The resignation of the Revd Professor Michael Reiss from his position as Director of Education at the Royal Society over the issue of the teaching of creationism in school science classes provides the background to this article. The immediate controversy is described and considered in relation to its wider context and to the serious questions that…

Christian professors and professors generally, whether teaching at religiously affiliated or secular institutions, face an age-old question: Can one safely use the classroom to advocate one's personal position with regard to controversial issues or not? Positions examined include that of "value-free" science, "value-full" advocacy, and an…

In thinking about teaching nonfiction, the authors acknowledge that many contemporary and important nonfiction texts that students should be encouraged to read take up social issues that are not easy to talk about or even to think about. They discovered that combining well-chosen nonfiction on social issues with specialized digital games and other…

Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides. As she reports, her aim was to not create a hierarchy of suffering or…

One of the most important goals of discussing controversial issues in the classroom is to educate students to possess an inclination towards reason, open mindedness and fairness. However, research tends to show that teachers are not adequately trained to lead fruitful discussions about controversial issues and do not possess the necessary skills…

In preparing cadets to be officers, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (CGA) is committed to developing "the whole person." CGA has increasingly developed program-specific ways to achieve educational goals and learning outcomes. While character development and ethical education have long been important learning outcomes, today's CGA curriculum…

Online learning environments offer new opportunities for learning and over the last decade or so a variety of online learning environments have been developed by researchers to facilitate collaborative learning among students. In this paper we will present a case study of a successful collaborative learning design. This involves a near synchronous…

This article reviews themes and changes in the teaching of HIV/AIDS content in social work programs over the first three decades of the epidemic. Social work education in the first decade of the epidemic was largely focused on helping clients in the death and dying process, while medical and pharmaceutical advancements in the mid-1990s drastically…

This article explores some of the challenges of developing a module on global learning with primary initial teacher education (ITE) students studying at a UK university. The research, which employed a mixed methodology, involved around 550 students and eight members of staff over a three-year period. The findings indicate that many students…

There is a growing consensus that simply learning enough science to decipher public debates on socioscientific issues will not make citizens better equipped to handle the complex and ill-structured problems these controversial issues present. This study highlights the interaction and complex interplay between youth authored and appropriated frames…

This article examines the historic uses of the phenomenon recently defined as "Deep Politics" to shed light on the underlying realities of the contemporary War on Terror. Deep Politics describes the multiple uses of misinformation to marshal public sentiment in directions desired by dominant political and economic forces. Facing the reality of…

Climate change and its effects are likely to present challenging problems for future generations of young people. It is important for Australian students to understand the mechanisms and consequences of climate change. If students are to develop a sophisticated understanding, then science teachers need to be well-informed about climate change…

This article explores the underlying and epiphenomenal manifestations of milieus and contexts that serve to control and undermine, or provide pathways to, the discussion of controversial issues in classrooms. Given the importance of teaching and discussing controversial issues, as an essential lever for democratic citizenship education, I draw on…

The authors explored the ethical reasoning of 27 preservice teachers in the first course of a 4-course social studies education program. The students discussed 2 historically analogous cases that focused on 1 of 4 value problem areas: consent of the governed, general welfare, property, and morality. The authors were interested in exploring whether…

In this article the author examines changes in students' self-awareness of multicultural topics during a multicultural education course. The course is a three-credit elective course offered in the university's school of education but taken by students across disciplines at a large, public research university in a mid-Atlantic state. Course…