Young people around the world show considerable engagement with climate change. How can education draw on this engagement in order to benefit students and society? In this article, we discuss how inquiry-based dialogues can support students' development in their societal engagement. We argue that such dialogues should include real-world problems…

Sociology curricula often house a variety of "hot button" or contentious topics (e.g., race relations, crime and deviance, personal freedoms/choice, gender). While departments may be giving more attention to ensuring that these topics are included in their curriculum, here I argue that we also need to engage students in reflection about…

The state of democracy facing expanding political division and pervasive racial and social inequalities. Discussing and deliberating controversial social and political issues functions help foster students' civic contribution. I conducted a qualitative case study and recruited 14 participants, with whom I conducted interviews, self-reflection,…

The aim of this dissertation was to develop and validate a novel Epistemic Competence Beliefs Measure (ECBM) in order to explore students' ability to evaluate the characteristics of scenarios about complex and controversial social issues. Epistemic competence was hypothesized to be critical in performing multiple source use (MSU) tasks and in the…

Friction in the classroom may create useful tension for teachers when they attempt to discuss sensitive topics as part of democratic learning. Due to the openness and indeterminacy of these topics, students can experience what it is like to be (political) subjects in a diverse society and become aware of other people's subjectness in a charged…

This study investigated three teachers and their students at International School in Guatemala as they engaged with social issues through and with art. Student and teacher experiences were examined using critical theory, concerned with ideological conflicts that shape the curriculum and how knowledge is legitimated within schools and communities…

This paper presents findings from a study of high school students (N = 165) engaged in discussions of controversial political issues within Close Up Washington's civic education program. We report findings from pre- and post surveys to investigate how the group's views about the issues were affected by the discussion strategy they experienced. We…

This paper attends to the emotional and affective relations that manifest through political discussions in secondary classrooms. In particular, the focus is on the dynamics of classrooms during discussions of political issues. Specific attention is given to interpretations of movements and manifestations of emotions as well as the ways that…

Over the last year and a half, a number of scholars, pundits, and journalists have criticized college campuses for coddling students by constructing environments that protect them from offensive opinions and evidence that disconfirms their prior attitudes. In this article, I suggest two pedagogical techniques that can help students encounter and…

The teaching of socioscientific issues (SSI) holds promise for advancing functional scientific literacy, promoting critical thinking, and providing an interesting context for learning required science content, but few teachers actually employ this teaching method in K-12 classrooms. One common reason cited by teachers is their concern about the…

This paper explores barriers to realising the social purposes of higher education within a context of dominant hierarchical socio-cultural norms. Those norms are examined to reveal how they hinder students and teachers from engaging with critical thought and social justice issues in Malaysian higher education. The impact of these norms is examined…

In light of societal pluralism, diverse visions exist for social justice. In this sense, uncertainty is a marker of social justice education and research. This article shares insights into how we came to ask a question about teaching for social justice through cross-cultural collaborative self-study. Eight New Zealand pre-service teachers…

Our research shows that social science university trained Ghanaian student/teachers do have the knowledge, confidence, and willingness to address HIV/AIDS issues in their teaching, yet they do not. The reason, we argue, is that teachers have little incentive to address contentious issues in the classroom. Questionnaires were administered to 382…

In this article, we study third-year university students' reasoning about three controversial socio-scientific issues from the viewpoint of education for sustainable development: local issues (the reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees in France, wolves in the Mercantour) and a global one (global warming). We used the theoretical frameworks of…

This article discusses the results of a mainly qualitative study into possible impacts of recent controversial socio-scientific issues on a group of Portuguese secondary school students regarding their conceptions about scientists. The 86 participants: (1) answered a questionnaire with open-ended questions; and (2) wrote a science fiction story…