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To support a sustainable planet, preschools need to engage young children with sustainability education. In the United States of America (USA), nature-based preschool programs are likely to promote environmental science and nature education, given their outdoor curricula, but very little is known about how these programs might also cultivate sustainability education. The purpose of the present study was to investigate nature-based preschool teachers' craft knowledge (Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992) about sustainability education within curricula as they presently exist. We interviewed 22 early childhood educators and administrators across nine early childhood nature-based education centers in the Northeastern United States. Following Davis' (2010) differentiation of education "in," "about," and "for" the environment, we found that most participants promoted activities "in" the environment, such as children spending time outdoors in the woods. Educators reasoned that they focused on promoting "in-nature" based activities because they believed that caring for and loving nature were foundational to promoting sustainability practices. Also, the educators promoted simple everyday pro-environmental behaviors, such as reusing containers, as they believed such acts lead to lifelong sustainable behaviors. Ultimately, we found that almost all of the teachers who participated in our study "wanted" to include sustainability education within their pedagogical approaches, and they did so by focusing on "every-day sustainability practices," but felt they could not engage in more ethically-driven sustainability practices due to curricular and parental barriers.

Educational lore casts grit as a panacea for solving long-standing achievement disparities. Fifteen years of empirical research has not supported this claim, yet many schools still uphold grit. Why? This article examines when (and if) K-12 educators should emphasize grit in classrooms. We first define the construct and offer evidence-based critiques of grit's conceptual claims. Next, we discuss grit's influence on school achievement, which has, at best, a negligible impact on school achievement. However, at worst, grit reifies social inequalities by boosting the performance of already-privileged individuals and harming minoritized groups and those in under-resourced learning contexts. Finally, we argue that grit does not compensate for adverse circumstances--including poverty, racial/ethnic discrimination, dis/abilities, and intersections--but instead reinforces privilege. Building on these insights, we close with several recommendations for policymakers, schools, and teachers to reduce the inequitable opportunity gaps that undermine achievement and support students with research-based interventions.

Short-term, faculty-led study abroad programs are increasingly featured in higher education internationalization efforts. As noted in the literature, such programs can aid in the development of varied student outcomes, including developing global citizenship. This paper presents an examination of the Global Engagement Seminar (GES) program, a short-term, faculty-led program at a private women's liberal arts college that has expressed a firm commitment to internationalization. A quasi-experimental design was employed to examine whether participation in the GES program influenced participants' antecedents, identification, and pro-social values of global citizenship (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller 2013a), and how the relationships compare with those of a matched comparison sample. The results of the survey indicated that GES completion moderated some but not all of the paths in the global citizenship model. Completing a GES was associated with non-significant relations among the moderated paths, a finding that emphasizes the need for a nuanced discussion of the complex relationship between short-term study abroad and global citizenship. Implications for faculty-led global engagement programs that aim to promote global citizenship among undergraduates in liberal arts contexts are discussed.

Playing drinking games can be characterized as a high-risk drinking activity because games are typically designed to promote heavy alcohol consumption. While research suggests that young adults are motivated to play drinking games for a variety of reasons (e.g., for thrills/fun, for the competition), the Motives for Playing Drinking Games measure has received limited empirical attention. We examined the psychometric properties of this measure with a confirmation sample of young adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk ( N = 1,809, ages 18-25 years, 47% men; 41% not currently enrolled in college) and a validation sample of college students ( N = 671; ages 18-23 years; 26% men). Contrary to the 8-factor model obtained by Johnson and Sheets in a study published in 2004, examination of the factor structure with our confirmation sample yielded a revised 7-factor model that was invariant across race/ethnicity and college student status. This model was also validated with the college student sample. In the confirmation sample, enhancement/thrills and sexual pursuit motives for playing drinking games were positively associated with gaming frequency/consumption and negative gaming consequences. Furthermore, conformity motives for playing drinking games were positively associated with negative gaming consequences, while competition motives were positively associated with gaming frequency. These findings have significant implications for research and prevention/intervention efforts.

