Literary scholar Clare Bradford gives voice to a pervasive anxiety that arises when a child audience meets unsettling ecological narratives. She remarks: "to explain to young children that pygmy hippos are under serious threat or that elephants are still being killed for their tusks or that wilderness areas are disappearing is to construct a…

Giving students opportunities to work collaboratively with complex online information is important for the development of democratic citizenship, but providing and structuring these opportunities poses pedagogical challenges. In this study, we investigate how digital mapping tools developed within Science and Technology Studies (STS) are used by…

The sixties and seventies were a time of great cultural, social, and political change in the United States. Events including civil rights demonstrations, anti-war protests, environmental movements, and gender rights sparked activism among students and young people across the country. In order for American youth to mobilize, they turned to…

This work explores the potential of using a critical service-learning project with middle grades English language arts students to facilitate development of a social justice mindset. Through The Responsible Change Project, a curriculum designed by classroom teachers, students identified social justice issues of concern within their communities,…

While antiracist, problem-posing, and culturally relevant curriculum are effective in teaching students how to deconstruct the world, in practice, social justice education often falls short of helping students reconstruct those instances. In response, researchers in this study implemented a social justice action project for high school students…

In this article, the author describes a collaborative problem-based inquiry project with eighty-three secondary students. The students attended a large high school situated in a medium size town, surrounded by farmland and smaller rural towns. Demographically, nearly half of the students identified as Latina/o, while the slight majority of the…

The chances of lightning striking twice are infinitesimal, at best. What are the odds, in middle age, of being struck with a jarring bolt of figurative lightning, then a few months later being an eyewitness as the same sizzle in the sky jolts a group of students--those decision-makers of tomorrow? The author describes two experiences that proved…

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…

The WaterCircle (WC) project was implemented in a school, with young adolescents, to address environmental problems. Framed in a participatory research (PR) approach, this school-and-community based intervention includes the use of online tools through which environmental problems in the community are discussed within and by a group of students.…

In this essay, Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia explore how young people from six demographically distinct communities across the United States understand the social and political issues affecting their lives, engage in storytelling and dialogue across differences, and collaboratively imagine humanizing and hopeful civic futures. Drawing from…

Local community organizations with data and statistical needs provide beneficial authenticity and context in the classroom. Students can provide creative, broad perspectives to problems and issues relevant to those organizations. This paper describes characteristics of mutually beneficial relationships between classes and community partners.…

In response to a need to equip youth to become successful contributors to our growing digital economy, educators and researchers are exploring ways to incorporate computational thinking (CT) for all across curricular domains. In this paper, we take a place-based approach to examine how and what CT practices youth learn through designing mobile…

An underlying belief on the positive relationship between educating the young, on the one hand, and the economic, political, and cultural survival of a nation-state, on the other, seems present in virtually all modern and modernizing societies in the world (Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000). In the United States, this belief takes on many forms, but…

In 2010, as part of the National Youth Theatre's social inclusion educational outreach programme "Playing Up 2," young people identified as "NEETS" (Not in Education, Employment or Training) performed a new-writing play called "The Block," by first time playwright Tarkan Cetinkaya. This play is set on an unnamed…

Teaching the connections between environmentally-harmful acts and social conflict is essential but is often ignored in education. This article presents two ways in which these are not taught because of the policies of those who benefit from the ignorance of these connections: first, the avoidance of teaching global-local connectivity and second,…