This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in "Shelby County v. Holder" that Congress had exceeded its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement authority when it reauthorized a part of the Voting Rights Act (a coverage formula) that forced places with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before making changes to their election laws.…

In late 1987, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White circulated a draft opinion to his colleagues in a case about whether high school journalists had the right to be free of interference from school administrators. His opinion in the case, "Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier," sided with Missouri administrators who some four years…

Homosexuality is widely perceived among many Muslims as a "western disease", a natural outcome of the West's secularity and cultural degeneracy. In spite of the emergence of more liberal attitudes towards sexual differences in modern times, moral issues have not lost their relevance in polemical discourse against homosexuality among many…

In this article the authors specifically address the use of narratives in the form of analogies as an experiential learning activity. The use of analogies as an experiential learning tool in multicultural education can be helpful in a number of ways. Analogies provide an alternative tool for processing multicultural topics with students who have…

Reclamation work denotes the process of uncovering the lost contributions of women to the philosophy of education, analyzing their works, making them accessible to a larger audience, and (re)introducing them to the historical record and canon. Since the 1970s, scholars have been engaged in the reclamation work, thus making available to students,…

Using literature in the social studies classroom is a useful pedagogy that is particularly well-suited in human rights education. Literature can give voice to people who cannot speak for themselves and gives students an opportunity to consider perspectives that are often foreign to them. When used with delicacy and care, these literary…

This study investigated help-seeking activities in a computer-based environment teaching argumentative skills by videos of argumentative dialogues of teachers who discussed controversy issues in the context of a workshop. Learners, all of them students of educational sciences, solved learning tasks on the presented argumentative dialogues and…

Positive political discourse is the heart of democracy. The purposes of political discourse include making an effective decision about the course the society should take and building a moral bond among all members of the society. A responsibility of social sciences within a democratic society is to provide the theory, research, and normative…

In our science for non-science majors course "21st Century Physics," we investigate modern "Hubble plots" (plots of velocity versus distance for deep space objects) in order to discuss the Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy. There are two potential challenges that our students face when encountering these topics for the…

This study examined the changing content of history textbooks in Northern Ireland, drawing on a sample of 15 textbooks published from 1968 to 2010. Findings from the content and narrative analysis indicated that following the introduction of the Northern Ireland Curriculum in 1991, history textbooks shifted from a narrative to source-driven…

Examining the growth, incentives, and progress of overseas campuses of major American educational institutions is an important academic pursuit. To have a complete picture, one must also consider the impact these branch campuses are having on the lives of their students. The Northwestern University in Qatar's journalism program was invited to…

In this paper, we describe an exercise that challenges hetero-normative and sexist notions of sexuality, allowing students to envision alternative models. Research shows how active learning eases student anxiety over challenging or threatening material. After reading Jessica Fields' "Risky Lessons" and Waskul, Vannini, and Weisen's…

In this article, Leslie Duhaylongsod, Catherine E. Snow, Robert L. Selman, and M. Suzanne Donovan describe the principles behind the design of curricular units that offer disciplinary literacy support in the subject of history for middle school students who represent a wide range of reading levels, and for their teachers, whose own subject matter…

Marginalized groups present part of our reality which we would prefer to forget about. Yet, the humankind remains (un)aware of the simple fact that there is merely a very tiny red line between the central and marginalized parts: any of us can at one point in life simply, unwillingly and abruptly wake up on the other side of this line!!!…

In this study, we make an effort to compare studies that explore the factors related to acceptance of evolutionary theory among Greek and Turkish students-future teachers, using conceptual ecology for biological evolution as the theoretical framework. We aimed to look into the acceptance and the understanding of evolutionary theory and also to…