-based healing, horticultural, animal-assisted, adapted/inclusive, and eudaimonic. Outdoor therapies can be arranged with respect to one another according to the varying amounts of challenge, nature, and psychotherapy. This essay considers these three key dimensions before discussing the 10 or more well-known forms of outdoor therapy.

This study explored children's perceptions of a canine-assisted social-emotional learning program developed within the framework of a canine therapy program at a mid-sized Canadian university. Data collection made use of interviews, field notes, and observations. Children (N = 8, 5-11 years) from an after-school program participated in a six-week intervention after which participants were interviewed about their experiences in the program, their learning of social and emotional competencies, and the role of the therapy dogs in facilitating their socioemotional development. Using conventional content analysis, salient themes reflecting participants' experiences were identified. A within-case analysis was conducted followed by a cross-case analysis to identify what participants collectively saw as important. Salient themes to emerge through cross-case analysis were: 1) the dogs were meaningful and essential to the program, 2) it was an enjoyable and positive experience, and 3) participants reported evidence of social-emotional learnings. Evidence from this study suggests that the therapy dogs might have provided behavioral and emotional support. Findings suggest that integrating therapy dogs into social and emotional learning initiatives can provide unique advantages and improve children's engagement and learning of social and emotional skills. Findings are discussed within the context of human-animal interactions and social and emotional education.

This paper describes a unique collaborative action research project that brings together members of the [q virgule suscrite] [i-acute] [c-acute] [schwa][y-acute] (Katzie) First Nation, post-secondary and K-12 communities, as well as foresters and environmentalists, to restore creeks that have been compromised by land use impacts, forest removal, and global warming. Identifying creek restoration as a site for multi-system change and wholistic re/conciliation, we explored the following questions: How can we bring together members of our diverse communities to learn about the dire condition of our watershed and take action to help Salmon? How might this collaborative work strengthen community relationships? What contextual factors enable and impede the enactment of our vison? Through iterative cycles of action and reflection, intentional trial and error, conversational inquiry, and storytelling, we identified 'guideposts' that will inform our work moving forward. Our research has illuminated structural changes that could enhance environmental justice for Salmon, such as empowering the caretakers of creeks and rivers since time immemorial as sovereign leaders of restorative projects, affirming the rights of the Land and other sentient beings to receive care, developing leadership structures that serve to unite (rather than polarize) citizens in addressing environmental problems, and forming diverse relational webs that exceed partnerships. Action research, informed by Indigenous worldviews, can play a pivotal role in supporting communities in assuming relational responsibility in caring for the Land and one another. As Donna Haraway (2016) contends, it is time to 'make kin' outside of our genetic and ancestral ties to 'change the story'.

This article presents a comparative exploration of news media portrayals of Indigenous environmental issues in Canada and the United States guided by a qualitative multimodal critical discourse analysis methodology. Theoretical framing was provided by Elliot Eisner's three curricula, Antonio López's visual literacy framework, and the broader fields of critical media literacy, environmental communication, and Indigenous media practice. This inquiry responded to recent media coverage of manifestations of resistance to environmental degradation and colonial (re-)encroachment in Indigenous territories on both sides of our shared borders such as the Keystone XL and Coastal GasLink pipelines, among others. Media portrayals of environmentally conscious Indigenous initiatives and collaborations such as the proliferation of renewable energy developments across Turtle Island/North America and the transborder Buffalo Treaty were also explored.

Four experiments examined Canadian 2- to 3-year-old children's (N = 224; 104 girls, 120 boys) thoughts about shared preferences. Children saw sets of items, and identified theirs and another person's preferences. Children expected that food preferences would be more likely to be shared than color preferences, regardless of whether the items were similar or different in appeal (Experiments 1-3). A final study replicated these findings while also exploring children's expectations about activity and animal preferences. Across all studies, children expected shared preferences at surprisingly low rates (never higher than chance). Overall, these findings suggest that young children understand that some preferences are more subjective than others, and that these expectations are driven by beliefs about domains of preferences.

