The rise in the number of young people disengaged from mainstream schooling is reaching critical proportions. This paper explores a child-framed participatory inquiry known as The Walking A/r/tography Project, which sought to challenge, empower and engage youth at risk in one Special Assistance Secondary School in Southeast Queensland through…

Incorporating climate change into education is critical for building a sustainable future and empowering the next generation to take action. This study aims to explore how a project-based club program influences middle school students' action competency in responding to climate change. For this aim, ten students who participated in a project-based…

In this article, the authors focus on a one-week research project examining Frederick Douglass's civic actions to challenge racial discrimination African Americans faced before and after the U.S. Civil War. Our one-week research project was implemented at a free public charter school in amid-sized Southern city. Our project connects to the…

Change comes when individuals transform themselves first and then move outward into the world. The C3 Framework lays out a vision for civic action within Dimension 4 of the Inquiry Arc in a section titled "Taking Informed Action." The Framework emphasizes that "It is important to note that taking informed action … should be grounded…

Citizen science research has been rapidly expanding in the past years and has become a popular approach in youth education. We investigated key drivers of youth participation in a citizen social science school project and the effects of participation on scientific and topic-related (i.e., political) interest and efficacy. Findings suggest that…

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…

Current science education reforms and policy documents highlight the importance of environmental awareness and perceived need for activism. As "environmental problems are socially constructed in terms of their conceptualized effects on individuals, groups, other living things and systems research based on constructivist principles provides…

In this lively and groundbreaking book, arts educator Marit Dewhurst examines why art is an effective way to engage students in thinking about the role they might play in addressing social injustice. Based on interviews and observations of sixteen high schoolers participating in an activist arts class at a New York City museum, Dewhurst identifies…

In this paper, we argue for the importance of creating a context that allows students to explore their sense of "self" and their embodied identities, specifically within a physical education context. We specifically explore how students' mediated and embodied identities are "translated," particularly as they engaged in activist…

This article describes Bill Ferriter's efforts to incorporate cause-driven learning into his 6th-grade grade language arts and social studies classroom starting with Kiva (http://www.kiva.org), a microlending website that pairs interested lenders in the developed world with people in the developing world who are working to improve the quality…