Democracies expect citizens to engage actively in public life by making decisions about political issues that are frequently ambiguous, with strong moral and emotional implications, and often subject to misinformation and manipulation. Strong critical thinking (CT) appears therefore as a crucial component of a reflective democratic citizenship.…

Colleges and universities play an important role in training a skilled workforce and generating knowledge for society, but we know little about exactly how universities choose the skills and knowledge they provide to students. In my dissertation, I introduce novel data that allow me to document new facts about the supply of courses at a large…

Given the current political climate of division, the study of history is important now more than ever, but the value of the study of history has been marginalized. This study used student focus groups to understand ways in which history could be taught in such a way that its importance is emphasized through relevance and connection to current…

There is a dearth of studies exploring how younger children engage in civic life, what may be expected of them given their age, and what instruments may be used to capture their levels of civic engagement. Addressing these questions, this article presents key findings from a pilot study that aimed to create a validated instrument designed to…

The current study aims to understand the expectations of pre-service preschool teachers regarding what kind of environment we will live in in the future and the reasons behind these expectations in terms of sustainable development (SD). To this end, the current study was conducted based on a phenomenological model with the participation of 77…

Pre-service and beginning in-service science teachers enrolled in a university teacher education program participated in a project to support their teaching through a lens of sustainability. While they demonstrated active and positive engagement, I considered the possibility of any students reacting negatively to the course material and doing so…

In this paper, we synthesize existing literature on Culturally Relevant Science Teaching (CRST), more specifically the third tenet of CRST-developing students' sociopolitical or critical consciousness. While there is research on this third tenet, our review of the literature reveals that this tenet is understudied and underutilized. We offer our…

This article analyzes how guns emerged as both urgent topics of dialogue and common features of everyday life for 228 students and their teachers in six communities across the United States who participated in the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project, a year long social design-based experiment aimed at foregrounding youth voice and fostering…

While voter turnout is often seen as one definitive aspect of civic engagement, this paper argues that there are more nuanced ways to reflect on the impact of service-learning experiences on students' environmental awareness and environmentally responsible behavior changes. Using course evaluation qualitative comments in environmental…

Critical exploration of socio-political issues has been a topic strongly carried out in English classrooms in the last decades. This article is the result of a research study that shows what the use of political cartoons reveals about the promotion of critical reading in an EFL classroom at a private university in Colombia. The study was developed…

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…

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…

Results from IEA's International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 show that a notable number of young students use social media to engage with political and social issues regularly. This brief examines how this type of social media use may translate to students' intended political behavior. We find that social media use for…

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 article explores the educational processes of the high-school youth and higher education youth of parents who were imprisoned following the coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016. Data was collected from parents who are involved in their children's education and who have been subjected to political persecution. The research is focused on…