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The continuation of racial inequities in the United States has ignited the recent Black Lives Matter Movement, a protest of police brutality and gun violence. Black lives matter in public school classrooms, too--where students of color face barriers to equitable educational experiences. The Children's Defense Fund Freedom School program is a major component in developing critical literacy skills through critique, inquiry, and transformation through social justice and action. Critical literacy is enacted through identity--mainly as difference, self, consciousness, narrative, and positionality. Historical and contemporary relevance of Freedom Schools connects to the urgency of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

When companies take a stance on sociopolitical issues, it is considered corporate social advocacy (CSA). This article examines to what extent perceived corporate motives of engaging in CSA affect consumer skepticism and brand equity. It is one of the few published studies of consumer attitudes toward companies' CSA involvement. An online survey was conducted (N = 375). It provides evidence that consumer assessments of the motives that inspire CSA are similar to the better-researched motives that inspire CSR. The findings imply that companies need to develop a good understanding of the consumers' attributions when engaging in CSA.

There is a dearth of studies exploring how younger children engage in civic life, what may be expected of them given their age, and what instruments may be used to capture their levels of civic engagement. Addressing these questions, this article presents key findings from a pilot study that aimed to create a validated instrument designed to measure the civic engagement of primary school children. Based on a survey administered to 655 primary school children aged 9-11 across England, this article focuses on the new measure that was specifically designed, and then tested and validated through both exploratory and confirmatory analyses. The findings validate a tripartite measure of civic engagement that assesses the civic attitudes, actions and awareness of 9-11-year-olds. This measure was found to be both practical and efficient in its administration, and it has been shown to be easily comprehensible by this age group. This new measure addresses an important gap in the literature on civic engagement in children, providing researchers with a validated tool to effectively measure civic engagement in 9-11-year-olds. The findings have implications for both researchers and educators interested in designing and evaluating interventions aimed at promoting civic engagement among younger children.

Purpose: This article aims to present the results of an exploratory pilot study that demonstrates the validity of a self-created implementation methodology to develop the students' level of perceived achievement of the social entrepreneurship competency and explain how this is equally valid in developing the perceived achievement of the complex thinking competency. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a multivariate descriptive statistical analysis, this article offers the results of an educational intervention carried out on a sample group of students from a Mexican university before and after a training program in social entrepreneurship. Findings: The favorable results showed that the proposed methodology is valid for scaling social entrepreneurship and complex thinking competencies and their subcompetencies. Originality/value: These results are not only academically valuable, as they highlight the need to delve into the relationship between these two competencies, but they also allow us to appreciate the ample opportunities for practical implementation of entrepreneurship programs by universities and other institutions to work directly with social entrepreneurs and seek alternatives to develop skills through devising, proposing and developing social entrepreneurship projects.

This article describes a longitudinal study of a social justice-oriented service-learning course at a large diverse university. The course elucidates the social causes of social problems, with poverty as a case example. Research shows that service-learning meaningfully impacts college students but that outcomes vary across courses and students, and scholars have called for greater attention to these sources of variation and mechanisms of change. Placing social justice at the center of this inquiry means focusing on a particular subset of outcomes and student characteristics. The study evaluated changes in outcomes central to social justice pedagogy, including explicit and implicit attitudes, explored whether these changes were moderated by students' social class, and tested whether attitude changes predicted civic behavior a year later. Compared to a control group (n = 172), students who took the course (n = 113) increased systemic attributions for poverty, decreased individualistic attributions, increased their awareness of class privilege, and increased their general social justice attitudes. They increased their civic action in terms of political action and general civic engagement. Implicit attitudes did not shift. Students who experienced more financial stress changed less in terms of deficit-oriented thinking but changed more in terms of system-oriented thinking. Pedagogical implications for social justice-oriented courses are discussed, including the need to consider techniques targeting deficit-oriented thinking and system-oriented thinking separately.

Purpose: To analyze the effects of debates on social entrepreneurship (SE) in physical education teacher education students (n = 38) from an urban university. Participants discussed the role that society, social class, gender, race, and violence play in sports. Method: A convergent parallel mixed-methods design with methodological triangulation was employed: QUAN + QUAL. Results: The quantitative results provide evidence regarding the positive effect of debates on SE. The qualitative analysis complements this outcome by describing how SE was developed, for example, facing a new teaching methodology, being challenged by peers and/or the teacher, analyzing different opinions and their implications, developing new arguments for discussion, discussing topics according to the students' interests, and leading the conversation while debating. Data transformation and sentiment analyses provide supplemental information regarding the benefits provided. Discussion/Conclusion: Our results display how debates improve SE in physical education teacher education students, calling for new research in this direction.

