This qualitative study highlights how children's literature can serve as a springboard for discussing current events while making connections with a similar historical event. Undergraduate students enrolled in children's literature courses read the graphic novel "Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918" and discussed the parallels between the…

The modern college instructor in the United States faces several unique dilemmas due to students' increased access to information via the internet and social media, increased polarization across the nation, and increased unrest resulting in more experiences impacting mental health. As such, modern instructors are faced with the challenge of…

Popular culture exists as an expression of cultural history. It speaks to who we are, what we aspire toward, and where our generation stands in relation to the major issues of the day. This article is a conversation about the myriad perspectives offered in this issue of "New Directions for Student Leadership," exploring the contributions…

Race for the Red Planet was designed by Daphne Fauber to teach engineering design principles through the contextualization of popular culture, science fiction, and the current race for Mars. The goal of the lesson was for students to learn how people may be living on Mars in the future through a variety of interdisciplinary sources and various…

This study was carried out in order to determine what postgraduate science teachers perceive when socio scientific issues are mentioned, how they teach these subjects, what difficulties they encounter during teaching the subjects and what they need during the teaching of socio scientific issues. For this purpose, three groups of interviews were…

The author of this article discusses the extensive use and analysis of real-world situations as the core construct on which to build a course in principles of microeconomics. Building on the literature that focuses on current event readings, the goal here is to train students to be able to "do economics." The author details course…

What should teachers do on the days after major events, tragedies, and traumas, especially when injustice is involved? This beautifully written book features teacher narratives and youth-authored student spotlights that reveal what classrooms do and can look like in the wake of these critical moments. Dunn incisively argues for the importance of…

This paper discusses the use and benefits of the Current Affairs Journals Assignment in the Introduction to International Relations Class. The assignment provides not only the immediate benefits of relating class material to current events but helps to shape students' interests and to build knowledge in a thematic or regional area that can guide…

In this article, the author will start with discussing what the scholarship of teaching and learning in history has to say about the role that epistemological inquiry should play in the history classroom. The author will then describe the history classroom through the lens of students' beliefs about the nature and source of historical knowledge…

There is a demographic and democratic imperative for social studies teachers to broach the issue of contemporary immigration in their classrooms. In this study, preservice social studies teachers (PSTs) viewed three documentary films that presented stories of immigration that run counter to the narrative projected by the Trump administration and…

In recent decades, nationalism has emerged from the distant purview of history to become the primary driver of some of the world's biggest news. Given the prominence of nationalist conflict, students in political science increasingly study the subject with modern references in mind. This article describes the design for a timely undergraduate…

This article addresses the cultural and educational needs of global learners by shedding light on existing literature focused on issues related to globalization and the internationalization of higher education in the United States. International student mobility promotes cultural and economic changes, which are recognized within this article due…

Many elementary and middle school students are confronted by media messages constantly. They receive messages not only from family and friends, but from television and social media outlets. The media messages about current events are often politically biased, polarized in nature, and potentially inaccurate, especially on social media platforms.…

Sixty-eight undergraduate translation students received direct instruction in the features of news headlines and news stories. A week later, they took a test that required them to identify the syntactic and lexical features of a sample of news headlines and news stories, supply deleted word, and substitute punctuation marks, infinitives, and block…

It is important that preservice educators have an awareness of geography, including city, county, state, and the broader globe. Ensuring that preservice educators are aware of new technologies to promote K-12 students' knowledge of geography is important. K-12 students can benefit by gaining 21st-century skills using problem solving, critical…