This study investigates the effectiveness of two pedagogical strategies--deliberation and debate--in fostering productive political discussions among high school students, with a focus on overcoming affective polarization. Paying attention to students' comfort, engagement, and willingness to participate, this study employs a mixed-method approach…

Whether a response to lackluster academic gains in our nation's schools or longstanding beliefs about the wider purposes of schooling, social and emotional learning (SEL) has gained a massive following in education circles. Further, the mental health challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have strengthened the demand that schools do more to…

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a term used to describe policies and programs that promote the representation and participation of different groups of individuals, including people of different ages, races and ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, genders, religions, cultures, and sexual orientations. Diversity, as it relates to a…

In communities historically shaped by processes of "de jure" and "de facto" segregation; police repression; and lack of access to equitable housing, jobs, and labor-rights, young people find very little of this content reflected in their school-based learning. These societal "civics lessons" indicate the need to move…

Over the past decade, the author and their colleagues have been carrying out research to try to better understand the factors that shape students' engagement with science, as well as their science and career aspirations. The ASPIRES/ASPIRES 2 studies have tracked a cohort of students in England from the age of 10 to 18, combining large-scale…

Faculty at Bethany College, Kansas found that when engaging with controversial topics like social justice, students needed lower-stakes spaces to think--and history and writing, together, provided these needed spaces. When taught in combination, these two subject areas prompted engagement and self-reflection, and the interdisciplinary synergy…

One important area of development for educators at all levels is teaching students from diverse backgrounds, which includes attention to the important role of social class. In this reflective essay, two teacher educators and four students (two graduate, two undergraduate) examine the aspects of a course on social class and schooling that they…

This article explores the ways in which high school teachers understand their students in relation to their own racialized social class backgrounds. It problematizes ethnic outsider inabilities to engage teaching philosophies and practices, which render teachers unable to create constructive dialogues with students that have been marginalized in…

Teaching practices, whether intended or not, privilege and marginalize particular groups of people. Inequality in education reflects inequality in society. The different ways in which technology is used may bolster or reinforce social inequities (Araque, Maiden, Bravo, Estrada, Evans, Hubchik, Kirby & Reddy, 2013). The digital usage divide…

Prof. Niemonen claims that the concept of white privilege is "anti-sociological" and "mask[s] complex race-class interactions." He highlights the importance of including social class in discussions of white privilege but focuses exclusively on the white working class, neglecting how race and social class also intersect for…

The purpose of this study was to explore the issue of social class in art education. As mentioned in my theoretical framework underlying this study, Bourdieu (1973/2000) used the term "cultural capital" as forms of knowledge, tastes, and practices to explain the relationship between knowledge and power in the field of education. I…

In this article, Federico R. Waitoller and Kathleen A. King Thorius extend recent discussions on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in order to explicitly account for student dis/ability. The authors engage in this work as part of an inclusive education agenda. Toward this aim, they discuss how CSP and universal design for learning will benefit…

In the fall of 2016, the "Harvard Educational Review" ("HER") published "Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy that Accounts for Dis/Ability" by Federico R. Waitoller, assistant professor in the Department of Special Education at the University…

This article describes and evaluates an activity designed to demonstrate how biological factors (e.g., genetics), individual-level behaviors (e.g., smoking), and social factors (e.g., socioeconomic status) shape health status and access to health care. Active learning techniques were utilized to introduce the sociological imagination as it…

Grounded in feminist notions of valuing lived experiences and constructing knowledge about the wider world from material realities, this article uses autobiographical narratives and poststructural and critical theories to argue for change in children's literature. The author presents two simultaneous streams of shifting, representations and…