Early in the fall of 2007, one of the author's students asked whether she could pass around a petition during class protesting the "moment of silence." The Illinois legislature had recently passed a law requiring all schools to observe a moment of silence at the start of each school day. A number of students who heard the conversation…

Recent events on Wall Street raise a complicated question: Will the financial crisis help or hurt colleges' sustainability efforts? Both are possible. In this article, the author discusses how the Wall Street meltdown may hurt colleges' green initiatives. However, advocates of sustainability see an opportunity to change the conversation. A…

Effective social work education that promotes social justice requires expanded curricular models and creative pedagogical approaches. This article presents a curricular case study demonstrating the use of current events to enhance both implicit and explicit curricula. How the cultural crisis of Hurricane Katrina was used to engender transformative…

The phrase "teachable moment" has a taken-for-granted connotation of readiness to learn, but has been rarely defined and researched in the literature of higher education. This study described faculty members' experiences of teachable moments in their undergraduate classrooms. This included the conditions in which they emerge, and the…

On June 4, 1989, the Chinese military, under orders from the highest levels of government, violently crushed peaceful civilian demonstrations in Beijing, most symbolically in and around Tiananmen Square. In the end, the Chinese government claimed that the death toll was approximately 200, but the Chinese Red Cross reported 2,000 to 3,000 deaths.…

This study employs the Solomon Four-Group Design to measure student knowledge of the United States government and student knowledge of current events at the beginning of a U.S. government course and at the end. In both areas, knowledge improves significantly. Regarding knowledge of the U.S. government, both males and females improve at similar…

This article reports that charter schools, which the Bush administration has strongly supported, may have effectively helped undermine Catholic schools--the nation's largest provider of faith-based education. Whether the proliferation of charter schools in urban areas is fueling the demise of inner-city Roman Catholic schools is not a new…

In this article, I reflect on the pedagogical decisions I made when I taught a course on gendered literacies during the 2008/2009 presidential campaign. I specifically focus on what I term the "Hillary" phenomenon, the media's often negative and unflattering portrayal of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. I start with a brief…

Drawing on multimodal, post-structural, and critical theory, the author examines a high-school English classroom exchange about editing a student publication. Analysing a young woman's embodied identity performances, the author illustrates how Simone, a tenth-grader, employed, adjusted, and coupled modes of communication like speech, laughter,…

For 53 years, Clifford K. Berryman was a political cartoonist for "The Washington Post" and "The Washington Evening Star". He drew thousands of cartoons commenting on the congressional and presidential candidates, campaigns, issues, and elections of the first half of the twentieth century. Berryman was a Washington institution, and his decades of…

In this article, the author reports his dismay when he learned that his students are ignorant of critical issues outside of the classroom despite the availability of online information. However, he believes that its both unfair and inaccurate to hold those young people accountable for the moral and legal morass they find themselves in as a nation.…

Israeli, Palestinian, and American archaeologists unveiled a draft agreement on archaeological and cultural heritage that they hope to see included in a future Middle East peace agreement. Presenting their proposal to an audience of archaeologists at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, they said it was the first time that Israelis and Palestinians…

This article reports the move from paper-based marking (PBM) to onscreen marking (OSM) in Hong Kong for the subject Liberal Studies--whose objectives involve broadening students' horizons through critical examination of current issues. While currently a small candidature subject of approximately 3300, from 2009, the subject will become compulsory…

Whitefish Bay High School recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, and the author wanted his students to remember this event for many years. As a U.S. history teacher, he also wanted to find a way for them to understand that their high school's history has coincided with national events and trends over the past seven decades. He decided to use a…

Barack Obama's monumental presidential campaign took the nation by storm, a history-making and future-defining feat sure to keep academicians busy for many years to come. How America addresses race as a result of Obama's sweeping victory remains to be seen, but his election came in the same year New York state installed its first Black governor,…