What tactics are high school educators using to teach about socio-political changes in the past and present? Five educators in the province of Alberta (two women, three men; four urban, one rural; four White, one Arab; four without visible religious garb, one Muslim in hijab) explored content they considered to be "radical" and how they…

We advocate for the reading of young adult literature (YAL) as a means for justice-oriented education, and we also recognize how the recent surge in challenges to youth-centered texts in the U.S. attempts to limit such work in classrooms. In response, we wondered about the ways in which YAL offers pathways for critically framing and situating…

This article presents a teaching case study of a semester-long progression of engaged learning activities in an introductory American politics course. The method enhances a traditional democratic participation assignment with authentic social network engagement. Students in the course selected democratic actions from a menu. Actions involved…

This article explores how a public written response to anti-LGBT+ legislation in Ghana also functioned as a religious educational intervention to shape future visions of tolerant pluralism in Ghanaian society. Navigating the intersection of politics and religion, the Interfaith Diversity Network of West Africa (IDNOWA) lodged a religious objection…

This paper critically evaluates societal reactions to integrating LGBTQ+ content into the Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) curriculum in England and Wales. Utilising Stanley Cohen's theory of moral panics, it examines the roles of media, moral entrepreneurs, authorities, and the public in shaping debates around educational reforms. The paper…

In many contemporary democracies, political conflict and polarisation have become defining features of the political culture. Similarly, drawing especially from Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism and her more recent left populism, many philosophers of education have argued that political conflict and the attendant political emotions should be…

Considering globalization as part of a post-colonial conjuncture, the examination of the politics of decolonization is essential to understand key conflicts in global civil society. Recently, a global movement for the decolonization of higher education has played a key role in this context, with the #RhodesMustFall movement being particularly…

In this article, I explore the deep roots and long history of the attacks on Critical Race Theory in education, while at the same time savoring the equally long and eminently venerable and presently visible traditions forged by "the insights of generations of anonymous 'race men' [and 'race women] who, under the most difficult…

The United States retains many aspects of a healthy open society, but there are indicators of trouble and deep divisions around the meaning and importance of democratic values. This debate has significant repercussions for universities and their academic communities. In the most-simple terms, there is a red and blue state divide over the role and…

Education has recently gained new attention as a key strategy for addressing climate change. Much of these efforts are aimed at young people via formalized climate change education. At the same time, young people are increasingly engaging with climate change via activism and social movement participation. But to what extent does existent climate…

This paper seeks to address the wider questions of populism and its seeming contemporary rise within the specific context of the Philippines, regarding education. Starting from the assumption that neither politics nor education sits above cultures or spaces autonomously acting upon them but instead emerges with/because/against particularities;…

Although teachers make frequent decisions about whether and how to address difficult topics, they typically do so with minimal support. This article reports a case study of an inquiry community of 20 educators who engaged in practitioner inquiry as professional learning for addressing the difficult topics that they teach within their curricula or…

News coverage of the Thunberg-inspired student climate strikes in Australia in 2019 and 2020 framed school leaders 'in conversation' with politicians, education system spokespeople, political pundits, the public and student activists. While previous scholarly interest has mainly focused on the student protestors, we examine the intertextual…

The United States (U.S.) is in the midst of a paradigm shift in who creates news. It is widely known that the internet has in the past few decades displaced television and print newspapers as the primary medium where news is consumed. However, the past two decades have also seen a shift in "who" is communicating the news. People…

Recent global reckonings with structural racism and histories of colonialism, slavery, and genocide continue to raise questions about how educators should engage students in questions of historical responsibility for difficult pasts. Recent educational scholarship has explored this issue largely through the lens of concepts such as collective…