Various curricular and textbook initiatives exist to aid in the national processes of coming to terms with past violence, often serving the political goals of the victors, sometimes supported by international transitional justice institutions. Sierra Leone and Liberia each experienced a devastating civil war during the 1990s and into the 2000s,…

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…

The identification of conflict and development of common ground, important steps in the interdisciplinary research process, become challenging when applied to solving complex real-world problems that involve opposing interest groups, especially those whose members do not possess academic or interdisciplinary training. This article examines…

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…

Sex education, especially in the southeastern USA, remains steeped in an Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage (AOUM) approach, which sets up barriers to the education of sexually active students. Research confirms that science education has the potential to facilitate discussion of controversial topics, including sex education. Science teachers in the…

Today's youth increasingly are being expected to engage in civil deliberation in classrooms while simultaneously living in a society with a high level of political incivility. However, teaching students to argue--particularly in oral form--is enormously complex and challenging work. In this article, the authors report on a study of four high…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore how preservice teachers in a young adult literature course critically conceptualize discussions in school spaces about race and police/community relations; and to understand the constraints and affordances of using the young adult (YA) novel, "All American Boys," as a critical…

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…

This qualitative multicase analysis investigated the role of "educational niceness" and "neutrality" (e.g., Baptiste, 2008; Bissonnette, 2016) in preservice English teacher feedback on sociopolitical issues in student writing. As part of the field experiences for several ELA methods courses at two universities, one urban and…

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…

This paper discusses contradictory imperatives in contemporary Australian pedagogy--the notions of "controversy" and "diversity" as they relate the subjects of genders and sexualities. It is a common view that both gender and sexuality are important organising features of identity, society and politics. Consistent effort is…

Decades of work in dismantling racism have not yielded the kind of results for which religious educators have hoped. One primary reason has been what scholars term "white fragility," a symptom of the structural racism which confers systemic privilege upon White people. Lessons learned from Christian mystics point to powerful ways to…