This paper explores how teachers in training co-created a canon of texts for teaching about trauma issues, including sexual violence. This paper represents a piece of a larger feminist study where 23 teacher candidate participants took up readings in a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with Canadian adolescent literacy learners. Overall, the data strongly indicated that many participants prioritized promoting social action in their emerging pedagogies, including anti-rape efforts. Discourses of readiness to combat rape culture especially surfaced, signalling that overwhelmingly, participants were authoring themselves as educators who prioritize creating community and enacting resistances to oppressions in some way. As such, a key finding examined in this paper was how participants collectively built on the initial corpus of trauma texts in the study's text set that they advocated for or planned to teach in their future education careers.

Drawing insight and inspiration from our comrade Aziz Choudry, in this paper, we explore the role of political education and knowledge making in social movement struggles to contest the state and capital around access to water and other public services. Drawing on a decade of organising work in the city of Cape Town and at wider scales, we highlight the importance of learning and knowledge generation in social movements and the everyday strategies of organising movements use to overcome divisions based on 'race', gender, class and nationality, and to confront those obstacles presented or exacerbated by exclusionary governance arrangements, commodified service delivery and the coercive apparatus of the state. Rejecting elite led organising in favour of working-class self-organisation, these strategies seek to build individual and organisational solidarity across the diverse and fragmented experiences of those living on the margins of capitalist society.

Actualizing education beyond the scope of traditional schooling and incorporating elements of critical pedagogy and social transformation are essential for efforts aiming to reduce inequalities and enhance the livelihoods of excluded populations. This article examines emancipatory education through a Freirean lens by considering its dimensions of critical pedagogy, both in practice and in theory. Drawing from a case study of an NGO-led initiative enabling hundreds of young people from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to formulate and implement their own ideas for social action, the article examines the links between the program's objectives and practices and the aspects of the negotiated curriculum, problem-posing education, dialogical learning, and praxis that form the theoretical underpinnings of emancipatory education. The case study findings, which highlight the stages of the educational program, reveal how young people are empowered to challenge prevailing environments of exclusion and advance practices of positive community social regeneration. The study, thus, provides evidence of a form of education for social transformation (EST) which can contribute meaningfully to a peaceful struggle for social change while simultaneously redefining and humanizing education as a practice of emancipation.

The United States is at a turning point in its history. Insurrection has become a dominant motif describing a country torn between the promises and ideals of democracy and an emergent authoritarianism that trades in lies, lawlessness, and a rebranded fascist politics. In this article, I analyze the contrasting visions, politics, and role of education that are central to both notions of insurrection. In the first instance, I argue that insurrectional authoritarianism is wedded to a fascist legacy that calls for racial purity, militarism, ultra-nationalism, and state terrorism. In the second instance, I analyze insurrectional democracy as a mode of resistance that has a long legacy in the battle for racial justice, economic equality, and a politics of inclusion. The article explores how both positions are motivated by particular understandings of education, agency, and the future. Within this distinctive historical moment, both participate in a landscape in which images, the social media, and the Internet play a decisive role in merging political education, power, and cultural politics. Both notions of insurrection infuse cultural politics with a specific language that narrate their visions and work to produce particular modes of agency, identifications, and social relations. At the core of the article is an analysis of how each narrative uses language and cultural politics to define their different notions of insurrection and how education and politics merge to create militarized identities operating in a warring environment in which the very categories of politics, education and democracy are on trial. I conclude that insurrectional authoritarianism has created the context for a civil war marked by a number of counter-revolutionary interventions in which ideas are married to violence and present a threat to democracy. I conclude with a call for an insurrectional democracy that makes education central to politics in order to produce an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a mass movement in defense of socialist democracy.

This study draws on the Theory of Planned Behavior to empirically examine the relationships between attitude toward behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control and university students' social entrepreneurial intentions, while also examining the moderating roles of entrepreneurship education and academic major. Through multiple linear regression analysis, we tested our hypotheses on a sample of 832 college students for their social entrepreneurial intentions. Results indicate that all aspects of the Theory of Planned Behavior have a positive and significant impact on social entrepreneurial intention. More interestingly, the positive effects of attitude toward behavior and perceived behavioral control on social entrepreneurship intention are strengthened when students attend a university entrepreneurship program and have a non-business major. On the basis of three-way interaction analysis, our findings suggest that college students' social entrepreneurship intention is highest for non-business majors with a favorable attitude towards behavior, have strong behavioral control, and receive entrepreneurship education. This paper elucidates behavioral mechanisms that determine university students' intention to engage in social enterprises.

