This article connects instrumental, emancipatory, and critical approaches to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with the different cultural responses or grand narratives of the Anthropocene: eco-modernist, eco-catastrophist, and eco-socialist. The tensions between these different approaches are explained by ESD's reliance on the ideals of…

As university-based community engagement programs expand through curricular and cocurricular initiatives, it is important to understand and assess their impact in advancing a key mission of higher education--to nurture and develop engaged citizens with a well-honed sense of civic identity. A literature review revealed a gap in the…

Service learning can prepare undergraduate students with the necessary civic capacities and commitments for today's solutions to wicked social problems. However, most studies on the civic outcomes of service learning, such as civic-mindedness, are student self-reports on surveys given at the end of an academic term. A more nuanced understanding of…

The University of Southern California (USC) Democracy Project responds to the inadequacies of traditional civics education, particularly its failure to engage marginalized students in meaningful democratic participation. Grounded in the theories of John Dewey and Paulo Freire, the project uses an action civics model to connect students with…

Education has long been an area of political debate in the United States, with politicians and policymakers advocating for distinct societal and/or individual purposes of K -12 education. In this article, we examine the public opinion on the purpose of education, and we explore whether this political divide on the purpose of education is also…

Which programmatic principles of community engagement have a higher potential to irritate the beliefs that college students hold regarding their own power, privilege, understanding of social justice? This study takes a qualitative approach to the exploration of three groups of students representing curricular community engagement, co-curricular…

Forest ecosystems play a fundamental role in mitigating global environmental changes. The development of environmentally sound behavior, and inter- and intragenerational equity can help counteract these global changes. One type of formal and non-formal environmental education is forest education, which aims to promote the achievement of…

The Project Citizen Research Program (PCRP) was a three-year research initiative that evaluated the effectiveness of the Center's Project Citizen teacher professional development (PD) program and curriculum intervention for middle and high school students. The program took place over three academic years that were impacted by the COVID-19…

This paper presents reflections on educators' experiences while teaching critical global consciousness and students' conceptualizations of global citizenship and civic mindedness in an undergraduate course. The course applied the principles of critical multicultural education to education in a global context. This analytical autoethnography…

The teaching personal and social responsibility (TPSR) model has been considered a valuable tool for children to reach their full potential in life. However, little research has been conducted with the TPSR model in preschool contexts. The purpose of the present study was to understand the experiences of a program leader while implementing a…

There is debate internationally about the production of curriculum texts and the epistemologies underpinning the knowledge legitimated in national curricula. National History curricula in particular are a source of contention bounded by calls for coherent and unifying national narratives that are inclusive and reflect the complexity of the…

This article examines the way a group of Latina girls responded to instances of sexual harassment in a public high school in Madrid (Spain). I begin with a current event: educational reforms seeking to address the 'problem' of youth democratic disengagement. Drawing on ethnographic and genealogical modes of inquiry, I examine the subjective…

Recent critiques of citizenship education have identified the need for curricula that cover not only civil, political, social and cultural aspects of political belonging and responsibility, but that orient students to the realities of global engagement and responsibility. Rather than focussing on national values, histories and political…

This paper describes a three-year, design-based research project to redesign a year-long, project-based advanced placement environmental science course to better support student engagement and the development of environmental citizen identities. In the initial implementation, students' increased understanding of environmental problems…

Geographical knowledge is powerful if it is critical and empowering. This article develops this argument with reference to the philosophy of knowledge and Laura Wheelahan's advocacy of critical realism as the philosophical strand of her social realist curriculum theory. While the GeoCapabilities Project has drawn on the sociological strand of that…