This paper examines the idea of using advertising to facilitate difficult conversations about diversity, politics, race and gender in the classroom. In our current tense political climate, I explore how cultural competence can be developed in the classroom by introducing topics related to diversity through the viewing of Super Bowl 2017…

This qualitative study sought to explore reasons why social studies teachers chose to teach controversial issues and counternarratives in their classroom in an era where doing so is dangerous for teachers and their job security, and how they go about doing so in their classrooms. The theoretical framework of this study encompassed the notion that…

Ice-breaking discussions around race and personal perspectives can be challenging in any classroom, they also are crucial to cultivating racial consciousness among those espousing that they know better. This provides the groundwork needed to implement--in a non-threatening manner--the creative, alternative methods that will combine students'…

At our predominantly white university, students often shy away from controversial conversations. How can the classroom encourage students to value and engage in potentially explosive conversations? We develop a concept of "empathic scaffolding" to articulate an approach that integrates diversity and inclusion into the classroom. Empathic…

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…

Courses: Visual Rhetoric, Political Communication, Media and Society, Argumentation. Objective: Students trace a social hierarchy created through the visual reason of memes.

Field trips can provide an opportunity to take the student to the world, as an alternative to presenting the world to the student in the classroom. Such trips can create a forum for exploring controversial and distressing topics by exposing the students to first-hand experience, rather than second-hand accounts: witnessing the effects of blind…

Even after you have decided to tackle a problem like racial equity, it may seem daunting to broach the subject in a physics classroom. After all, the idea of a (typically White) instructor in power tackling a sensitive topic such as social justice can be scary in any (mostly White) classroom. Not only that, but physics is typically viewed as a…

As sociology instructors increasingly include materials on sexual violence in their courses, both instructors and students express anxieties over how best to handle such sensitive conversations. This article critically examines the conventional advice to offer a trigger warning, which can interfere with student education (e.g., requiring survivors…

Sex and relationships education has been a controversial area of the curriculum in England for many years. Despite changes to the content and the approach to this material, many teachers and parents remained unhappy about issues such as: the right of schools to teach material that some think should be done in a family situation only; the problem…

We present a sequence of professional development sessions to support science teachers in designing socio-scientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL) lessons to foster democratic citizenship. We focus on seven stages for enacting SSIBL: (1) introducing a dilemma; (2) initial opinion-forming; (3) creating a 'need to know'; (4) inquiry; (5) dialogue;…

Many have discussed the inherent problems in teaching race and ethnic relations courses. Students often come to class with preconceived ideas about their social world, and a range of feelings and experiences including confusion, biases, and misconceptions. Therefore, significant barriers to learning exist before the first day of class. To address…

Author Richard Milner IV is a Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. The author of numerous articles and seven books, his research focuses on urban education, teacher education, and African American literature. Throughout his career studying the…

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of increasing the intellectual viability of lower-level foreign language (FL) study while facilitating connections between academic practice, learners' lives, and global communities. This article reports on a content-based role-immersion simulation (RIS) designed to incite a critical orientation…

In this article, we argue that teachers' epistemic cognition, in particular their thinking about epistemic aims and reliable processes for achieving those aims, may impact students' understanding of complex, controversial issues. This is because teachers' epistemic cognition may facilitate or constrain their implementation of instruction aiming to…