The 2016 presidential election was the first since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in which full voting protections were not in place for historically marginalized voters. This shift was largely due to a 5-4 decision in "Shelby v. Holder" (2013) in which the Supreme Court ruled that states with a history of voter discrimination…

The examination of the two featured pages of a 1921 House anti-lynching report can facilitate an engaging inquiry into the continued absence of a federal lynching law as well as historical efforts by lawmakers and civic groups to promote justice and change. In the decades between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s, thousands of individuals…

Differences of opinion are inherent in controversial issues, because controversy arises when reasonable people disagree about the best way to reach a solution to a problem. However, social studies teachers tend to shy away from disagreements because they want to avoid upsetting students or parents by bringing up controversial topics in the…

This article explores the possibility that the recent #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests at South African universities may be partially underpinned by grief over a dying essentialist assemblage in the wake of the 2012 Marikana massacre--which saw the assemblage severed from the State Apparatus in a way that spelled its doom.…

Cases like that of John Howard Yoder--a pacifist theorist who perpetrated sexual violence--raise difficult questions about teaching material implicated in traumatic pasts. This paper argues that "moral injury" provides a useful framework for understanding the dynamics of teaching prominent cases of tainted legacies like Yoder's and for…

In a multicultural democratic society, the increasing demographic diversity within and across nation-states calls attention to pedagogical knowledge and skills needed to engage students in discussing controversial cultural issues (CCIs). Woven in the intersection of democratic education and multicultural education, this qualitative study sought to…

Background: The "cognitive incongruity model of epistemic beliefs and emotions" states that if students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge (e.g., knowledge as simple and absolute) are incompatible with the epistemic nature of learning materials (e.g., complex and contradictory), cognitive incongruity arises. This, in turn, entails…

High-quality talk about issues that raise high-intensity emotions in the public sphere is timely needed. Still, researchers committed to the fostering of high-quality types of school talk generally disregard the role of emotions. We show that this disregard is not accidental and that it conveys a customary reluctance in schools to consider the…

This study focused on teachers' perceptions of caregiver support for engaging in conversations about race in the classroom. We analyzed data from the Teachers' Race Talk Survey, an exploratory survey that examines teachers' perceptions about discussing race and racial violence in the classroom. Our analyses suggested that respondents espoused…

In this essay, Rebecca M. Taylor and Ashley Floyd Kuntz explore the higher education aims of advancing truth, respecting speech, and fostering inclusive learning environments in the context of controversial invited speakers on college campuses. They consider the case of Charles Murray's visit to Middlebury College in 2017. They argue that…

This dissertation uses the theoretical framework of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) across three discrete articles to examine teaching and teacher education. CWS offers a mechanism to highlight and critique the ways Whiteness operates within teaching and teacher education. Across the pieces, I argue that Whiteness is both pervasive and shifting…

The authors designed an assignment for a writing class for late-secondary and early-college students, one with a central goal of giving students the opportunity to engage with a controversial topic by identifying and representing views other than their own. The authors called it a "not my opinion" assignment, and they piloted it in a…

This study provides a situated account of a native English-speaking teacher who implements critical literacy in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom at a Korean high school. Teacher interview data and student presentations are analyzed to depict how a third space created by the EFL teacher and his students allowed meaningful and…

Little is known about the conditions that enable teachers to educate others about the troubling issue of gender-based violence. This paper discusses the centrality of "structures for care" for fostering the willingness and capacity of primary school teachers to initiate classroom talk about this sensitive and silenced issue. Drawing on…

Effective sexual health education plays a critical role in adolescent pregnancy and HIV and STI prevention. This article describes the formative research conducted to design, and then pilot-test, SkillFlix®, a streaming video training created to improve educators' skills in delivering sexual health education to youth by modeling Microskills®.…