The present study is about sensitive issues in history teaching that have probably been experienced by most teachers in the field. We conducted a questionnaire study in Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and The Netherlands to assess which issues were experienced as sensitive in class, what the reasons were…

We assessed the influence of genre-specific discourse knowledge and writing goals on the persuasive writing of 4th and 6th grade students with and without learning disabilities (LD). Students were first interviewed about their knowledge of persuasion and persuasive writing. They then wrote a persuasive essay about a controversial topic after…

Despite its popularity among students, terrorism is a sensitive and emotive topic that is difficult to learn, and challenging to teach. Given the lack of a simple definition, terrorism is hard to explain objectively and comprehensively. Perceptually value-laden and provocative, it can reinforce stereotypes and prejudices against a group of people…

In this endeavour to examine teachers' willingness to discuss controversial political issues in class, we focused on four variables that received little attention so far: teachers' vested interest, knowledge, the topic of discussion, and teachers' ethnicity. 1130 teachers in Israel, 832 Jewish and 298 Arab, answered an online questionnaire that…

Purpose: Unprecedented global challenges of the twenty-first century have highlighted the need for novel programs to train students in the skills necessary to address increasingly complex controversial science issues. Issues-360[TM] was developed as an innovative year-long co-curricular, issues engagement initiative designed to address this need.…

This study is about a seventh-grade classroom in a predominantly White region in the rural northwestern United States where a White teacher led an interdisciplinary unit on African American narratives of enslavement and freedom fighting. Through the lenses of racial literacy, critical Whiteness studies, and discourse studies, authors use data from…

Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and COVID-19 have reached a tipping point. According to this report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one…

Adolescents are often described as egocentric, but a major source of this external behavior is the internal fear of adolescents have about feeling invisible, being different, and even their own mortality. Facing this fear through a curricular focus on death can help to combat this behavior. This can be accomplished through novel studies of books…

Based on interviews with teachers and students in Norwegian high schools, this article explores discussions of controversial issues in the classroom. Building on practice theory, it examines what enables "good" classroom discussions. The main finding is that good discussions are made possible by a productive learning environment that is…

This article is based on a research study that implemented an empathy-based pedagogy (EBP) in three schools in Kazakhstan with the aim of understanding how secondary school students can learn about global issues and what challenges the teachers faced. It reflects on findings which provide strong evidence that walking in the shoes of other people…

With nationwide concerns about the declines in youth voting turnout across the United States, increased attention has focused on schools to promote "civic education," a broad curricular approach aimed at facilitating students' development of key civic knowledge, skills, and behaviors. However, less is known about how civic education…

National right-wing media and their viewers are alleging that critical race theory (CRT) is "infecting" public school classrooms, fueling an assault on how schools should discuss race, racism, and our nation's history. This turmoil over curriculum and teaching "sensitive" topics is deeply upsetting to teachers. Principals can…

In this article, Harper B. Keenan investigates the treatment of violence in elementary history education through a case study of a fourth-grade unit on the colonial history of California featuring "the mission project," a long-standing tradition in California's elementary schools that has students construct a miniature model of a Spanish…

This Thematic Fiche was produced by the members of the ET 2020 Working Group on Promoting Common Values and Inclusive Education. The Working Group operated within the context of the 2018-2020 mandate and comprised representatives from Member States and Candidate countries, as well as from relevant EU agencies, stakeholder associations, social…

This dissertation is a historical case study that focused on the founding and continuation of the GSSch to define the term, academic resilience and to determine how the GSSch had impacted "academic resilience." I examined qualitative data from interviews alongside research published during the founding (i.e. mid-1970s) and continuation…