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…

Use this youth-friendly guide to build more just and liberatory school communities. Much change is needed to make school communities more affirming and inclusive of gender and sexual diversity. This timely book is written for secondary students and their adult allies who are working to make schools more supportive of lesbian, gay, bisexual,…

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…

Exploring the interplay between teacher solidarity and fragmentation in Arizona, this paper uses a critical bifocality lens to examine the experiences of six teacher organisers during the pandemic. This qualitative research centres teacher organisers' experience in an iterative analysis of policy and pandemic context, labour action, and teachers'…

Using post-structural theories, this paper explores the public discourses of several Canadian teacher unions and grassroots teacher activist groups around the issue of school reopening plans in Canada amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper aims to highlight the ways in which these two forces of teacher activism can influence and impress upon each…

This interpretive case study used Black Critical Patriotism (Busey & Walker, 2017) as a theoretical framework to make meaning of two Black men secondary social studies teachers' thoughts on American citizenship, the purposes of social studies education, and the extent to which they taught for social justice amid anti-CRT legislation and…

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…

Based on evidence from a 2019 survey of a sample of Chilean secondary education teachers responsible for citizenship education, this article examines their beliefs regarding citizenship and how these beliefs relate to their justifications of both legal and illegal protest actions in a societal context of wide socio-political crisis and…

This interview-based study examines how justice-oriented K-12 administrators and teachers in Iowa make sense of the recent state-level education policy, H.F. 802. Synthesizing literature on Critical Policy Analysis and epistemic justice, we introduce Critical Epistemic Policy Analysis to understand the micro-level impact of divisive education…

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…

This study explores the conditions that provide new opportunities for youth of color to develop civic agency, paving the way to enact change in their schools and communities. This article shares findings from a qualitative study of an after-school program designed and implemented by the authors, in which 15 middle school-aged youth--including a…

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…