Grounded in the context of the gap in civic participation, action-based civics curricula, and how classroom interactions may affect student development, we present the CIVVICS (Civic Interactions motiVating diVerse Individuals in Classroom Settings) observation tool. CIVVICS's four domains--Lesson Planning and Implementation, Classroom…

Student voice is a key component in constructing discourses of respect, empowerment and citizenship in schools. It can help schools to become learning communities, rather than knowledge factories, that serve the needs of the majority of their members, the students, as successfully as possible and prepare them for future lives in a wide variety of…

This article presents a model for democratic pedagogy in science classrooms that is based on an examination of existing literature on democratic educational practices and on teacher and student ideas about how this pedagogy can take shape and be operationalized in science classrooms. A goal of democratic science pedagogy is to explore ways of…

This paper discusses a recent Australian study of boys' education using case studies to determine successful practices. It focuses on an early childhood site where access to "discourses of power" for students and parents and a valuing of students' "action knowledge" created a particular democratic culture achieving improved…

Research literature on students as researchers demonstrates a spectrum of constructive ways in which students are being actively engaged in school and classroom action inquiries. Any identified tensions lie in the degree to which students themselves are genuinely engaged as action researchers. Increasingly, externally driven agendas for change and…