In the literature on intercultural education there is an abundance of text about what ought to be going on in the classroom and a lack of empirical descriptions of the dilemmas of intercultural education in practice. This article describes the practice of five teachers guiding discussions about sensitive issues in ethnically diverse secondary…

When political knowledge is scarce, affective attitudes, which can consist of emotion-driven feelings regarding political figures, government, country, and foreign nations, often assist policy judgment. Based on pre- and post-surveys administered in Introduction to American Politics courses, fall 2003-fall 2005, this study examines how political…

A variety of different arguments have been offered for teaching "both sides" of the evolution/ID debate in public schools. This article reviews five of the most common types of arguments advanced by proponents of Intelligent Design and demonstrates how and why they are founded on confusion and misunderstanding. It argues on behalf of teaching…

There are some who experience irreconcilable differences between their religious beliefs concerning a world created as is, on the one hand, and a scientific view of the world that has developed by means of natural evolution over billions of years, on the other hand. In this special issue, scholars from very different religions, backgrounds, and…

Last fall the author taught two sections of a first-year seminar on activism and volunteering, called "Raise a Fist, Lend a Hand: Activism and Volunteerism at the Dawn of the 21st Century," at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest. She had noted in the course description that a community-service requirement was included, so she…

In this article, the author provides the contentions of intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins on the November 2008 elections and the presidential leadership. Diggins observed that "all people spoke about was winning the elections, and no one seemed to be concerned with the problems of the future." Diggins also expressed how he was skeptical…

Evolution is an important and sometimes controversial component of high school biology. In this study, we used a mixed methods approach to explore students' evolution acceptance and views of evolution teaching and learning. Students explained their acceptance and rejection of evolution in terms of evidence and conflicts with religion and…

For multicultural education to be effective, it must be introduced in the early years and reinforced throughout the school years. It is important for teachers of young children to be equipped with the appropriate knowledge, skills and positive attitudes to promote multiculturalism in their classrooms. This paper reports on a survey involving…

As the education for citizenship agenda continues to impact on schools in the UK and with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) in conjunction with the Scottish Government introducing its Lessons From Auschwitz (LFA) project for students and teachers in Scotland, this article focuses on the Scottish context and investigates the school processes by…

Teachers sometimes shut students up for the sake of civility. My question is whether silencing for the sake of civility can be morally justified when a student derogates fellow students as members of some widely stigmatized group, and the offending speech is not for any further reason to be deplored, for example, as a personally targeted insult.…

The field of political science has encountered a unique obstacle in its development. Contemporary political theory has diverged in opposite paths, becoming more conceptual and abstract as well as focused and concrete. The unfortunate result of this has been a lack of clarity in communicating political theory to a new generation of political…

This paper suggests the need for a critical analysis of the nationalization of mourning and its educational implications, especially in conflict-ridden areas. Our thoughts are grounded in a comparative study on mourning that has been conducted as part of our long-standing ethnographic research in schools in Cyprus and Israel during the last 10…

In this paper we present a schematic overview of the central concepts in evolutionary theory, setting them off against the background of widespread misconceptions about them. Our aim is to provide high school teachers with (1) an overview of those particular concepts that they can expect students to have difficulties with, (2) a comparison of…

In this article, the author shares some of the tricky discussions he has presented to his students in his "Argument and Persuasion" course, a second-level writing class designed to develop students' skills in reasoning, conducting research, and writing essays. He relates how this course always makes it difficult for him to be neutral when…

There have been a number of recently published books and reports about the existence of a liberal bias in academia (e.g., ACTA 2005, ACTA 2006, Berube 2006, Black 2004, Horowitz 2006, Horowitz 2008, and Shapiro 2004). Sociology is one of the disciplines that is most frequently cited as "producers" of bias in two of these studies (ACTA 2006,…