The negative emotional affects of standardized teaching and learning abound in public schools and work to create a melancholic, shared reality for teachers and students. The authors argue that teachers and students must acknowledge this melancholy and pursue shared inquiry around those emotions in order to help bring about understanding and the…

The information giants, Google being the largest, trade every day and build high-valuation mega-opolies on the back of very personal information without including their sources of value with any tangible return for their investment of exclusive data. The time has come to ask the question whether the grand bargain of "cool tools" in…

Since 2005, New Orleans has proved fertile ground for the most extensive education reform movement in the United States. As such, the educational landscape in New Orleans is a highly contested space. Yet stakeholders across the pro/anti-charter divide lack a fully developed language that accommodates the multi-vocality of participants contributing…

In this qualitative study, the authors addresses the complexities of the Nigerian Social Studies teaching context taking into cognizance the pervasive and lecture-based pedagogical process centered on rote learning and memorization. Democracy being a globally enthroned system of government can only endure when the citizens are actively involved by…

Swedish educational policy mandates have given schools a double mission: the development of content-based knowledge as well as the promotion of democratic values and competencies. While detailed learning outcomes are specified for content domains, the democratic mission is imprecisely described and unsupported by practical measures. This leaves…

The Developmental Democratic Planning (DDP) model frames educational planning as a process that extends beyond the immediate focus of a particular planning effort to acknowledge and cultivate the potential of all members of the organization to fulfill their roles as active participants in the democratic life of the organization. The DDP model…

I propose an approach to service-learning that encourages and enables students to engage with human rights and social justice in ways that are democratic and effective. I describe a teaching process in which civic action can be critically reflected on not just to promote engagement and build knowledge but ultimately to encourage and equip students…

I point out that supervising students sceptically might engender moments of acknowledging humanity within the Other (autonomous action or ijtihad), experiencing attachment to the Other's points of view with a readiness for departure (deliberative engagement or shura) and showing responsibility to the Other (recognitp[ion of the other or ta`aruf).…

Purpose: The main task of every school is to contribute to student learning and achievement. In the twenty-first century, national and international evaluations and comparisons have focussed on measurable student and school results. Not only teachers but also principals are held accountable for school results, which increase expectations of…

According to John Banas and colleagues, the research on laughter in the classroom indicates that a classroom full of laughter increases learning. In contrast, Plato argued that laughter is a vice and chastised those who would give in to it. Nonetheless, between the ancient concept of laughter as vice and the modern concept of laughter as learning…

In "Reconstruction in Philosophy," John Dewey issued an eloquent call for contemporary philosophy to become more relevant to the pressing problems facing society. Historically, the philosophy of a period had been appropriate to social conditions (indeed, this is why it had developed as a discipline), but despite the vast changes in the…

Education for sustainable development plays an increasing role in environmental education policy and practice. In this article, we show how sustainable development is mainly seen as a goal that can be achieved by applying the proper processes of learning and how this learning perspective translates sustainability issues into learning problems of…

Considering the attention that global citizenship education has recently received, it is not much of a surprise that teacher education programs and courses around the world are including stated goals related to the preparation of teachers to educate their students for global and participatory citizenship. This is also the case of the Faculty of…

This paper reports data from a study investigating distributed leadership (DL) and its relationship to social justice and democratic values. The research comprised a case study of a UK secondary school, which describes itself as having a finely distributed leadership culture, and involved teaching staff, non-teaching staff, senior leaders and…

The First Amendment Schools project holds rich lessons in how to change school cultures into "laboratories of democracy"--as well as in how to increase the odds of success for any school reform effort. School reform programs of any sort need to make sure to build in sustainability, to provide ways to spread their lessons beyond the…