While the importance of secure relationships between children and caregivers has been well established in the literature as an essential feature of healthy child development, the influence of animal-human relationships on healthy development and attachment is also beginning to gain attention. A burgeoning literature supports the developmental and sustainability benefits of such relationships to children. One hundred seventeen directors of childcare centres in Manitoba, Canada (16.5%) caring for 24% of children in licensed care responded to a survey about animals in childcare facilities. Findings showed that only 51% of facilities currently had animals, with fish and caged rodents being the most common. Although centre directors agreed that the benefits of centre-based animals included children learning responsibility as well as increased calmness and happiness in children, the drawbacks in terms of children's allergies, the costs, and the inconvenience outweighed these benefits in almost half the centres. Given the benefits of animals in young children's lives, a list of variables for consideration is provided to aid directors in decision-making about animals in childcare centres.

Conditioned fear memories that are context-specific shortly after conditioning generalize over time. We exposed rats to a context reminder 30 d after conditioning, which served to reinstate context-specificity, and investigated how this reminder alters retrieval-induced activity in the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex (aCC) relative to a no reminder condition. c-Fos expression in dorsal CA1 was observed following retrieval in the original context, but not in a novel context, whether or not the memory was reactivated, suggesting that dCA1 retains the context-specific representation. c-Fos was highly expressed in aCC following remote memory testing in both contexts, regardless of reminder condition, indicating that aCC develops generalized representations that are insensitive to memory reactivation.

This article provides an overview of the ethical and educational functions of storytelling in fishing and hunting practices and pedagogies. I explore various psychological, anthropological, and ethical theories surrounding storytelling as a way of encouraging deeper, more robust engagement among humans, nonhuman animals, and myriad beings that exist alongside of us in our multispecies communities. Drawing on animal studies, narrative theory, and critical pedagogy as well as ongoing qualitative research, I offer potential ways of incorporating a wider "ecology of stories" into situated hunting and fishing practices to engage more ethically with the people and beings that dwell in a given place.

In this paper, we attempt to do a kind of theorizing that we think is compatible with new materialisms. To do this we explore the idea of what it might be to separate "ontos-" from "-logos," and give suggestions to readers for ways of experiencing this idea. We posit that it is not only possible to make diffractive "readings" and re-readings of texts, but also that experiences themselves can provide a diffractive context for "ontos." Thus, not only can different concepts held in the forefront of our minds allow us to encounter, interpret, and understand differently but so too can positioning and entangling ourselves differently. As such we will ask the reader to do things beyond simply reading the text as they engage this paper. We also tell stories, two from an Anishinaabe knowledge keeper of Chris's acquaintance, to provide another way for shifting conceptualizing towards a different ontological position compatible with an immanent materialist position. We explore the capacity of words to tell a story about experiences that are inherently non-verbal, in which human I-ness shares a being state with what are normally thought to be separable objects in the natural world. The paper concludes with a short discussion of pedagogy in light of this discussion/action.

This study draws on Martha Nussbaum's (2000) account of the nature of human well-being in order to explore the role of animals in formal education settings. Nussbaum's capabilities approach identifies the ability "to have concern for and live with other animals, plants and the environment" (p. 80) as a necessary component for well-being. Yet, this condition of well-being remains largely unexplored in education despite research that suggests many potential social and health benefits of dog-human interaction. This paper describes the effects of a unique, Canadian school-based cooperative education program in which students work with animals for high school credit. The qualitative research design is based on interviews, students' own stories of the impact of animal interaction--particularly in light of other challenges they faced academically and socially. Research results, support other empirical accounts of positive effects of animals in education settings, and offer insight into the nature of human-animal interaction as a component of well-being within a vocationally-oriented program.

Beta-adrenergic receptors ([beta]-ARs) prime hippocampal synapses to stabilize long-term potentiation (LTP). This "metaplasticity" can persist for 1-2 h after pharmacologic activation of [beta]-ARs. It requires activation of PKA (cAMP-dependent protein kinase) during [beta]-AR priming. A-kinase anchoring proteins (AKAPs) tether PKA to downstream signaling proteins. We hypothesized that induction of this metaplasticity requires intact functioning of AKAPs. Acute application of stearated ht31, a membrane-permeant inhibitor of AKAPs, either during [beta]-AR activation 30 min prior to LTP induction or during LTP induction, attenuated the persistence of LTP. A control, inactive ht31 peptide did not affect [beta]-AR-mediated metaplasticity. These findings implicate PKA anchoring in the induction of [beta]-adrenergic metaplasticity of LTP.

