Shared understanding of what words mean is critical for understanding and having meaningful discussion within professional circles and between the profession and the public. For over six decades, the term "reading wars" has been used in scholarship and popular media to describe debates about how to teach reading. In this article, the…

To support preservice teacher education and in-service professional development for rural social studies teachers, I examine the degree to which rural teachers, students, and communities are reflected in social studies education research. I first developed a theoretical framework for analyzing the rural research quality in the articles I found. I…

This study explored incidents in schools involving the controversial campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again (MAGA)." Using a "cartography of controversies" approach, we located news reports to understand how educators, students, and families engaged with MAGA as a cultural symbol. In addition to mapping the location of each…

Both evolution and climate change have broad scientific consensus, and yet they are the most contested scientific concepts in the US K-12 education system. This study aimed to explore trends in proposed US state legislation employed from 2003 to 2023 by anti-evolution and anti-climate change education movements to constrain the teaching of these…

Teachers' decision-making about resource selection is made more complex when resources are appraised for their potential to raise controversial issues or cause offence to others within school communities. Debates around the use of trigger warnings, freedom of speech and the impact of exclusionary practices further complicate these processes. In…

Netflix series "Sex Education" is popular with young people in a way school-based programmes rarely are. Analyzing the first three seasons, this paper explores "what" and "how" educative content is offered and how young people are addressed as sexual subjects. It is argued that "Sex Education" radically…

In this column, I explore the relationships between identity work and the sense of belonging. I argue that the absence of critical conversations such as race may prompt students to fit in but does not warrant a sense of belonging. Using a research study on Asian immigrant students as a reference point, I propose that we consider students'…

It has been well established that controversial issue discussions are an integral component to a high-quality civic education. However, as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, teachers have become more hesitant to engage students in discussions of controversial political issues. Two decades worth of literature on…

Dr. Jessie Wallace Hughan was a trailblazing New York City public school educator and pacifist. Hughan was a socialist, and she was among numerous teachers who faced investigations for anti-patriotic activities at the turn of the 20th-century, when teachers across the country faced intense scrutiny and legal challenges if they were suspected of…

In 2014, a US college created a policy requiring faculty to provide trigger warnings for students. This spurred a heated debate across North America regarding the need for and efficacy of trigger warnings in classes. A content analysis of comment responses (over 1500) to 20 articles on the topic of trigger warnings from two higher education news…

Recent efforts to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in U.S. public schools have been criticized for fundamentally misunderstanding both CRT and K-12 teaching and teacher education. This paper argues that Anti-CRT fear-mongering in the U.S. is a new face on an old practice, the racist use of public education to sustain White supremacy. Using…

Hydraulic fracturing ('fracking'), like other complex social and environmental issues, is a controversy about science which raises educational questions about how best to prepare young people to understand, respond to and, where necessary, act (or not) in response. It raises political questions. We present a state-of-the-art review of research…

This report examines how media covered the critical race theory (CRT) debate in schooling through an analysis of all news articles published between September 2020 and August 2021 by four major newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today) and three major education press outlets (Education Week, the 74, and…

This article sought to give an overview of different interpretations and characterizations of socioscientific issues (SSIs) by identifying single entities that could form components of SSI and give examples of where single entities were combined to involve SSI in enhancing scientific literacy. Through a narrative literature review, the article…

With nationwide concerns about the declines in youth voting turnout across the United States, increased attention has focused on schools to promote "civic education," a broad curricular approach aimed at facilitating students' development of key civic knowledge, skills, and behaviors. However, less is known about how civic education…