A growing body of research has documented the escalating popularity of religion among student populations in China's higher education settings. Despite the changes sustained by China's religious policies throughout the post-Mao era, the state has not abandoned its long-standing approach of cultivating citizenship through Marxist-Leninist-oriented…

Purpose: Even as sites for higher education work to transform curricula and strive for greater diversity among students and faculties, little is done to create safe, inviting environments for people to openly discuss the contradictions and challenges in teaching about differences. The authors' purpose is to examine multiple and intersecting…

Verity Morgan took an unusual approach to the challenge of teaching the Holocaust, coming to it through the lens of environmental history. She shares here the practical means and resources she used to engage pupils with this current trend in historiography, and its associated concepts. Reflecting on her pupils' responses, Morgan makes a case for…

The impact of the election of a new U.S. president and his far right ideology and agenda has reverberated across the entire world. This new reality calls for all critical equity-seeking educators; multicultural, social justice, culturally responsive, and others to be reflective and engage in deep thinking on ways to respond. Within a framework of…

This interdisciplinary study seeks to explore the extent to which graduate students enrolled within a teacher preparation program associate the use of Controversial Public Issues (CPI) in the K12 classroom with broad principles of democratic education. The study also attempts to understand how twelve teacher candidates view the practicality of…

This study investigated the ways novice social studies teachers navigated classroom exchanges connected to broader societal and political discourses that are potentially controversial. The difficulty of such conversations often leads teachers to avoid discussions vital to the fabric of democratic life. In this paper, we explore the teaching…

In democratic societies schools have an obligation to address complex societal issues such as ethnic/religious tensions and social conflicts. The article reports an exploratory study of how theatre plays were used in upper-secondary schools to generate pedagogically relevant platforms for addressing the current Middle East conflicts and their…

Despite scientific evidence suggesting close phylogenetic relationship between chimpanzees and humans, the inclusion of these apes in the genus "Homo" is controversial. Several tools have been used to analyse this issue such as fossils, molecular clock and genome. This work intended to understand the biology teachers' conceptions about…

Increased interest in climate change education and the growing recognition of the challenges inherent to addressing this issue create an opportunity to conduct a systematic review to understand what research can contribute to our ideas about effective climate change education. An academic database, EBSCO"host," was used to identify 959…

The newly adopted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requires that California secondary science teachers integrate global climate change (GCC) content into their curriculum, but research reveals major inconsistencies in teaching GCC content across the nation. The teaching inconsistencies are due to factors such as the lack of scientific…

This study investigated and analyzed the use of rhetorical appeals, and the presence of hedges, and boosters in the argumentative essays of ESL learners. It is aimed at exploring the linguistic differences between male and female writers in terms of how they put forward their claims in an argument and how they appeal to their audience. The study…

My research into pupils' perceptions of terrorism and current UK counter-terrorism policy highlights the need for more detailed and accurate discussions about the implementation of the educational aims, in particular those laid out by the Prevent Strategy. Religious education (RE) in England is affected by these aims, specifically the challenging…

In their article "Mindfulness and discussing 'thorny' issues in the classroom" Konstantinos Alexakos et al. ("Cult Stud Sci Educ," 2016. doi: 10.1007/s11422-015-9718-0) describe "thorny" issues as "difficult topics to discuss because they are more personal to some perhaps even cause pain and violence." As…

Because race is treated as a controversial issue within K-12 social studies classrooms, teachers report avoiding the topic. Some consider it too sensitive or complex for their students; others don't want to say the wrong thing; still others fear being labeled a "racist." The authors argue that one of the reasons why social studies…

As civic educators become increasingly concerned about polarized political environments, researchers have begun explore the ramifications of contentious political discourse on young people. Through a quantitative analysis of data gathered from two rural, Midwestern schools, this study provides evidence that the degree to which a student socially…