This qualitative study explores how middle school students in the Western United States participated in a curricular unit that focused on action for socioenvironmental sustainability. Using inductive coding and building on prior research, I examined actions that students took during this sustainability unit and how students talked about action after the unit concluded. I developed a visual tool for analyzing action in terms of scale: the "action scale framework." I used this tool to examine students' enactment of action and ideas about action on a continuum from individual to collaborative changemaking and the intended outcome of action as directed at behavior transformation or system transformation. Action across scale is necessary for addressing socioenvironmental challenges more justly. These findings suggest possibilities and challenges for designing action-oriented learning environments that support heterogeneous outcomes and more collective action.

In these challenging times, it is essential to activate student voice and prepare them for civic engagement and social action. Social-emotional learning strategies integrated into the social studies curriculum help to accomplish just that. Laura Bond, Maurice Elias, and Samuel Nayman describe the STAT program, which enables students to build both social-emotional and citizenship skills that will help them to take action on the issues they care about now and in the future.

Evidence from the UN World Youth Report (2015) suggests that young people, while increasingly disengaged with formal political processes, are motivated by cause-related social action. Higher Education (HE), through research and partnership, provides ideal learning spaces to explore cause-related social action. However, as HE partnership opportunities continue to be reframed under a narrative of employability and one-off participation, there is a risk that these experiences miss an opportunity to critically engage young people with issues at a socio-political level. This research paper considers the potential of participatory action research (PAR) as a pedagogical mechanism for re-politicising social action for students in a UK HE context. The project explores the experiences of 160 undergraduate students, working in partnership with 400 young children, aged 2-10 years, to investigate and co-construct their views and action concerning causes represented by local community organisations. Findings suggest that using participatory, youth-action approaches students shifted their self-identified positions from a non-social-orientated approach to establishing them as advocates for causes and children's voices. We argue that PAR, as a learning experience, and service-learning pedagogy open up an alternative experience of social action through an educational context with engagement and consideration of social issues. In conclusion, we call for new alliances between HE, young people, and community organisations, to produce, through enquiry, critical knowledge aimed at social transformation, which can open-up authentic democratic spaces within the learning communities in HE and its networks.

This study explored types and intensities of students' emotions related to participation in school-based SSI club project related to climate change (CE). Ten high school students participated twice a week for 7 weeks in club activities to model causes/impacts of CE, explore local problems related to CE, and plan and participate in social action. Researchers used the control-value theory to analyze how students' emotions changed over time and found that while some initially reported negative emotions persisted after the club activities concluded (anxiety, fear, guilt, and despair), students also reported more positive emotions (sense of accomplishment, confidence) than before. Students' emotions became more positive when planning and participating in social action and some emotions (guilt, anxiety, and expectation) helped to drive students to action. We discuss implications for club activities as a way to educate students about CE and we raise questions for future research.

Campuses are developing new ways to respond to complex social, cultural, economic and environmental problems by adapting their educational approaches and their scholarship to address a changing world order. At the same time, government agencies, nonprofit organizations and businesses are embracing collaborative approaches to community problem-solving. These collaborative approaches, on and off campus, are creating new forms of university-community engagement that will require us to rethink the nature of the societal roles we play and how we generate knowledge, create an inspiring educational environment, and assist our students in acquiring the knowledge and skills they will need to work effectively with others to address the complex societal problems that they will face throughout their lives.

Environmental issues can serve as a marvelous framework for high-level student analysis of critical scientific and social concerns. We describe a series of activities and discussions that motivate students to explore environmentalism, sustainable development, carbon offsets, and related ideas with an engaged learning format that helps students to reveal the gray areas that exist when deciding upon social policy that is based on the impact of science. We summarize research supporting engaged learning in STEM education, and provide a successful example of this changing educational paradigm. Although we present data to show that students value the paradigm, the paper is intended to highlight the instructional, rather than evaluative, aspects of the model.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how preservice teachers conceive of and implement social actions on their college campuses related to a chosen social problem developed in a young adult novel and to examine how social action projects develop teacher candidates' critical literacies. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative exploratory multiple case study (Stake, 2005) investigated 70 pre-service teachers on two college campuses over two semesters as they engaged in social action projects. The researchers engaged in layers of open and thematic coding through the theoretical lens of critical literacies. Findings: Preservice teachers engaged in a range of direct and indirect action and, as a result, experienced varying levels of self-efficacy and impact. While most felt their endeavors were successful, those who conducted awareness campaigns noted an inability to measure the effects they had on their communities. Their development of critical literacies through social action was evidenced in the partnerships across campus they established as well as their levels of engagement with peers and local officials. Originality/value: While the results of conducting social action with youth in secondary classrooms are well established in the literature, lesser well known are ways to engage preservice teachers in such endeavors. This study illustrates not only how teacher candidates can engage in social action as aligned with young adult literature but also offers insights gained from those processes.

