The instructional rationale behind critical pedagogy is to provide students the opportunity to voice their personal stories and opinions, and to reflect and act upon social concerns relevant to their daily lives. Students can then practice being agents of transformation in their own lives, starting in the classroom. This paper is based on the…

Integrating socioscientific issues (SSI) into classrooms to address science-related social matters has gained attention. Educational comics show promise in introducing SSI content; however, previous studies focus on higher education, leaving gaps in elementary school implementation. We interviewed eight practitioners to explore design principles…

Fake news and artificial intelligence are phenomena addressed in academia and research within the fields of communication and audiovisual education. As a medium and language, cinema has mirrored these challenges, exemplified by the short film "Deep Soria." The primary objective proposed in this study is to ascertain whether this short…

Complexities of social problems in our globalised world pose new educational challenges, including how to empower citizens for active engagement with socioscientific issues. This study describes the analysis and discussion of an activist video as the first phase in an activist education programme. Participants were 104 preservice primary teachers…

The PhotoVoice tool invites participants to create photographs that reflect aspects of their surroundings that they find problematic and to elaborate on them in writing. Participants then share their photographs and written accounts with an influential audience with the hope of resolving the highlighted concerns. Aiming to connect the classroom to…

The story of American superheroes cannot be told without the publisher DC and its evolving audience. During the latter 1930s and early 1940s, DC Comics assembled a catalog of superheroes that became the archetype of the genre itself: Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. As DC Comics' audience and market grew throughout the decades, the company's…

Metaxis offers a powerful, yet elusive space for learning. We argue that authentic questions can provoke compelling metaxis moments where students and their teachers straddle two worlds at one time: the fictional and the real. We report findings from two New Zealand research projects in primary schools where we investigated the precursors to…

The concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) grasps attention of the world after the UN decade (2005-2014) of Education for Sustainable Development. People from all over the world realized the need of its integration on all levels of education. This study was also designed to explore the level(extent) of integration of the components…

In Turkey, as in all countries of the world, education is regarded as the sole means of modernization, progress, civilization, productivity, and sustainability of all these things. The aim of the Turkish education system is to raise students with the national, moral and cultural values of the Turkish nation, to educate them as citizens of a social…

In this article, the authors share ideas for harnessing the power of mathematics and children's literature to understand social justice issues with upper primary students, which can be adapted for younger students. The authors focus on the critical issues of food scarcity and waste. Children's literature and current data are purposefully employed…

This study explores the role of specific sustainability education pedagogies in developing preservice teachers' sustainability consciousness (SC). The participants were 77 Greek preservice teachers from a Department of Primary Education, organized into two cohorts (N[subscript 1]=30, N[subscript 2]=47), from two consecutive semesters. Data were…

Background: The development of prosocial competencies in university students can be attained through the implementation of Service-Learning (S-L) methodology by carrying out a community service to groups of foreign unaccompanied minors (FUM). Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) and Sport Science (SS) students involved in an S-L experience…

The image of the "criminal" black male is one that shapes the social experiences of black males in U.S. society. The racialized and gendered representation of black males as criminal, primarily through the depiction of the "thug," functions to justify various forms of social marginalization including disproportionate school…

Socioscientific issues (SSI) such as COVID-19 and climate change often highlight the inequalities that structural racism creates. If we ever wish to equitably solve these issues, we require a population that has the scientific literacy and the sociopolitical consciousness to do so. Yet, the push for culturally relevant education has had little…

As the number of jobs in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) workforce grows exponentially, there has never been a more important time to provide students with real-world learning opportunities that have 21st century implications. Measuring things that matter is a fundamental skill that formulates the backbone of many concepts…