Primary Objective: This study examines student reaction to a unit of instruction teaching war through a more critical lens focusing on anti-war movements and how student sense of civic agency was impacted. Research Design: A design study that centered student voice on activism and experiences of a unit of instruction of the USA at war. Design…

Environmental education often advocates for individual pro-environmental behavior--which, while beneficial to a degree, fails to match the large scale of today's capitalism-fueled socio-ecological challenges. Rather, collective action holds promise as a means for the large-scale changes required in the Capitalocene. These actions can take the…

Over 2015-2016, high school students in Brazil occupied hundreds of schools across the country. Students fought to keep public schools open, funded, and functional, against outsourcing and privatisation, and in solidarity with teachers' trade unions and strikes. The 'primavera secundarista' ('student spring') was the most significant school…

School-based supports, such as LGBTQ+ -themed curriculum, invite opportunities for challenging oppression with respect to gender and its intersections with other identities such as sexuality and race. However, more understanding is needed regarding how literacy educators might leverage these opportunities. This article describes how intimacy,…

I draw on Dewey's concept of democratically constituted society to investigate whether Japanese schools are organized in a way that students can experience democratic living, by examining diversity and interaction within schools. I also rely on Reimer's notion of citizenship education to explore whether schools in Japan foster the competencies…

Upward Bound (UB), created in 1965 to provide educational enrichment for low-income youths, had to be racially integrated. In 1966, I was among three White northern teens sent to integrate UB at Xavier University in New Orleans. My family had lived in North Carolina in the early 1960s, participating in civil rights actions, so I had had some…

The present study advances a model of critical civic motivation grounded in expectancy-value theory and highlights diverse manifestations of motivation among marginalized adolescents. The participants were 447 high school youth (85.0% Latinx; 62.9% low-income). Two complementary methodological approaches were employed to examine civic motivation,…

In the midst of political attacks on public schools to prevent discussions on social injustice and Latinx youth culture, there are after-school programs that nurture Latinx youth critical consciousness and social justice activism. This study uses agencies of transformational resistance (ATR) as a framework to explore one after-school program's…

In response to their experiences of heteronormative and cisnormative cultures in school contexts, some young people undertake various forms of action within their schools with the intention of changing practices, school environments, or school policies. This student-led action can be understood as a form of activism but it may also be seen as the…

Young people's ongoing, necessary confrontation with painful and distressing realities exacerbated by ecological precarity in diverse contexts has profound implications for formal education systems. Additionally, educational policy in many contexts has been slow to respond to the urgency of addressing climate change, nor has most policy robustly…

The present study uses a story constellation to explore the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school in an urban city in Central Chile. Because these experiences were motivated by the students' participation in the student movement outside of their high school, they were not considered in any school or policy…

This study explores the ways that youth make sense of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and how context informs the scope and nature of youth-led local civic action. Using an embedded case study approach, this study focuses on the Cultivating Pathways to Sustainability project, which engages scores of young people in the state of…

In this ethnographic study, Alexandra Freidus investigates the dilemmas of whiteness that challenge a youth-led campaign for school integration in New York City. Analyzing field observations, interviews, and internal documents, she illustrates the ways whiteness shaped young people's identities as allies and activists, contributed to an…

Context: School-based student protests have received little scholarly attention, yet they have the potential to impact the school community, students' civic development, and larger social movements. Principals are key actors in responding to school-based student protests. As school leaders, principals' actions affect the outcome of student…

The necessity of providing specific forms of support to youth activists engaged in the pursuit of racial and intersectional justice is evident, especially given current unsupportive political contexts of anti-protest and anti-Critical Race Theory legislation. Hence, this qualitative research study assigns importance to the firsthand experiences of…