This article examines the significance of the concept of participation for teacher meaning-making processes in education for sustainable development and health education. In Scandinavian public schools, education for sustainable development and health education focus on a wide palette of societal problems rather than on narrow curricula. Drawing…

This article discusses the use of problem-based learning (PBL) in the undergraduate sociology classroom. PBL shifts students from the role of passive listeners and learners to active knowledge builders and communicators through the use of concise and engaging social problem cases. PBL creates opportunities for building substantive area knowledge,…

As journalism schools continue to respond to industry disruption, some are adding curricula about practices that reframe traditional journalism. In this article, I examined experiences of some of the first university instructors of solutions journalism--critical reporting on responses to social problems--to explore the opportunities and challenges…

The Common Core State Standards advocate more writing than previous standards; however, in taking a college and career readiness perspective, the Standards neglect to emphasize the role of context and culture in learning to write. We argue that sociocultural perspectives that pay attention to these factors offer insights into how to interpret and…

Transformative, anti-oppressive curricula, as theorized by Banks (1989, 2014) and Kumashiro (2001, 2009), directly address present-day realities of racism, discrimination, and oppression. According to Banks (1989), a transformative curriculum includes "the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference, and content from various groups,…

This research paper explores teachers' contribution to quality education in the midst of political, economic and social struggles in post-conflict Liberia. The paper adopts the qualitative research method and interviews were conducted with teachers and educational stakeholders to examine the needed contributions of teachers to quality education in…

Background/Context: Within the United States, wealth disparities are growing and upward social mobility is becoming increasingly difficult to attain. These trends call into question the American Dream ideology that anyone can succeed through hard work. This meritocratic ideal has traditionally been one of the unifying ideologies promoted through…

This Open Access book presents an international group of scholars seeking to understand how youth from different cultures relate to modern multidimensional concepts of citizenship, and the roles that education and society have in shaping the views of the world's future citizens. The book also explores how different aspects of citizenship, such as…

Much of the conversation about inequality in education and society problematizes poor and minority populations, rather than tackling systemic issues. It helps to address these issues through using a lens that exposes dominant ideology. This article examines the exclusion of scholars outside of the ideological center. It also suggests that…

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Environmental Literacy Program (ELP) Community Resilience Education Theory of Change communicates the overarching philosophy guiding its grants program. It can also be used to inform project-level logic models, ensuring that a project's activities, outcomes, and goals are aligned with the…

Social studies professionals advocate linking discipline-based content to citizenship learning goals. However, research suggests that students rarely encounter inquiry-based instruction in their geography coursework and have few opportunities to explore how geography impacts civic decision making. In this article, we present a problem-based…

The pace of societal change and the development of societal challenges have speeded up considerably during the last couple of decades, with substantial impact on different levels, i.e. ranging from global to local, or from business to government. When focusing on the public domain, these changes and challenges have had a major impact on public…

This article reports on a qualitative research study on the feasibility of teachers using newspaper articles in advancing a humanistic perspective of science in teaching Grade 9 natural sciences to South African learners. Two key design principles were distilled in this design-based research: Newspaper articles can serve as a viable resource for…

This study investigated the ways novice social studies teachers navigated classroom exchanges connected to broader societal and political discourses that are potentially controversial. The difficulty of such conversations often leads teachers to avoid discussions vital to the fabric of democratic life. In this paper, we explore the teaching…

At stake in contemporary US racial tensions is a struggle over the meaning of being "human." By drawing on black feminist theories of being human as verb, and minority discourse critiques of humanism, the paper links "racialization" to apparatuses of humanization that emerge in early modernity including slavery, colonization,…