The language and cultural priorities in Australian Indigenous education have been priority areas since the inaugural national Indigenous education policy was launched in 1989. For over thirty years, these priorities have sat awkwardly in the largely non-Indigenous teaching profession and classroom teachers continue to struggle with how to embed…

The article examines the mutual relations between education, biopolitics and authority. The objective is to deconstruct authority in relation to three biopolitical issues: abortion, sexual orientation, and IVF. This deconstruction is performed by analysis of the manifestations and strategies of authority employed in Polish textbooks for four…

This qualitative, multi-site case study examines two cases focusing on the dialogic relations of secondary English students and their teachers, as they interact with print and non-print pop culture texts related to sports and/or music as part of a curriculum unit on a politically sensitive topic. The purpose of this inquiry is to examine…

Traditional commercial textbooks at the college level are slow to update, often have problematic language or content related to queer and trans identities, and are likely to be prohibitively expensive. As an alternative, I explore the benefits of using open educational resources (OER) and free-to-access resources for a human sexuality course. I…

In this essay we explore how pernicious social narratives affect schooling and suggest rethinking leadership may ameliorate issues of injustice in education. We reject the idea that school leaders must necessarily be politicians who serve as bureaucratic management-oriented functionaries. We claim instead they are intellectual leaders who might…

In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom established the Governor's Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education (the Council) to assess and improve education about the Holocaust and other genocides (Holocaust and genocide education) in California schools. In response to declining youth awareness of these issues and events and to rising hate incidents, the…

History education that deals with the controversial and sensitive past is a vehicle for peacemaking in conflict-affected societies. However, its success is dependent on teachers taking risks to challenge entrenched 'us versus them' views of history. How does a student teacher in Northern Ireland grapple with risk-taking when learning to teach…

This study is based on an analysis of survey data from a national sample of K-12 public schools teachers (N = 5,237). The purpose of this article is to examine teachers' beliefs about nationalism and how it correlates to teachers' beliefs about religious liberty, and to what extent beliefs about nationalism are stronger than beliefs about…

There is a steady line of academic discourse around the topic of controversial issues and how to approach them in and through education. In this line of discourse, discussion is widely seen as a primary method of democratic education that is especially suitable to foster its major educational aims, such as tolerance, reciprocal respect, or…

Evolution is central to biology education and yet, it is often one of the most misunderstood and controversial topics that biology educators must teach. Research spanning the last four decades has shown that students continue to struggle, even with direct instruction, to understand the process of evolution by natural selection. In my first…

Gay academics in China are governed by both the repressive political climate and heteronormative culture on campus. This intersectional experience is still underexplored in the literature on queer teachers. Drawing on 40 gay academics' interview narratives, this article focuses on their concerns about addressing queer issues in the classroom in…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between high school students' understandings of aspects about nature of science (NOS) and their argumentation skills, particularly whether informed conceptions of NOS contribute to better argumentation skills. Participants, a total of 125 Grade 10 students, responded to an open-ended…

Background/Context: Historical studies of this volatile period in educational history (1960-2003 tend to focus on educational policy and/or curriculum, but rarely address changes in learning theory. Numerous historical studies have traced how psychologists, psychometricians, policymakers, and social scientists have dismissed the intellectual…

Teachers' decision-making about resource selection is made more complex when resources are appraised for their potential to raise controversial issues or cause offence to others within school communities. Debates around the use of trigger warnings, freedom of speech and the impact of exclusionary practices further complicate these processes. In…

School communities across the United States are experiencing increasing calls to remove the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) from their curricula despite not actually doing so in practice. This anti-CRT push is part of a larger, conservative agenda to ban teaching "divisive" topics in public schools and exemplifies the underlying…