Background/Context: Many studies have systematized the wide range of youth civic engagement mechanisms identified to date; however, how young people deal with a complex flux of sociocultural and personal variables which condition their scope of engagement has received less attention. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article…

Background/Context: Jean Anyon's work provides a powerful intervention in the study of education with her attention to political economy and the social contexts of education. Mainstream neoliberal charter reform arguments often counter Anyon's work by suggesting a "no excuse" ideology, which often ignores structural realities facing…

Background/Context: A growing interest in how principals address issues of social justice in schools has emerged with an emphasis on critically interrogating school practices, policies, curriculum, and instructional approaches. Yet, many injustices, which prompt calls for social justice, are created outside of the school by larger socioeconomic…

Background/Context: Social scientists, policymakers, and commentators have long assumed that Western democracies enjoy relative stability because of deep commitments to a culture of democratic governance. But those commitments are quickly fading in almost every developed and developing democracy around the globe. In the same period in which…

Background or Context: This research is situated against the backdrop of viral racial violence, global uprisings for racial justice, a polarizing presidential election, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, widespread economic precarity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside such urgent reminders of the need for liberatory education, the daily…

Background: New York City is one of the most segregated school districts in the country, but between 2012 and 2021, school integration moved from a marginal to a central education policy. Existing narratives have emphasized the efforts of parents and school and political leaders, with less attention given to the significance of citywide coalitions…

Background/Context: This article explores how the classic U.S. educator effort to stay politically "nonpartisan" when teaching became particularly complicated in an era of spiking K-12 harassment, when government officials openly targeted and denigrated populations on the basis of race, national origin, gender, sexuality, and religion.…

Background/Context: Critical consciousness (CC) is an awareness and reflection of inequities, political efficacy, and agency in response to injustice. Similarly, sociopolitical development (SPD) is the process of developing a critical understanding, skill set, and emotional depth to enact individual agency against oppressive forces. Of the latter,…

Background/Context: Within the United States, wealth disparities are growing and upward social mobility is becoming increasingly difficult to attain. These trends call into question the American Dream ideology that anyone can succeed through hard work. This meritocratic ideal has traditionally been one of the unifying ideologies promoted through…

Background/Context: Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are paying increasing attention to the educational opportunities afforded by the maker movement--a growing public interested in do-it-yourself designing, remixing, and tinkering using physical and digital tools. While education research on "making" has often focused on…

Context: University-based teacher education programs are increasingly committed to teaching about race and racism, but programs continue to face challenges in preparing justice-oriented educators. Critical scholarship on teaching about race and racism has identified some core concepts that teachers should learn, including an understanding of…

Background/Context: In "Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2009)," the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence citizens' decisions about candidates and issues that will appear on election ballots. More important, however, for democratic educators, the ruling…

Background/Context: Drawing from critical theory and new literacies studies, the article examines the design and production of museum literacies--broadly conceived to comprise reading spaces and objects, including language texts--and how these practices can be read in terms of political, social, historical, and economic relations. Because museums…

Background/Context: There historically exists significant epistemological and political tension within the field of curriculum studies. Further, although there is some application of standpoint theory in educational research generally, and little used within curriculum studies specifically, much of it is undertheorized at best and, in many cases,…

Background/Context: Research indicates that across democratic societies, teachers face numerous intellectual and emotional challenges when handling controversial topics in the classroom. Less attention, however, has been paid to how teachers' willingness to teach controversial topics intersects with political and other societal factors in…