Considering (a) the many potential connections between hunting, culture, and environmental thought, (b) how much hunters have contributed to the conservation movement and to the protection of a viable land base, and (c) renewed interest in hunting as part of the wider movement toward eating local, non-industrialized food, we seek to bring hunting out of the margins and into a more visible role as a legitimate focus for environmental learning. To dig beneath the sometimes dismissive stereotypes that often marginalize hunters and hunting, and to explore hunting as a practice of ecological learning, we went straight to the source--we went hunting. Through narrative inquiry, this paper explores the ecological learning experienced in the context of a weeklong pronghorn antelope hunt in traditional Cheyenne and Arapahoe hunting territory in central Wyoming. By juxtaposing four voices, we recreate the hunting cycle and make meaning of our experience learning about ourselves, our environment, our food, and the more-than-human world.

This study investigated Ontario science and biology teachers' practices and attitudes toward animal dissection and dissection alternatives. The data was collected through a mixed methods approach involving online surveys (n = 153) and subsequent telephone interviews (n = 9) with secondary school science and biology teachers. The findings indicate that teachers identify strengths and drawbacks to both dissection and alternatives, but the majority continue to strongly favour traditional dissection and see it as vital to biology education. Further, although teachers expressed concerns with dissection, their concerns were overshadowed by an overall dissatisfaction with alternatives. It is argued that teachers need to engage more deeply with the ethical questions that underlie dissection and consider how its learning outcomes can be achieved through humane science education practices. It is also argued that science teacher education programs should include ethical discussions about the controversies of dissection and provide training to familiarize pre-service teachers with alternatives. (Contains 4 tables.)

This paper explores the pedagogical benefits of combining remote winter wilderness travel and homestead living with reading, writing, and listening to personal narratives from the expedition region. A co-taught interdisciplinary university course will be used as a case study to demonstrate the ways in which this approach aids in developing place-consciousness--an awareness of storied landscapes--as well as the skills and mentality required for directly living with the land. It is our hope that the interdisciplinary content and experiential pedagogy employed in this course will enable students to re-establish vital relationships with nature that have been lost in our increasingly urban and technologically dominated lives. We will also discuss the use of uncommon and potentially controversial practices in our program such as fishing and hunting for food, and observing the skinning of wolves, that we believe are important elements of becoming genuinely place-conscious in the region of the Canadian north we study and visit. Tensions between our stated philosophies and actual practices are also revealed and examined.

This article examines children's encounters with dead and dying bumble bees in their everyday entangled lives. Within the context of an early childhood classroom located in suburban British Columbia, Canada, the article stories situated and emergent bee-child worldings to illustrate possibilities for learning with other species in anthropogenically damaged worlds. I pay attention to some of the ways in which children's and educators' practices have shifted away from encountering bees predominantly as objects of scientific knowledge towards more relational, embodied, and affective immersion in the lives and deaths of bumble bees. Situating these practices within current bumble bee vulnerabilities, I consider how children's and educators' inquiries might be viewed as pedagogies that matter for learning to live less destructively with others in current times of anthropogenic change.

This paper describes the partial results of a research project which investigated conceptions of nature and the role of place in environmental education in children who attended Camp Arowhon. Through interviews and observations, utilizing a hybrid research drawing from phenomenography and ethnography, local common wild animals emerged as playing an important role in campers' embodied connection to place. Through structured "nature programs" and unstructured "free-play," campers discovered and increased their familiarity of common local animals. Using the deleuzeoguattarian concept of "becoming," these interactions are proposed to serve as a starting point through which a child can move on to engage with increasingly abstract aspects of the natural world. Implications for urban environmental education, where these children spend the majority of their year, are discussed. (Contains 3 tables and 7 notes.)

Nunangat pedagogies concern the adoption of teaching practices informed by relationships with land, water and ice. In this article, the researcher examines an opportunity to disrupt Global North dominance in the Inuit homeland through engagements with fox. Nunangat methodologies require consultations with Elders and hunters especially concerning knowledge that is not accessible via the Internet or at the library. A rhizomatic analysis is used to connect the presentation of the various research narratives and analysis of encounters with fox. These strategies are employed to facilitate occasions to re-conceptualize early childhood practices in ways which enable recognition of the vitality and viability of local Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of "staying with the trouble." Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the specificities of educators' and children's everyday practices of caring for and detaching from an introduced species of Vietnamese walking stick insects. The paper argues that the child-pet-educator relations that emerged through these practices are a site at which to trace and disentangle commodified relations of enclosure and invasion in urban nature pedagogies within anthropogenically damaged places. We conclude by suggesting that classroom pet pedagogies need to enact a more-than-human relational ethics which subverts child development discourses and unsettles children and animals as innocent couplings.

