This paper is a reflective response to Tena Thau's suggestion -- in her 2024 piece 'Moral Philosophy as War Propaganda' -- that philosophy has little to teach about the war in Gaza (and, by extension, similar cases of widespread, horrific human suffering). I first reconstruct one of the arguments that Thau makes in her piece. I then show that her…

On December 3, 2024, the U.S.-Mexico Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute hosted the fourth edition of the Convocation program, coined Convocation 4.0. This event brought together thirteen former American, Canadian, and Mexican ambassadors to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, along with two current ambassadors and various…

Public art is placed in relation to its surroundings, conveying messages that are open to interpretation and thus proposing conversations between art/aesthetics, geography, histories and the subjectivity of the viewer. As such, it can engender possibilities to 'politicize our relations with place'. Embracing the vision of a multidisciplinary…

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unanticipated event that has exposed human fragility in an interconnected and interdependent world. While impacts are of a global magnitude, they have been felt at the most local of levels. Across the world pupils' daily lives and experiences have been directly impacted by government-imposed measures and restrictions…

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, every aspect of daily life is being altered in response to the virus. The pandemic has altered secondary education. Classes online, teachers struggling to learn Zoom and make lessons meaningful and relevant to students. Students struggling to make sense of this moment, struggling with mental health issues due to…

Grade 12 students in my son's psychology class had been asked to share their deepest reactions and thoughts toward the victims of the "Charlie Hebdo" incident in Paris. "Charlie Hebdo" is a satirical magazine that had published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Students felt sympathetic toward the victims and…

This article provides a practical guide for teaching visual analysis to university students. By adapting Serafini's curricular and pedagogical framework for teaching multimodal representations to incorporate self-reflection, I evince how visual analysis can be taught in a writing course and similar introductory courses. Using a photograph that…

Sometimes, things don't go to plan. Current events come into the classroom, especially the history classroom. How should students' responses to current affairs be dealt with there? How should students' desire to voice their opinions be handled if their opinion is unpopular. What if the student is simply wrong? How far can moral relativism be…

Cultivating EFL learners' critical thinking ability is an urgent task for English teachers. To integrate the training of language skills and cultivation of critical thinking ability into one language course, the author designed an activity called simplified Modal United Nations conference, which is based on the revised Bloom's Taxonomy that…

Pervasive gaming is a reality-based gaming genre originating from alternative theatrical forms in which the performance becomes a part of the players' everyday life. In recent years much research has been done on pervasive gaming and its potential applications towards specific domains. Pervasive games have been effective with regards to…

Robert Gardner is a Social Studies teacher at a large urban high school in Edmonton (Canada) with a widely diverse ethnic population. He observes that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 his students became much more engaged in discussion of international issues and more willing to share their personal experiences of life outside of…

Just a few months earlier, the United Nations and the World Bank reported that 1.4 billion people live below the new poverty rate of US $1.25 per day. That news was accompanied by stories of severe famine in Africa, Asia, and even scattered through Europe and the Americas. The author knows that it's sometimes difficult to teach about contemporary…

The recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in Geography revealed that few American students can identify locations of current events, the scale of those events, or why those events are important. Social studies educators have found that by incorporating emerging technologies into their classroom--such as Geographic Information Systems…

This paper is the synthesis of Elizabeth Henke's four years of work from 2009-2013: three years at the high school and one year at the University for Peace. She summarizes, "A Montessori high school education should reveal to the adolescent a pathway to peace that is built on positive human relations and should provide opportunities for…

An analysis of three eulogies (1876-1916) given for Miguel de Cervantes to commemorate the day of his death demonstrates the ways in which the discursive qualities of the eulogy--mourning, celebration, and resurrection--align with regenerative discourses regarding the Nation at particular moments in Spanish history. The eulogized depictions of…