In community interventions more generally, the concept of fidelity refers to the degree to which a program is delivered as intended. The present paper discusses ways in which fundamental aspects of participatory research challenge the concept of fidelity and differ from more traditional science-dominated approaches. We begin with a discussion of the fidelity concept and some of its strengths and limitations. We then discuss both social problems and proposed solutions as representing complex problems defying simple or permanent solutions. We suggest that three prominent aspects of participatory research highlight this complexity and pose challenges in assessing fidelity. First, in participatory research, the goal is not only scientific but also social action on a local issue as well. Second, the participatory process among varied partners is itself part of the intervention itself to be understood as affecting both processes and outcomes. Third, the goals of participatory research include community-level as well as individual-level changes. These issues are illustrated in a discussion of how culture is conceptualized and acknowledged in fidelity assessment. We conclude with some recommendations for approaching fidelity in participatory research in a way that appreciates its differences from more traditional paradigms underlying community interventions.

Civic engagement and social justice have received heightened attention in music education in the decade since Jorgensen posed the question 'Why should music educators not be interested in justice?' To this end, a social-justice focused initiative was piloted with choral ensembles at two public universities in the Midwestern US using human trafficking as the focal issue. A pre-experimental design was used in two paired studies to address research questions: (1) What is the impact of participation in the initiative on students' knowledge, engagement, actions, and attitudes? (2) What are students' recommendations for initiative refinement? Results indicated statistically significant increases across all eight outcomes for student participants in both studies. Recommendations highlighted students' desire for consistent knowledge-building throughout the year and instructor-provided informational resources. Overall, pilot findings suggest this is a promising approach for music educators desiring to incorporate social justice engagement initiatives within already content heavy music courses.

Climate education is increasingly being taught in schools, and groups are looking to pass climate education into law. This article looks at climate justice, a framing of the overarching climate movement, to advocate for an education that inspires action. Drawing from Freire's 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed', it makes a case for problem-posing education over the banking model of education, specifically when teaching about social issues.

A central goal of civic and multicultural education is preparing young people to participate in deliberatively informed action on important social issues. In order to achieve this goal, educators need to cultivate young people's innate but partial 'sprouts' of benevolence, which are rooted in feelings of empathy and compassion. Without a sense of benevolence, students are unlikely to be motivated to deliberate and take action on the needs of others. Consequently, curriculum related to public issues should begin by engaging students with knowledge of other people's lives and concrete circumstances. By encountering rich and emotionally compelling accounts of the lives of others, students' sense of benevolence can be extended beyond the people and situations they know best. This forms the basis for subsequent curriculum encounters with differing perspectives and worldviews, as well as with structural causes of social issues and potential implications of civic action taken to address them.

The article adds to a growing conversation that recognizes and supports young children's civic capabilities, positioning them as citizens-now and not simply citizens in the future. They detail how three different classrooms sought to work with children to engage in social action on behalf of their broader community. This response wonders alongside the authors about how adults can best work with children to support their civic action and proposes that teachers engage children's visions for a more just, humanizing democratic society. The article offers three avenues of action for teachers as they support children's civicness: reflection on our views and experiences with democracy, educating ourselves in the traditions and histories of community organizing, and developing practices that involve children's visions of society. [This article is in response to "That's My Voice! Participation and Democratic Citizenship in the Early Childhood Classroom." For that article, see EJ1274025.]

This paper shares a participatory action research study conducted by a team of researchers at a university laboratory school in collaboration with three classroom teachers and 60 preschoolers. The team engaged in this research in order to examine the ways in which school personnel could generate more authentic community service experiences with, rather than simply for, children. Findings illustrate that with the support of adults, children generated ways to address issues, discussed their ideas with adults, reflected on their actions, and understood that their voices were being heard beyond the school community. With this increased participation, young people were able to show and exercise crucial skills and dispositions for democratic citizenship.