As institutions, science and science education alike have rarely included the perspectives and contributions of indigenous peoples pertaining to the natural world. Yet, people worldwide have benefited from the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities. Western science and technology, though broadly worthwhile, have been a source of global environmental damage. Research has shown that indigenous ways of knowing can help students develop complex and multilogical understandings of the natural world. In particular, students can learn from native knowledge systems how to live in more sustainable ways. In this article, the authors describe a lesson on climate change that explored possibilities for a more multilogical science education. Ninth- and tenth-grade science students investigated collaborations between Inuit elders and Western scientists working to understand how climate change alters bird migration patterns. The lesson connects to the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) and the nature of science. The authors conclude by discussing possibilities for integrating indigenous knowledge in science education.

This exploratory mixed-methods study examined the influence of an on-campus canine therapy program on linguistically diverse international students' perceptions of their English language development and stress. Participants were recruited from English language support classes at a mid-size western Canadian university and were randomly selected from a larger pool of participants indicating interest in the study. Seven participants attended five canine therapy sessions in which they interacted with certified therapy dogs working as part of a campus initiative to reduce stress and homesickness on campus. Both formative and summative data collection was done with students completing weekly stress assessments, responding to summative questions asked in an interview, and elaborating on their views in a focus group discussion. The following key themes emerged with students describing: 1) decreased overall stress; 2) improvements in their sense of belonging in the campus community with dogs as social catalysts; and 3) increased opportunities to practice oral language skills through interactions with dog handlers and fellow students in the lab. Implications are discussed within the context of reducing the affective filter for language learners and increasing accessibility to programs for international students.

This article reports on the findings of a recent qualitative grounded theory research study in a metropolitan area in the south-east of Canada examining one junior/senior kindergarten classroom's engagement with nature. It focuses on the role of the learners, the children and the teacher, in co-constructing two very different learning experiences. The findings suggest that when learners play an agentive role in constructing their own learning experience and are involved emotionally as well as cognitively, the level of engagement would be deeper, richer and more sustained.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the frequency with which child protection workers (CPWs) in Ontario, Canada, seek information about animal cruelty during investigations of child maltreatment and the extent to which they consider information about animal cruelty when making decisions about whether intervention is required. The CPWs (N = 78) responded to an online survey about their experiences with animal cruelty during child protection investigations in the previous year. Few CPWs routinely asked questions about animal cruelty during investigations, but those who did ask questions were significantly more likely to report disclosures of animal cruelty by children and caregivers than those who did not ask questions. Many CPWs had directly observed children and caregivers physically harming animals. Almost all respondents indicated that animal cruelty was an important factor to consider when making intervention decisions. The results suggest that CPWs should consider routinely asking children and caregivers questions about animal cruelty and observe the behavior and living conditions of family pets when conducting risk assessments. Future research should determine whether animal cruelty is a reliable indicator of exposure to family violence.

There is increasing research on the effects of industrial livestock production on the environment and human health, but less on the effects this has on animal welfare and ecological justice. The concept of ecological justice as a tool for achieving sustainability is gaining traction in the legal world. Klaus Bosselman defines ecological justice as consisting of three elements: intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice. While the first two have been extensively discussed, interspecies justice has received less attention. It is argued that the neglect of interspecies justice in the practice of industrial livestock production leads to both intragenerational and intergenerational injustices. The article focuses primarily on an animal welfare perspective, addressing the extreme harm and oppression of animals entailed by their commoditization for industrial food production. The destructive impact of this mode of food production on environmental resources and its massive contributions to climate change also lead to the impoverishment of the food, environmental, social, and economic health of present and future generations. The article describes the legal mechanisms that have permitted, and indeed encouraged, the move to industrial livestock production, and suggests changes that could reduce the three kinds of ecological injustices which industrial livestock production produces. (Contains 35 notes.)

In this article, I use Donna Haraway's philosophy to think about postcolonial encounters between different species. I follow entangled stories of the deer/settler-child figure to trouble colonialisms and untangle the histories and trajectories that we inhabit with other species through colonial histories. I shy away from generalizations and instead grapple with complexities that ordinary stories bring as I attempt to engage in nonhegemonic versions of childhood studies. (Contains 4 notes.)

