Approximately four months ago the author was sitting at his desk at the Air Force Academy preparing a course in leadership that he would be teaching during the fall semester. Then, something happened that would have a drastic impact on his professional life as an educator and a military officer. He was informed that he would be deploying to Kabul,…

Background/Context: Emotions often accompany discussions of ethnic matters, yet there have been few sustained investigations in education of how, and with what implications, emotional responses are (de)legitimized in the classroom, especially when conflicting historical narratives are involved. Emotions have remained in the margins of educational…

This action research study interrogates how one teacher educator analyzed her pedagogy and engaged her students in writing narratives about working with children, families, and co-workers who are racially and ethnically different from themselves. Data were collected from a special topic graduate course entitled, Epistemology, Diversity and…

In this qualitative study, the authors first explore the "sense making" of Emma, a former high school teacher (and co-author of this study), with regard to discussion of issues around race that became controversial in her social studies classroom. Her student population comprised predominantly white, rural, socioeconomically…

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explain a cooperative learning technique, Academic Controversy (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1996), also known as Cooperative Controversy, Structured Controversy and Structured Academic Controversy, that has potential for use in intercultural education and has support in both research and theory.…

On the basis of analysis of student responses to a case study titled "Drinks and Dinner," the authors evaluate the pedagogical potential of using constructive controversy case studies to teach about inequality. "Drinks and Dinner" is designed to capture the complexity of social interactions that defy simple solutions to engage students in…

Recent anti-evolution legislation, in the form of Academic Freedom bills, has been introduced in many state legislatures over the last three years. The language in the proposed Academic Freedom bills may allow different interpretations of what can be taught in the science classrooms, and possibly spur parents to take advantage of their perceived…

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and possibly intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battle-grounds over them. I begin by examining whether…

The work of Students Informing Now (S.I.N.), an immigrant student organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is described in this column. The authors argue that S.I.N.'s diverse activities and textual products construct a counternarrative that challenges and reframes the debate on undocumented students and immigration. Focusing on…

The authors describe a pedagogical exercise that conveys the multilayered properties of gender to undergraduate students. They propose a simulation that demonstrates the social constructiveness of gender, maintaining that gender should be conceptualized and portrayed as a process, system of stratification, and social structure. The authors begin…

Contemporary policy statements from government and reforms to science curricula in schools emphasise the importance of educating a scientifically literate public for democratic participation in science and technology. While such an aspiration is seemingly uncontentious and appears consistent with progressive educational thinking, the reality of…

Young adults deserve our best as parents, educators and community members. The Michael L. Printz award winning books, instituted by the Young Adult Library Association, form a recent grouping of current literature. Novels worthy of the Printz Award explore physical, emotional, and social themes important in the lives of young adults. This library…

This article describes a 7th grade Language Arts teacher's investigation into whether she could use her district-prescribed literature selections to effectively increase her students' awareness of sociocultural issues. She used an instructional strategy called Think-Aloud to explicitly discuss social and cultural issues as they related to the…

An instructional focus on critical literacy (CL) encourages students to become active readers and writers of cultural texts so that they can create their own meanings in order to shape and transform their social conditions (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; Shor, 1992). It is, however, seldom pursued with English learners (ELs) because teachers…

Drawing on multimodal, post-structural, and critical theory, the author examines a high-school English classroom exchange about editing a student publication. Analysing a young woman's embodied identity performances, the author illustrates how Simone, a tenth-grader, employed, adjusted, and coupled modes of communication like speech, laughter,…