The fierce public and scholarly debate over trigger warnings in university classrooms has often characterized the issue as one of academic freedom and ignored the social justice arguments for trigger warnings. In this essay, we argue that trigger warnings expand academic speech by engaging students more fully in their own learning. Specifically,…

LGBTQ themes are often neglected in many schools' curriculum. Currently, an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum framework is not required in most school districts across the county. Therefore, it is important to understand how teachers regard LGBTQ issues; how they address the needs of students in the middle school and high school English classroom who…

M. Alison Kibler is Professor of American Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. She has taught "Rights and Representations", a seminar for first year students, focusing on the tension between free speech and equality in American law and politics, for fifteen years. In this article, Kibler…

This article explores the relationship between the philosophy of ethics, history education, and young people's historical ethical judgments. In the last two decades, "ethical judgments," which focus on making decisions about the ethics of historical actions, has been acknowledged as a second-order historical thinking concept in history…

For social work educators, teaching social policy in the current political climate in the United States may seem daunting and energizing at the same time. Students are often acutely aware of the political and policy-related controversies raging in Washington, D.C. and local governments, and yet their position on these issues may be unexplored or…

Student interest in plants is lacking. Therefore, we investigated potential drivers of situational interest in cultivated plants and interactions between different dimensions of interest, i.e. topic, context and learning activity. A total of 462 high school students (14-17 years of age) rated two sets of questionnaire items combining eight plants…

The dramatic increase in hate-related bullying and culturally and/or racially offensive comments or symbols in the wake of the 2016 election came as a surprise for many educators across the United States. Research points to both an increase in frequency of hate related speech and controversy in schools, and teachers reporting a lack of training,…

The teaching of evolution in American high schools has long been a source of controversy. The past decade has seen an important shift in the rhetoric of anti-evolutionists, toward arguments of a strongly mathematical character. These mathematical arguments, while different in their specifics, follow the same general program and rely on the same…

Academic freedom means that both social studies educators and students have the opportunity to engage in intellectual debate without fear of censorship or retaliation. Academic freedom gives both social studies educators and students the right to express their views--in speech, writing, and/or through electronic communication without fear of…

Oslo Accords have stringently underscored that both rivalries, the Palestinians and the Israelis, must abstain from incitement to terror and violence. Their educational systems, consequently, have to refrain from convulsive, fundamentalist, and heinous skirmishes leading to stalled reconciliation. History school textbooks are deemed, from both…

Bjorn Wansink and his co-authors have aligned their teaching of a recent and controversial historical issue--the Cold War--in the light of a contemporary incident. This article demonstrates a means of ensuring that students understand that different cultures' views of their shared past are nuanced, rather than monolithic--a different concept in…

Teachers, both of science and of religion, have to help pupils to learn about the links between these subjects. An effective way to support this learning should start from the beliefs and ideas that pupils already have, ideas which might well be influenced by public debates, often characterised by controversy, between those holding strong beliefs…

Lisa Borgerding's work highlights how students can understand evolution without necessarily committing to it, and how learners may come to see it as one available way of thinking amongst others. This is presented as something that should be considered a successful outcome when teaching about material that many students may find incompatible with…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe a letter written to undergraduate students before their enrollment in a required foundations course, Service-Learning in English Education, taken before admission to the English education program at [the university]. The course, offered in the spring of 2017, came on the heels of Donald Trump's election to the…

Purpose: Grounded in the scholarship addressing teacher self-censorship around controversial topics, this paper aims to investigate a three-part research question: How do secondary English language arts (ELA) teacher--candidates (TCs) in the penultimate semester of their undergraduate teacher education program position political texts/speeches,…