The Nimkee NupiGawagan Healing Centre (NNHC) in Muncey, ON provides residential treatment to First Nations and Inuit youth who abuse solvents. As a complement to its culture-based programming, in 2008 the centre began offering weekly equine-assisted learning (EAL) curriculum to its clients in partnership with the Keystone Equine Centre and the Lambton Equine Assisted Learning Centre. This study explores the potential benefit of the EAL program on youths' healing. We conducted 15 interviews with two intakes of male and female EAL program participants and 6 NNHC and EAL staff, reviewed EAL facilitator and NNHC staff reflections and participants' EAL journals, and observed the EAL program. It was concluded that youths' healing was aided through the availability of a culturally-relevant space; from within an Aboriginal worldview this understanding of space is central to individual and communal well-being. This was conveyed in three key themes that emerged from the data: spiritual exchange, complementary communication, and authentic occurrence. This understanding provides insight into the dynamics of healing for Aboriginal youth who abuse solvents, and may be applicable to other programming and populations.

This paper focuses on the implications of two emerging digital technologies on the act of field birding, and the implications of these objects for thinking about wild birds. While the adoption of new immaterial technologies promises to improve the ease with which birding is practiced, their use leads to new ethical considerations. Using the Internet to share bird sightings, for example, lowers the barrier of entry to access this information. Therefore, bird sightings proliferate, often with little thought to the consequences of birders visiting the reported birds' location. A digital image, captured by digital cameras, perhaps marks the greatest change. With the adoption of a digital camera the nature of identification is effectively changed: captured images remove birds from the field and their broader ecological context. Given that birding is proposed as a way for western culture to reconnect with the more-than-human world, these digital objects promise to redefine a relationship with birds and the larger natural world. (Contains 1 note.)

An early-twentieth-century movement for social purity in England, Canada and the United States aimed to eradicate prostitution, the double standard of sexual morals and their dreaded corollary, the venereal diseases. Social purists suggested that "purity education" for children was the best pedagogical prophylaxis against such medico-moral impurity. Popular purity education guides like the "Self and Sex" Series configured purity education as nature study lessons on reproduction in flora and fauna complemented by a back-to-nature regimen of diet, dress and exercise. Social purists hoped that purity education would induce children to adopt an abstinence agenda promoting heterosexual conventions of chastity before marriage, procreative marital sex and sound parenthood. The Series is used to investigate the ways in which the social purity movement turned to a highly selective vision of the natural order to naturalize the abstinence agenda.

Students gain a better understanding of war and economics when the variables come alive through stories, artifacts, and paintings. In this article, the author describes a short story about the fur trade which can generate lots of student questions about the fur economics, the Eastern Woodland Indians, trade artifacts, and war. The author also discusses how a beaver can start a war. (Contains 3 figures and 7 notes.)

In this article, the author focuses on the foundations of Anishinaabe treaty-making with the United States and Canada. The author first describes a story of "The Woman Who Married a Beaver," which illustrates Anishinaabe principles of respect, responsibility, and renewal that are critical in treaty making. "The Woman Who Married a Beaver" is a powerful story of transformation that sheds light on how the Anishinaabe understood treaty-making. The author argues that the story recounts the forging and functioning of a treaty relationship between the Anishinaabe and beavers. The principles of respect, responsibility, and renewal illustrated in this treaty between the Anishinaabe and beavers are foundational in Anishinaabe political thought and practice. The Anishinaabe utilized these principles in their treaty practices with the United States and Canada as a means to establish just and mutually beneficial relationships. The author discusses the treaty process as a way to develop international alliances with colonial and settler nations. The author concludes by discussing contemporary applications of Anishinaabe treaty principles. (Contains 74 notes.)

