This article focuses on the dynamics at play in a challenging lesson observed during the LGBTQ unit in a social justice-focused high school course. On the surface, the lesson was a chaotic struggle involving a tense intergenerational clash between the teacher and an outspoken group of students. Young people interrupted and refused the teacher's…

There is a great deal of misinformation and stigma surrounding abortion, even though it is a common reproductive health service. Teaching about abortion encompasses many things: managing the beliefs of students and teachers; state regulations around teaching or talking about abortion in schools; available resources; and the cultural miseducation…

Recently, numerous news stories have detailed the ways teachers across the country have been disciplined for addressing issues of oppression and justice in their schools. This paper engages poststructural discourse analysis to consider data from a year-long study of recent graduates of a justice-oriented teacher education program during their…

Critical thinking ability is a very important basic ability in learning mathematics. In the era of technological advances and digitalization, a comprehensive learning approach is needed that accommodates critical thinking skills. The controversial problem-based multimodal approach with ethnomathematics is seen as being able to improve this…

Recent polling shows a marked increase in public distrust towards institutions and fellow citizens in the United States. In this context of rising distrust and democratic crisis, teachers have not been exempt from public scrutiny. Recent legislation in the United States targeting school curricula and classroom discourse reveal a mounting distrust…

Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but U.S. public discourse around the issue remains mired in controversy, including in education. Our study leverages natural language processing methods to give a precise look into the extent to which climate change-related topics are covered in 30 of the most widely used high school history…

Politically neutral pedagogy is often the subject of both praise and condemnation. But treating political neutrality as a principle to be either embraced or rejected confuses the issue, because the permissibility of neutrality actually varies across educational contexts. Educational practice should not be evaluated on the basis of whether or not…

Teachers across grade levels and content areas increasingly address difficult topics that can arise at a moment's notice, whether such topics are within or outside the scope of their planned instruction. At this time, however, little is known about how teachers experience these "unplanned difficult-topics moments." Hence, teacher…

This study investigates whether university students' epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge about controversial socioscientific issues (SSIs) can predict the different types of arguments that students construct. Two hundred forty-three university students were asked to construct different types of supportive arguments--social, ethical, economic,…

Many scholars suggest that recent major science education initiatives apparently tied to intense economic competitiveness and growth have prioritized education about "products" (e.g., laws, theories, innovations) and skills (e.g., experimentation) of fields of science and technology. Such initiatives also, apparently, tend to avoid…

Despite best efforts to the contrary, obscenity oozes out from under the rugs of "polite" schooling and "tidy" society. In this post-qualitative inquiry, the authors pursue questions in defense of pedagogies of obscenity. In what ways do educators fail to educate when they eschew obscenity, understand shame and disgust as…

This article outlines a method used to successfully breakthrough student bias surrounding controversial issues in the classroom. The method uses a debate with randomized position assignments to encourage students to consider all sides of the topic. Student feedback is overwhelmingly positive and students appear to develop a newfound respect and…

Sociology curricula often house a variety of "hot button" or contentious topics (e.g., race relations, crime and deviance, personal freedoms/choice, gender). While departments may be giving more attention to ensuring that these topics are included in their curriculum, here I argue that we also need to engage students in reflection about…

It has been well established that controversial issue discussions are an integral component to a high-quality civic education. However, as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, teachers have become more hesitant to engage students in discussions of controversial political issues. Two decades worth of literature on…

The aim of this article is to discuss how to research into phenomena that no one wants to talk about: silenced and tabooed phenomena. With the outset in data culled in two research projects concerning student's conceptualization of small group learning, the article discusses methodology, theory, and ethics in researching into silenced and tabooed…