In his article "Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord", David Long (2010) rightly challenges our presumptions of what science is and brings forth some of the disjunctures between science and deeply held American religious beliefs. Reading his narrative of the conflicts that he experienced on the opening day of the Creation Museum, I cannot…

Relations between Islam and the West have seldom been easy. Enmities and resentments date back centuries. So do cultural contacts, economic ties and periods of relative cooperation. Today, however, nothing symbolizes that unsteady and often tense relationship more than the events of 11 September, 2001 and the bloodshed that has followed in…

Can we avoid inheriting serious issues from research related to environmental education when the researcher community is addressing education for sustainable development? This paper identifies and discusses three main issues: if an explicit and coherent concept of environmental education or education for sustainable development is missing; if the…

Use of media in today's classrooms, from feature and documentary film to news clips streamed via the Web, has grown exponentially. Film can be a powerful medium for teaching and learning, but is often viewed as a neutral source of information. This collective case study focuses on two teachers who use documentary film to teach about controversial…

The idea for a professional development book group emerged from the authors ongoing conversations with colleagues about how teachers can gain the understanding necessary not only to foster and support gender variant and transgender students, but also incorporate these experiences into their curriculum in a meaningful way. In this article, the…

The intersection of science and our society has led to legal and ethical issues in which we all play a part. To support development of scientific literacy, college science courses need to engage students in difficult dialogues around ethical issues. We describe a new course, Stem Cells and Society, in which students explore the basic biology of…

Discusses a journalism course that analyzes relationships between mass communication and conflict issues with respect to recurring themes or problems in communicating the issues, the time in which the communication occurred, and the medium of communication. (RL)

The sixth in a series of theory-based essays, this article presents accounting for investments in debt and equity securities along with some related conceptual and measurement issues. Additional coverage is devoted to potential ethical dilemmas and both theoretical and empirical literature related to this asset. (Contains 1 footnote.)

The recent visibility of transgender lives demonstrates the dawning of a new period in the potential to include transgender topics in sociology courses. The focus on transgender individuals, communities, and inclusive initiatives are gaining momentum on many public and private college and university campuses, awakening old and new curiosities,…

Discussing themes from my paper "Scientists at play in a field of the Lord," three forum participants identify and discuss continuing social and epistemological issues which continue to challenge effective evolution education. I extend these themes and further amplify the vexing nature of an effective dialectic regarding evolution, especially for…

The polarized political mood engendered by the most sharply partisan Presidential election campaigns in recent memory has had an especially deleterious effect on the image of public education. This increased scrutiny has largely fallen on the shoulders of rank and file teachers who now face the most precarious moment in terms of job security since…

There is scant research literature on the interconnection between spirituality and anti-oppressive pedagogy in the higher-education classroom. In this paper, based on a broader qualitative study that examined spiritually-minded activist scholars in the Canadian university context, I focus on how four such scholars integrate spirituality into their…

History is an often unsettling and sometimes uncomfortable subject. It is controversial and often very sensitive. There is some consensus about its importance in the school curriculum but much less agreement about what it is for (Slater 1995: xi).

This article describes how the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues is reviving debate competitions among high school students in city schools. Starting in Atlanta in 1985 and boosted by seed money from the billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute, urban educators and their supporters in 2002 formed the National Association for…

Science education controversies typically prove more intractable than those in scientific research because they involve a wider range of considerations (e.g., epistemic, social, ethical, political, and religious). How can educators acknowledge central issues in a controversy (such as evolution)? How can such problems be addressed in a way that is…