Although school violence statistics indicate that schools are safe places, anxiety over school shootings continues to influence school safety reform to the extent that security measures in American public schools include the arming of schoolteachers. Furthermore, not only have youths' perceptions of school security been relatively unexplored,…

Agentic orientation, critical thinking (CrT) and taking the fourth-person perspective (4PP) are described as teachable attainments. A Personal Viewpoints (PVs) Biblical Studies curriculum challenged Year 7 students to resolve socially problematic situations through group discussion and perspective-taking. A life-issue scenario was used to pre- and…

A qualitative exploratory study examined African American 7th graders' talk about peer sexual harassment (N = 21). A thematic analysis of single-gender discussion groups demonstrated that while students held misconceptions about sexual harassment, they were fluent in the cultural norms that expect boys to push sexual boundaries and girls to…

Although we live in a global society, educators face many challenges in finding meaningful ways to connect students to people of other cultures. This paper offers a case study of a collaboration between teachers in the US and Turkey, where 7th grade students interacted with each other via online social media as a means to promote cultural…

The purpose of this study was to investigate student perceptions of co-teachers. Students with disabilities are more than twice as likely as their peers without disabilities to leave school early (Kortering & Braziel, 2002; Wilson & Michaels, 2006). Students in two inclusive classrooms in an urban middle school participated in interviews about…

In this exploratory case study, I investigated the ways that youth engaged in negotiating their identity during learning conversations at an informal science education camp. In particular, I was interested in exploring the ways that youth positioned themselves within their learning group and how this influenced their identities as learners of…

Using written language of early adolescents at a California middle school, this study investigated seventh grade students' perspectives on the frequency of hearing and using homophobic name-calling, reasons such language gets used, and reactions to hearing others use it. Students reported widespread use of homophobic name-calling but disagreed…