This paper describes an ethnographic case study of eleven First Nations adult learners in a Northern Ontario community attempting to earn secondary school equivalency through the General Education Development (GED) program. The paper maintains a focus on the power differentials at work in both the learners' prior educational endeavours and their…

Information literacy instruction traditionally focuses on evaluating a source for bias, relevance, and timeliness, and rightfully so; this critical perspective is vital to a well-formed research process. However, this process is incomplete without a similar focus on the potential biases that the student brings to his or her interactions with…

Participatory research can be seen as providing affordances for "listening" to student voices. This study contributes to the debate around its affordances in ameliorating democratic processes in schools. Students in a northern city secondary school in England used multimodal methods to research questions based on "where do students…

This response to Peterson's (2014) "Nonviolent Action as a Necessary Component in Educating for Democracy" enlarges the discussion of the role of the teacher/educator in deciding whether or when it is responsible to facilitate the engagement of students in acts of nonviolent dissent. Ultimately it would seem that the most important of…

The paper first examines the context that has given student engagement a very strong profile in higher education. It identifies neo-liberalism as the driving force in the present higher education context and argues that student engagement enjoys an elective affinity with it. While neo-liberalism is dominant, student engagement will be strong. But…

The focus of this article is methods for facilitating student voice and engagement in higher education, specifically participatory methods. Across the student voice and engagement literature there is a growing emphasis on promoting collaborative partnerships between staff and students. However, there is a lack of detail and criticality with…

In this rethinking of how curriculum can be approached in times of trauma, ideas around opening the curricular space to talking about taboo topics like suicide and sexual violence are discussed. Both deeply personal issues, our classrooms and students are not immune from their effects. A distinction between controversial issues and taboo topics is…

In a nation and political climate where models of communication and respect for another's ideas are difficult to find, the authors take seriously their charge to support educational practices that prepare students to critically engage in a free and democratic society. As part of a summer high school outreach program, they sought to develop a…

Egypt promises "education for all". Primary attendance and completion have increased substantially. Still, many children remain out of school. There remain questions about the quality of education. Since the early 1990s, community-based education (CBE) has been part of Egypt's educational programme. Community-based education is meant to…

This case study investigates the experiences of Shia Ismaili Muslim girls as they encounter themselves as subjects of social studies curriculums on Islam. A postcolonial lens is used to examine differently empowered subjectivities and curricular epistimes within the high school world history context. In an effort to understand their experiences,…

Traditionally, the field of resilience research, especially as it relates to children and youth, has been well ensconced in the discipline of psychology. Sociologists, when they do engage with the concept, tend to do so at the level of the community. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have called for a construction of resilience and…

In today's educational context, characterized by growing inequality and the rise of neoliberal ideology, universities are dealing with pressures to contribute to the global workforce and partner with private interests rather than educating citizens and serving the public good. This article presents youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a…

This article describes an experiment in collaborative course design in a midlevel sociology course. Unlike most of the literature on collaborative teaching and learning, which often deals with collaboration among students, this article discusses collaboration between the instructor and students. The students in this course collaborated with the…

This manuscript explains a civic engagement activity and presents assessment data on the activity.

This study investigated power relations in a graduate seminar on "Literacy learning and knowledge acquisition." Three categories were examined in relation to ideological assumptions: students' expectations, institution's expectations, and teachers' perceptions of their roles as guided by their teaching perspectives. The study aimed at…