The ability to engage in informed decision-making about socioscientific issues (SSI) is an important aspect of scientific literacy. Although science knowledge and practice are necessary for developing solutions to SSI, additional skills are also needed to attend to the complex social, political, economic, and ethical concerns of such issues.…

It is no secret that humanities professors find themselves disenchanted by the current state of neoliberal universities; as the story goes, jobs are scarce, enrollment continues to drop, and students seem increasingly disconnected from the value of humanities-based classes. Universities and departments strive for new ways to respond to the current…

Political education is a loaded expression, and even more so when it is suggested that state authorities should be in charge of it. The main claim from the author in this article is that, in contexts of sufficient political pluralism, political education should more firmly be taken in charge by primary and secondary schools. In the first section,…

Dissent is vital to the intellectual life of a classroom, just as it is to the health of a school, a school system, or a democracy, explains high school teacher Mike Miller. Rather than being silenced, healthy dissidence should be taught. Miller draws from his classroom experience to illustrate how educators can cultivate a climate that welcomes…

The voices of students of color often are left out of discussions of urban school reform conversations when they should be central to reform efforts. Jonathan Collins suggests looking at democratic reform as an avenue to bring those voices forward. Participatory budgeting, for example, introduces students to the idea that they could decide how…

The monologues presented in this article represent a particular Bakhtinian analysis of a transcript of a passionate, dramatic, and conflictual General Assembly meeting held in the first democratic school in Norway, the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO), only two months after the school was opened, on November 2nd, 1967. In the meeting, they…

American Indians account for roughly 2% of the United States population. Yet with only four Natives in the House of Representatives and no Native senators, representation in Congress is roughly half of what it would be if it was proportional to the overall Native population (Wang, 2010). Compounding the lack of government representation on a…

Citizenship education played a crucial role in the 19th century transition from royal sovereignty to democracy in the Nordic region, with folk high schools (FHS) playing an important role. While established to empower the people ("folk") for active participation in society, the contemporary folk high schools have reoriented from their…

This article describes public records request assignments in courses in political science and in Asian American Studies. Beyond commonly known activities like voting, volunteering, signing petitions or peacefully protesting, students should gain experience in exercising their rights to an expansive set of government records that fall within the…

The segregation enforced during apartheid has not only ensured widely disparate South African university landscapes, but also framed constructions of activism in historical discourses of racial disenfranchisement and marginalisation. As a result, activism is implicitly and explicitly associated with disadvantaged universities; with black students;…

The initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of course delivery from largely in-person to exclusively remote, thus disrupting the well-established pedagogy of the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP; https://www.thegep.org). However, our web-based research adapted well to the remote learning environment. As usual, students who…

When middle school teachers and leaders commit themselves to being responsive to the personal concerns of adolescents and the social concerns of their community, it results in opportunities to build capacity in students to be agents of change. This article captures the story of one school's process in designing and implementing a yearlong…

Amid a devastating pandemic and increasing polarization, how can US colleges and universities help students bridge divides, make their voices heard, and understand their responsibilities to others in a democratic society? This article is an interview of Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts…

This article describes one secondary social studies teacher's attempts to build a pedagogically democratic classroom. The teacher designs curriculum around large essential questions, connects content to the present lives of students, and creates space for students to make their own decisions and choices. The teacher is convinced that she has…

Jeremy Thomas and Russell McBride are social studies teachers in North Carolina and, until recently, were colleagues at a charter school outside of Raleigh, serving students in grades 6-12. After learning about the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), both teachers implemented it into their classrooms and immediately saw how the blueprint helped deepen…