Before Heritage Middle School began working with the Participate Learning team to connect lessons to real-world issues, the teachers and leadership had established a goal to encourage students to become more empathic about issues in their community. Although a handful of students and teachers who participated in the school's gardening club were…

Open Educational Resources (OER) and renewable assignments that create OER are closely related and promote access to knowledge, collaboration, and community engagement. Through both, PhD students can contribute to the advancement of open education while enhancing their own learning and professional development. Despite many advantages, OER and…

In the early 1980s, it was not sub-prime mortgages and toxic assets, bank failures and factory closures that crowded the pages of the business section of the daily newspapers. It was something called "stagflation," a noxious combination of inflationary pressures on currency and stagnating levels of production. Still, the effects were…

The Problem Panel Project is an instructor-developed, one-semester course in contemporary problems. Based on the inquiry approach, the course is structured for independent research and group work and requires no traditionally-structured daily lesson plans. The course is divided into six procedural points. First, students decide which contemporary…

Efforts to contain the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) have been slowed by numerous arguing factions, political, religious, and medical, all of which perceive the AIDS epidemic through a different set of symbols. The images can be more easily understood using Kenneth Boulding's Threat, Integry, and Exchange (or TIE) model. The…

Designed to aid middle school-aged students to understand better the problems illegal drugs pose for schools, and to provide students with an opportunity to come up with solutions, this illustrated curriculum guide helps students examine the problem of drugs in an imaginary school called Jackson Middle School. Students are asked to work with other…

This is one unit of the series described in SO 000 378. The essential ingredients are not the problems of American society themselves but the ability to recognize them, to view these problems in historical perspective, to mitigate or bring out effective change, to assign priorities, to investigate satisfactory problem-solving methods, and above…

Discusses four major approaches to teaching about controversial issues frequently cited in educational literature: problem solving, public issues, decision making, and moral reasoning. Provides guidelines for structuring large-group discussions, small-group discussions, and debates within these approaches. Includes a list of instructional…