Premised on the notion that any educational programme for pre-service teachers pursues excellence in both academics and social justice, teacher educators must capacitate student teachers to work in areas of social justice. Pre-service teachers must subsequently be assisted to become professionally qualified teachers who are prepared to move…

Many controversial subjects characterize geography in the 21st century. Issues such as climate change, sustainability and social exclusion generate much discussion and often involve clear differences in opinion of how they might be addressed. Higher education is an important space for critical engagement with challenging issues. Preparing for and…

Progress has been made in addressing socioscientific issues, such as debates about merits of nuclear power, by encouraging school students to consider complex issues and take positions about them. We contend, however, that they also need to learn to take research-informed actions to address issues. In the study reported here, we concluded--based…

A content analysis of ten United States history textbooks (2005-2008) was conducted by the researchers to determine the current depiction of Japanese Americans and internment during the World War II era. This study updates and expands upon the textbooks used in prior research by Romanowski (1995), Harada (2000), and Ogawa (2004) that had numerous…

The author explores the place of feminism in teaching through the lens of rhetorical dexterity, providing a case study.

Effectively integrating writing into biology classes gives students the opportunity to develop a better understanding of and engagement with course content. Yet many instructors remain reluctant to emphasize writing. Some are concerned about the time commitment writing assessment requires. Others shy away from emphasizing writing in their classes…

Throughout the last 50 years, the debate over engaging politics in the college classroom has raged on, sparked in part by the belief that liberal biases saturate scholarship and teaching in universities, which in turn lays the bedrock for the left-wing indoctrination of students. Polarizing and vitriolic debates abound regarding if, when, and how…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically illustrate how human resource development (HRD) resists and omits issues of diversity in academic programs, textbooks, and research; analyze the research on HRD and diversity over a ten-year period; discuss HRD's resistance to diversity; and offer some recommendations for a more authentic…

Critical thinking is a valued educational outcome; however, little is known about whether psychology courses, especially ones such as research methods courses that might be expected to promote critical thinking skills, actually improve them. We compared the acquisition of critical thinking skills for analyzing psychological arguments in 3 groups…

Over 5 million students and 28,000 schools are consistently marginalized or left out of statistics that describe evolution and science education. Although they are relatively few in number compared with their public school counterparts, the millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers in private schools need to be counted in research…

Holocaust education has been most successful in creating empathy, historical understanding and present responsibility against racism/antisemitism and towards human rights by telling true stories of children, women and men who were victims of these crimes during the Nazi period, while also raising awareness of the consequences for the present. The…

This is a practical introduction to blended learning, presenting examples of implementation across a broad spectrum of disciplines. For faculty unfamiliar with this mode of teaching, it illustrates how to address the core challenge of blended learning--to link the activities in each medium so that they reinforce each other to create a single,…

Students often struggle with how to translate textbook concepts into real-world applications that allow them to personally experience the importance of these concepts. This is an ongoing challenge within all disciplines in higher education. To address this, faculty design their courses using methods beyond traditional classroom lectures to…

In this chapter, the author describes how a pedagogical approach utilizing insights and principles from queer theory facilitated an intersectional analysis in a large lecture, general education course on "Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture" at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her goal in using queer theory's deconstructive…

Environmental education (EE) is now clearly specified in educational standards in many parts of the world, and at the same time the view of language learning is moving towards a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) strategy, to make English lessons more relevant and attractive for students (Eurydice, 2006). In this respect,…