To this day, it remains unresolved whether experimental amnesia reflects failed memory storage or the inability to retrieve otherwise intact memory. Methodological as well as conceptual reasons prevented deciding between these two alternatives: The absence of recovery from amnesia is typically taken as supporting storage impairment interpretations; however, this absence of recovery does not positively demonstrate nonexistence of memory, allowing for alternative interpretations of amnesia as impairment of memory retrieval. To address this shortcoming, we present a novel approach to study the nature of amnesia that makes positive, i.e., falsifiable, predictions for the absence of memory. Applying this paradigm, we demonstrate here that infusing anisomycin into the dorsal hippocampus induces amnesia by impairing memory storage, not retrieval. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)

This qualitative study analyzed grade 12 biology students' answers to written extended-response questions that describe hypothetical scenarios of animals' evolution. We investigated whether these type of questions are suitable for students (n = 24) to express a meaningful understanding of evolutionary theory. Meaningful understanding is comprised of factual, procedural (rules, algorithms), schematic ("knowing why"), and strategic knowledge (when, where and how to apply knowledge). Evolutionary theory as a multi-level concept includes concepts on three different levels (descriptive, hypothetical, and theoretical). Students' answers are examined as to whether they reflect the meaningful linking of all concepts through appropriate use of scientific language. Results showed that students (a) predominantly linked descriptive concepts and, although expected, (b) demonstrated only some cross-concept-level links (theoretical-descriptive), (c) exhibited even fewer multi-concept-level links (theoretical-descriptive-hypothetical), and (d) avoided the linking of hypothetical concepts with theoretical ones. All these results showed the lack of explanations and reasoning (absence of schematic and strategic knowledge) and knowledge of how to link concepts about evolutionary theory meaningfully. The results indicate further that written extended-response questions are only partially suitable for demonstrating meaningful understanding. Implications for teaching of evolutionary theory are discussed. (Contains 7 tables and 3 notes.)

This article describes the author's personal experiences leading primary grades in whole-class composing. Together they created songs inspired by topics the students were exploring in their homeroom classes. The author systematically describes the songwriting process they employed, identifying specific challenges encountered along the way. The first task was to identify a topic, then to create a song text. Next they explored and shared musical possibilities to match the text, one line at a time. They worked together to reach consensus on various aspects of the text and tune until they had a song. The author also describes how they made use of these songs as curriculum in the school music program.

This study investigated the potential of using a computer-simulated animal in a handheld virtual pet videogame to improve children's empathy and humane attitudes. Also investigated was whether sex differences existed in children's development of empathy and humane attitudes resulting from play, as well as their feelings for a virtual pet. The results showed that after playing "Nintendogs" for 3 weeks, the participants of both sexes, on average, scored higher levels of empathy on the Bryant Empathy Index, and had higher levels of humane attitudes on the Intermediate Attitude Scale, compared to their pretest scores before they played. A statistical association also was revealed between time playing with a computer-simulated animal and improved scores in empathy and humane attitudes toward animals. The findings also showed that participants tended to form emotional attachments with their virtual pet and considered it a real pet. (Contains 1 figure and 5 tables.)

Given the commonness of pets in communities throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia, among other countries, pet stewardship should be a natural topic of study for the integration of science, mathematics, and technology. Therefore, the term "stewardship" will be examined by applying observation and research to shape our behaviors and raise our students' awareness of pet ownership. After completing the interdisciplinary lessons in this article, it should be evident that our responsibility for our pets begins at home. (Contains 6 figures and 1 resource.)

Recent evidence suggests that rats require an intact hippocampus in order to recognize familiar objects when they encounter them again in a different context. The two experiments reported here further examined how changes in context affect rats' performance on the novel-object preference (NOP) test of object-recognition memory, and how those effects interact with the effects of HPC damage. Rats with HPC lesions and control rats received NOP testing in either the same context in which they had previously encountered sample objects, or in a different but equally familiar context. In Experiment 1, the two contexts had very few overlapping cues within or outside the apparatus; thus, the differences between them were global. Consistent with previous results, control rats showed a novel-object preference in both the unchanged and (globally) changed contexts, whereas rats with HPC lesions displayed a preference only in the unchanged context. In Experiment 2, the context shift included only local features proximal to the test objects. The main results were the reverse of Experiment 1--rats with HPC lesions displayed a novel-object preference in both the unchanged and (locally) changed contexts, whereas control rats displayed a preference only in the unchanged context. The findings are consistent with the view that HPC damage does not cause a general inability to recognize objects, nor an inability to encode or store a representation of the context in which the objects are encountered. They suggest instead that HPC damage impairs the ability to remember specific locations of familiar objects within a particular context. (Contains 6 figures.)

