An increasing number of school districts encourage discussion of current events in classrooms. However, teachers' ability and willingness to manage these conversations may be hampered by concerns about what they are or are not allowed to disclose, especially because their First Amendment speech protections do not fully extend into the classroom.…

Discussion about political and social issues in school matter for a wide array of democratic skills and competences such as political engagement, participation, and knowledge. However, little research has been done on what impact characteristics of the discussion climate in classrooms can have on young people's engagement with political…

How do we help teachers grow in accordance with their ethical ideals? Specifically, how do assessment practices fit within teachers' sense of themselves as caring and professional early childhood educators? I pursue these questions by drawing on a collaborative blog. In doing so, I offer portraits of novice early childhood teachers as ethical…

We studied the impact of introducing first-year computer science (CS) students to ethical thinking about the social justice impacts of data collection, tracking, bias, internet privacy, and competitive "real world" system design and critique activities. While basic content was consistent for all, one group was involved throughout the…

Background: Teachers need to make sense of curricular materials and design instruction to ensure students will be positioned to pursue their own arc of inquiry in curriculum enactment. Whole-group discussions are crucial opportunities for curricular sensemaking, yet planning and enactment can be challenging. Methods: We used a single, revelatory…

Four recent art therapy graduates created reflective artwork to process the COVID-19 pandemic and U.S. antiracist demonstrations and protests. This viewpoint describes their arts-based responses and intersubjective meetings to practice reflexive cultural humility. Key discoveries included themes of power and privilege, vulnerability, and moving…

Grounded in our commitment to support preservice teachers (PSTs) in an urban elementary teacher education program to develop anti-bias pedagogies, we engaged in a design-based study aimed at enacting critical conversations about texts that foster dialogue about power and privilege. In this analysis, we explore how PSTs engaged with children during…

Classroom dialogues have special educational value because they allow students to engage critically but constructively with each other's ideas, solve scientific problems jointly and develop their scientific understanding. The present study focuses on how groups of twelfth-grade high school and university students communicate and co-operate through…

Over the last two decades, the prevention of violent radicalisation, extremism and terrorism has become a major policy issue in Europe, and educational institutions' central role in it has become widely acknowledged. However, what has rarely been addressed is that living in today's media-centred world, in which terrorism receives much dramatic…

Background: While much literature has argued for the value of carefully designed instructional units building on student resources, less work details how students' own invocation of experiences and ideas from their everyday lives plays out in naturalistic classroom dialogues. Employing a sociocultural and interactional approach, this article…

The shift of evidence-based, active and inquiry-based pedagogy to online modalities has typically been done with a synchronous model, using video conferencing technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration amongst students. Such an approach can be infeasible for some students and create inequitable situations within a class. This paper…

Adaptive reasoning is one of five components students use to develop mathematical expertise and become mathematically proficient. When students adapt their reasoning they are logically thinking about the mathematical relationships between concepts and adapting their thinking to solve problems. Three Act Math Tasks are popular math problems used in…

Shifting classroom discourse to be more student-centered has become an integral part of reform-oriented instructional practices. At the same time, shifting discourse can open up opportunities for inequity to occur in the immediate learning environment as both the quantity and quality of mathematical talk changes. In this project, I examined…

The aim of this confirmatory grounded theory case analysis was to investigate the perceptions of high school civics teachers on the new Illinois civics curriculum and how this relates to concepts of citizenship. This qualitative study involved focus groups consisting of 20 public high school civics teachers to investigate the use of the…

This dissertation is about social studies teachers' perceptions of professional and personal preparedness to facilitate social justice discussions. Due to a focus on high-stakes standardized testing in Math and English Language Arts (ELA), there has been a lack of emphasis on the content of social studies. This phenomenological study explores the…