Change comes when individuals transform themselves first and then move outward into the world. The C3 Framework lays out a vision for civic action within Dimension 4 of the Inquiry Arc in a section titled "Taking Informed Action." The Framework emphasizes that "It is important to note that taking informed action … should be grounded in and informed by the inquiries initiated and sustained within and among the disciplines. In that way, action is then a purposeful, informed, and reflective experience." The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) breaks down Taking Informed Action into three sequential steps: "understand," "assess," and "act." To understand, students apply the inquiry's concepts or enduring ideas to a civic context. Students assess the topic by considering different perspectives on the issue, ways to address it, and the potential impact of their actions. When students act, they apply their learning in a civic action. In this article, the authors discuss how to support students in the understand-assess-act sequence of the IDM Blueprint and to provide them agency in determining their ultimate action. In doing so, the authors hope to inspire even the most reticent teacher to dip a toe into inquiry-based civic action.

A sense of place has been an integral part of service-learning since the field's inception; it describes one's attachment to a particular geographic place and is often a precursor to engaging in action to care for localities and their inhabitants. But practicing service-learning in online environments requires reconsidering this core value. Should the field celebrate the "liberation" of service-learning from geographical constraints, as some authors suggest, or reclaim a geographically bounded sense of place as an essential part of service-learning? The authors recommend finding ways to cultivate a virtual sense of geographic place in online learning environments to enhance a critical understanding of physical localities, better prepare service-learners to enter service sites, and deepen connections among participating students. By providing examples of online collaborative mapping and virtual community projects, this paper considers some implications for theorizing sense of place for online and face-to-face service-learning in the digital age.

Recent surveys have indicated a worryingly low level of support for democracy among Australian youth and around the world. For example, in the 2017 Lowy Institute Poll, 36% of Australians indicated that, in some circumstances, a nondemocratic government is preferable. Such concerns, while hardly new, have triggered calls for more civic education and civic involvement. Linked to these concerns are discussions about the way new media (including mobile accessibility, the internet, and social media) is reshaping our understandings of public participation in democracy, especially the way that we conceive of the public sphere. Schools are often seen as important sites for the development of civic values in democratic countries. Having the skills and knowledge to navigate the public sphere in a critical way as well as contribute to it meaningfully is an important part of any activist approach to citizenship education. This paper presents one such example of radical citizenship education, Justice Citizens, and presents a framework that fellow critical educators might use to encourage young people to contribute to the public sphere not as citizens-in-waiting but as justice-oriented citizens.

This essay explores a tension in the Catholic theological classroom brought about when teachers aim at dismantling racial injustice with resources from antiracist pedagogy. Where Catholic social thinkers package together reflection, judgment, and action, antiracist educators recommend forestalling the last step--action. The essay's primary aim is to clarify the tension--why it comes about and how it reveals itself--and proposes that Catholic theological educators respond by helping students broaden their understanding of action.

This paper explores intersections among art, action, and community. It describes sociopolitical aspects of the author's art therapy work with survivors of repressive regimes living in Brazil, China, and Denmark and considers ways that unique historical and social processes influenced her conceptualization and practice of social action art therapy.

Teaching character virtues and social-emotional skills in isolation of social-political context is incomplete at best. Further, racial and ethnic inequity in social action and political influence spans from youth to adults and must be addressed (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008b). Middle school is a crucial developmental time to cultivate students' social-emotional and character competencies alongside their social actions promoting positive change (Jones & Kahn, 2017). This article describes how our social-emotional and character development curriculum, called Mastering Our Skills and Inspiring Character (MOSAIC), inspired students to improve their school, community, and world. The lessons required students to engage in the kind of active learning that the Association for Middle Level Education champions through its statement, This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents, by applying the skills they learn in the classroom to relevant social issues (National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010). Our article brings this approach to life by illustrating its use in an under-resourced, highly stressed, urban school system.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how curriculum grounded in critical literacy strategies supports critical language awareness and activism across social issues and identities. The research is grounded in theories of critical literacies, discursive practices, and situated privilege. Critical practitioner research was used to collect classroom data, which were then coded and analyzed through critical discourse analysis to examine language, literacy, and examples of activism in the data set. Findings indicate that although strategies such as decoding discourses and ideologies, revealing connections between language and power, and engaging in social action are important to developing critical literacies across social issues, understanding privilege, power, and one's own role in maintaining oppression are also crucial to developing critical literacies around issues of situated privilege. Implications for teachers include consideration for the complexity of identities and social locations in critical literacy pedagogies.

This article examines how teachers can develop a sense of social activism in students through critical multiculturalism. Drawing upon data from a nine-month participant observation study of a first-grade public charter school classroom in central California, this article highlights how teachers can integrate critical multiculturalism within an elementary classroom by connecting artists' lives to social issues to raise awareness of social injustices, promote critical reflection and consciousness, and develop a sense of social activism. Particular attention is paid to how teachers can incorporate this curriculum into their own classrooms.