Do rats run and respond at a higher rate to run during the dark phase when they are typically more active? To answer this question, Long Evans rats were exposed to a response-initiated variable interval 30-s schedule of wheel-running reinforcement during light and dark cycles. Wheel-running and local lever-pressing rates increased modestly during the dark phase. A second experiment examined the potential role of food-anticipatory activity in this effect by delaying postexperimental session feeding by 6 hr. No increase in wheel-running and lever-pressing rates was observed during the dark phase. This suggests that the effect of light/dark cycle on running and responding for the opportunity to run depended upon food-anticipatory activity. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

Although information has become increasingly prevalent in young people's lives, minimal research has addressed children's attitudes to the word itself. This paper scrutinizes questionnaire-based data to explore how 45 eight- to ten-year-old Canadians understood the term. "Information" was often considered to be material that met a need, covered particular territory or was associated with action by an individual. The youngsters identified many features they believed characteristic of "good information"; where these requirements were not met the material was frequently deemed "bad information". The research findings have implications for teachers and librarians, as well as for researchers investigating children's information needs. (Contains 3 tables.)

"The Geography Teacher" provides hands-on reference and educative material for K-12 Geography teachers. The journal also pioneers innovative ideas for contemporary teaching methods, including lesson plans. This issue contains the following: (1) Ask Dr. de Blij (Dr. Harm de Blij); (2) Improving Geographic Understanding with a State Atlas (Jerry T. Mitchell, Monti Caughman, Susan Wise); (3) Girl Wins Geographic Bee (Scott Norris, NG News); (4) Playing with the 50 States and the Chemical Elements (Antonio Joaquin Franco Mariscal, Maria Jose Cano Inglesias); (5) Why Geography Matters to a Teen (Eric Goldfischer); (6) Reading Our World (The Geography-Literacy Task Force); (7) The Uses of Geography (James F. Marran); (8) World Refugees (Interview with Lavinia Limon); (9) Mapping a Secret (Dawn Bryant, Sue Gerstenberger, Dr. Timothy Lintner); (10) The World's Human Population (Chuck Fahrer); (11) Atlantic Canada in Review (Penny Anderson); (12) Infidel (book review by Jody Smothers Marcello); (13) Movies as Teaching Tools (Mary Lynn Everhart); (14) Book Reviews: Now and Then (Lydia Lewis); and (15) International Geographic Bee (NG web site). Individual articles contain references, tables, and figures.

Objective: The first objective of this study was to determine if children exposed to domestic violence were significantly more likely to be cruel to animals than children not exposed to violence. The second was to determine if there were significant age and gender differences between children who were and were not cruel to animals. Method: A community sample of 47 mothers with two children and a history of domestic violence were compared to a matched sample of 45 mothers with two children who did not have such a history. Results: Children exposed to domestic violence were significantly more likely to have been cruel to animals than children not exposed to violence. The age and gender of children who were cruel to animals did not differ from children who were not cruel to animals. However, exposed children cruel to animals were significantly older than non-exposed children cruel to animals. Conclusion: Animal cruelty by children is correlated with exposure to domestic violence.

By 1879 the vast buffalo herds were all but gone from the Great Plains. Many of the remaining animals had moved south from the Milk River of northern Montana and Alberta into the Judith Basin of central Montana. In these rich grasslands, for a few more years, life went on as it had for centuries. Following the buffalo came many Indian bands, as well as Metis who had been hunting on the Milk River for decades. A buffalo-based economy had brought prosperity to the Native people of the Plains. The animals provided essential food and materials in addition to products for trade. For Metis people, buffalo had replaced beaver as the backbone of their fur trade economy. Their production of robes for the eastern markets and pemmican for the Hudson's Bay and American fur companies provided the economic base of a growing number of communities spreading westward from the Red River of Manitoba, Minnesota, and North Dakota, including the Spring Creek settlement (Lewistown), where Metis descendants still live today.

Scientists have used educational presentations and "bug banquets" to alter widespread negative attitudes toward invertebrates. In this article, the authors explore whether such presentations have a measurable affect on attitudes. Junior high, high school, and university students completed an attitude survey focusing on invertebrates in general and as a food source. Half of each age group then experienced an educational bug banquet presented by the authors. Several weeks later, all participants again completed the survey. Results suggest that educational bug banquets have complex and subtle effects on attitudes that may depend on age, but they may help prepare people to respond more positively in future encounters with these species. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)