The authors have a lot in common. They are white, cis women, former K-12 art teachers, and recent doctoral graduates. They both entered their first classrooms with good intentions to create lessons reflecting diverse students. Yet, after a few years of teaching, they developed a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They developed a…

Contemplative practices are becoming more common in educational environments for attending to whole-student learning, fostering empathy, and promoting social justice and socially just pedagogues. This conversation explores how holistic approaches facilitate and expand the parameters of sociological pedagogy to integrate humanist pedagogies and…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual observations were utilised in teacher education programmes internationally (Murtagh, 2022; Mynott et al., 2022; Ó Grádaigh et al., 2021). In Scotland, virtual observations have been continued as part of teacher education programmes and this article explores student perspectives on their continued use. A…

This study explores the use of virtual worlds, specifically Minecraft, on sustainability education and cognitive skills. Using the Teaching to Inspire model as a lens, we examine how students design sustainable virtual buildings and cityscapes aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the social-ecological systems (SES) framework. Our…

The Happiness Curriculum is made up of compulsory 45-minute daily lessons with the aim of developing mindfulness, critical thinking, reflection, and social-emotional skills among students in more than 1,000 government-run schools in Delhi, India. Three units--Exploring Happiness through Learning and Awareness; Experiencing Happiness in…

This article reports students' responses to a critical information literacy course. The course has two unique elements which differentiate it from other information and media literacy courses: an assignment about confirmation bias and a facilitating, rather than an "expert" role for faculty to play in the course. After a review of key…

The purpose of this teacher action research project is to examine the perspectives of high school youth as they experience an intensive, 45-hours summer course geared toward developing and strengthening students critical consciousness as future teachers. This research study centers on a teacher pipeline program called the Future Educators Program…

This qualitative case study responds to calls for research on the ways critical reflection develops in preservice and novice teachers. While evaluating capacity to reflect is a dominant practice in teacher education, few studies explore empirically how different factors impact teachers' reflection. Building from earlier research that…

Deborah Britzman, over 15 years ago in her insightful essay "Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or Stop Thinking Straight", posed questions that continue to resonate (Britzman, Deborah P. 1998. "Curriculum: Toward New Identities", edited by William Pinar, 211. New York: Routledge). What if lesbian and gay theories were understood as…

The purpose of this small-group case study was to determine to what extent an asset-based social justice curriculum could cultivate critical consciousness as evidenced by teachers' written discourse about students of color and students living in poverty. Participants were selected based on enrollment in an online graduate course in diversity in…

In this article, I interrogate the changing forms that may be fundamental to transformative learning and how these are best chronicled and understood. Drawing on auto/biographical narrative research, I challenge the continuing primacy of a kind of overly disembodied, decontextualized cognition as the basis of transformation. Notions of epistemic…

The objective of this research is twofold: first intending to assess the level at which students prioritize happiness; and second discerning how the experience of happiness affects the formation of their identity and their relationship with their environment, taking into account the values deduced from their perceptions, and understanding from…

This paper discusses the role of emotions in mobilizing implicit activisms--that is, small-scale, personal, and modest activisms--in schools. For this purpose, the discussion evokes the notion of critical emotional reflexivity to illuminate how creating spaces for critical reflection on emotions may contribute to making implicit activisms more…

Simultaneous calls have been issued for reflective thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration in the teaching and the practice of rehabilitation counseling. This article introduces a learning tool, Fanciful Reflections, which can serve as a stimulus in such endeavors. Classroom and in-the-field applications of "fanciful reflecting" are provided…

There is a growing interest in the concept of critical reflection in the adult learning and management literature. In this article, the author examines four different intellectual traditions that inform the use of the term "critical reflection" on the different ideals they express and the different definitions of critical reflection they use. On…