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Several critical scholars recently have debunked the media's proclamation that with Obama's presidency, the United States has entered a post-racial era, with the media thus fabricating an image of a 'race neutral' American society (McCarthy, C. (2013). The problem with origins. Race and the contrapuntal nature of the education experience. In H. A. Giroux & P. Shannon (Eds.), Education and cultural studies (pp. 104–153). New York, NY; Zirkel, S., & Johnson, T. (2016). Mirror, mirror on the wall: A critical examination of the conceptualization of the study of Black racial identity in education. Educational Researcher, 45(5), 301–311). In this paper, first, I suggest that today's pedagogical conditions within schools built upon 'deficit thinking' (Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91) need to be critically considered as a source of inequity. Second, I contend that the historical legacy of the academic gap and the current health gap work implicitly as a new form of neocolonialism embedded in the current neoliberal colorblind era that continues to mark ethnic-minoritized young people as 'deficient'. Black and ethnic-minoritized young people's attempts to reconcile discrepancies between their own culturally relevant sense of self and the normative 'white' identity become a problematic and difficult process. Third, against the backdrop of intersecting forms of oppression, I discuss how the pedagogical infrastructure of the Body Curriculum allows young people to re-write the body 'from below' (Spivak, G. C. (1993). Outside in the teaching machine. New York, NY: Routledge) from the perspectives of the 'other' – ethnic-minoritized young people, to destabilize the 'center' position and at the same time, create powerful counter-stories for social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classrooms reflect and contribute to normative sex, gender and sexuality categories in school culture, rules and rituals. Texts, materials, curriculum and the discourse we employ as educators perpetuate the pervasiveness of these categories. This paper explores some of the less visible ways in which sex and gender categories are constructed in US English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, and how institutionalised heteronormativity positions students within normative categories of sex, gender and sexuality. These limiting conversations are difficult to identify and even more difficult to challenge. But it is precisely this dynamic – the subconscious reinforcing of sex and gender binaries – that upholds the dominance of the institution of heterosexuality. Merely addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) issues in the field of teaching reading, writing and literacy is an incomplete strategy. To disrupt normative narratives in the ELA classroom, educators must first identify the everyday practices occurring in school spaces, specifically recognising the teacher as a text. For sustained challenges to institutionalised norms, ELA teachers must engage in this work outside of LGBTQ-inclusive instructional materials and anti-homophobic education, and this paper offers specific methods for disrupting mainstream narratives in ELA classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many of the principles and practices that have influenced outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand find their genesis in the United Kingdom and North America. In recent times, many of these foundational assumptions have been called into question. This paper highlights how emerging ‘local’ voices are questioning and reframing how outdoor education is conceptualised and practiced. In large part this is due to a sense of distinctiveness borne from the bicultural foundations that underpin governance and policy-making. This paper explores how outdoor educators are developing pedagogies that acknowledge the particularities of our context, particularly the bicultural foundation of Aotearoa New Zealand. The paper highlights how social and cultural influences shape educational policy and how outdoor educators are responding, both theoretically and practically, to meet the needs of learners in an increasingly diverse society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports a design experiment that attempted to strike a balance between coverage and learning in an exam-oriented, college-preparatory, high school course-Advanced Placement (AP) US Government and Politics. Theoretically, the study provides a conceptual framework for penetrating the depth/breadth tension in such courses, which are known for coverage and perhaps 'rigour', but lag behind contemporary research on how people learn and what learning is. Methodologically, the paper details a mixed-methods study of an alternative approach to AP coursework, conducted with 314 students across three high schools. First-year findings indicate that a course of semi-repetitive, content-rich project cycles can lead to same or higher scores on the AP exam along with deeper conceptual learning, but that attention is needed to a collateral problem: orienting students to a new kind of coursework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we adopt Bernstein's notion of the pedagogic device to serve as a framework for explaining conflict and change in the field of literacy education across the past few decades, particularly in England, the USA and Australia. Following an overview of the pedagogic device and related constructs, we examine the relationship between the field of knowledge production and how this has been recontextualised into curriculum policy, firstly in the period when 'progressivist' pedagogy was in the ascendant, exemplified by the whole language movement, and then when a more 'skills' orientation took sway, with phonics as its touchstone. We argue that the pedagogic device provides a useful context for exploring how ideology operates both within fields and at the interfaces between fields. In particular, the sets of binary oppositions proposed by Bernstein can be used in crude form to describe the entrenched polarisations experienced in the field of literacy education - or they can be used in a more nuanced way to open up new possibilities for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

READ 180 is a reading program primarily designed for both struggling readers and English language learners (ELLs) in the United States. In this paper, we report findings from a qualitative study that investigated how four adolescent ELLs responded to using READ 180, particularly in relation to their cultural needs. Findings from the study showed that READ 180 provided some culturally responsive interaction and activities, principally in terms of thematic units, but was unable to respond to the unique cultural needs and background knowledge of each ELL to facilitate reading development. We discuss the implications of these findings for culturally responsive pedagogy and curriculum planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments, international organizations and academics have, in recent decades, expressed a sense of crisis in the practice of democracy based largely upon increasing levels of disengagement by citizens from even the most basic elements of civic life. One response has been to devise civics and citizenship education curricula for schools with the concomitant expectations of enhanced civic practice. Our examination of citizenship education programs has revealed considerable variation from country to country in the degree of success achieved in the design, development and implementation of programs. This paper examines recent developments in citizenship education in four leading Western democracies - Australia, Canada, England and the USA; each one with its own particular successes and shortcomings. It identifies several factors associated with the successful building of curriculum capacity for citizenship education and argues that these are fundamental for countries wishing to move beyond rhetoric and toward substance in citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A continued increase in US disaster losses suggests that there is still much to be learned about hazards. Hazards education, therefore, remains an important facet of preparedness. This paper investigates the science and social studies academic standards for 10 Southeast states to reveal the extent to which hazard topics are covered in grades K-12. The findings suggest that hazards are treated unevenly from one state to another, that geophysical events are overrepresented in the curriculum, and that little integration between science and social studies exists on the topic. One suggested remedy is to re-incorporate geography strongly within the state standards as an attempt to make both the physical and social aspects of hazards known to the student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When young children first come to school they bring with them a depth of being; the authors suggest that the educational community should respond to children with a pedagogy that is capable of nurturing this depth. The authors of this paper are teachers of many years’ experience. Their own work in classrooms has shown them that, paradoxically, depth in pedagogy is most surely to be found when teachers follow the light in the eyes of children. The authors draw upon a selection of vignettes and narratives taken from classroom experiences to describe how this is done. They also show how children and teachers can approach the complex learning that requires transcendence of the known. Notions of relational consciousness ( Hay, 2000 ), as well as ethical and spiritual sensibility ( Hay & Nye, 1998 ) are developed through reference to a range of educators including Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Stanley Cavell, Maxine Greene, Nell Noddings, Vivan Paley and Arthur Vogel. The broader educational community is reminded that school experiences should balance the measurable and the immeasurable. The authors question some aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (PL 107–110), sharing their concern that it may focus teachers’ attention too tightly on ‘that which is formed from without’ ( Dewey, 1938 , p. 17). The authors suggest that the weight of this legislation may result in the neglect of some very important aspects of learning. The broader educational community is invited to consider the implications of a pedagogy of depth, to become more aware of the skill of transcending known limitations through coming to shared understanding, and to find ways to reconcile the potential violence of legislated structures with the being-in-the-world of children in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]