Student respect toward teachers is traditionally considered in terms of behavior or authority. Yet, because of cultural differences and historic oppression of marginalized students in schools, not all students express respect in ways in which teachers are familiar. Because of structural inequalities and individual differences, standard behavioral definitions of respect are insufficient to address how students and teachers actually experience respect in the classroom. Using a comparative case study design, this study examined two female White novice teachers' beliefs and experiences of student respect within a novel relational respect framework. Results identified that teachers' respect beliefs were based on notions of authority, while respect experiences reflected authority and relationship-based respect. Importantly, these relationships were conceptualized as role model and friend-based respect. To help novice teachers balance their roles as both caring and authoritative figures, I propose that student respect should be thought of in relational, rather than behavioral, terms, and that teachers need to employ cultural competence when developing and maintaining their student-teacher relationships.

The climate crisis is both an environmental and moral issue. The United Nations' (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework for a global response to systematically challenge the world's reactions to the climate crisis, making sustainable education for all a priority. For such sustainability education to be effective, it should engage children in early childhood in, about, and for the environment, emphasizing the moral ramifications of climate equity and justice. We investigated in what ways 19 United States (US) nature-based early childhood educators focused their sustainability education (ECEfS) in, about, and for the environment. The types of activities that engaged about and for experiences were related to the moral principles of welfare, harm reduction, resource allocation, and equality, as well as teachers' reasoning about these experiences with children. Our findings suggest that educators' curricula and activities reflect potential moral issues related to sustainable development. However, educators did not engage children in moral reasoning about these issues. A possible explanation is US teachers' beliefs about developmental practice and children's capabilities leading them to rarely engage in moral reasoning about sustainability issues instead of scaffolding children to develop personal psychological resources, thereby supporting the SDG for sustainable education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To recognize and respond to the social injustice of climate change impacts, children require curriculum/pedagogies that render settler colonialism visible while dialoguing across pluri-versal perspectives. We present a case study of a school in Northeastern United States that taught the Abenaki language and knowledge on traditional Abenaki Land to non-indigenous students in a 4–5th-grade classroom. Utilizing Mignolo's [2011. Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial Studies, 14(3), 273–as283] concepts of 'epistemic disobedience' through 'de-linking' and 'de-centering' to challenge structural/curricular settler colonialism, we found that the school must first be open to, and appreciative of, non-dominant epistemologies to set the stage for epistemic disobedience. We identified teaching the language of the Land, on the Land as de-coloniality as praxis. However, we also identified curricular epistemic frictions with the Science teacher and their pedagogies which attempted to epistemically recentre students' thinking around the Standardized Account of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we describe several role-playing exercises on acculturation and relevant cultural adjustment processes that we incorporated into Tomcho and Foel's classroom activity on acculturation, and we report data that examine subsequent changes in students' responses on pretest and posttest measures shortly after the activity and present qualitative themes derived from students' reflections taken from an assignment at the end of the semester. We found no increases in students' perceptions that role-playing can help them gain a better understanding of acculturation. However, there were increases in students' awareness that acculturation is a real-world phenomenon, their understanding of how acculturation can impact people's lives, and their sensitivity and empathy for people who face some of the challenges associated with acculturation, even after controlling for students' pretest level of interest in cultural issues. Furthermore, thematic analyses indicated that students learned some of the challenges associated with acculturation and were able to label personal experiences associated with acculturation. They also gained concrete knowledge about and in-depth realization of the concept of acculturation. Instructors who teach psychology classes can use this exercise to complement traditional methods of teaching.

Despite extensive research on the importance of conceptualizing respect, little is known about how respect recipients and peer onlookers evaluate showing respect. Few studies have examined how such evaluations affect children's peer relations across four levels of social complexity (individual, interactions, relationships, and group), and few have assessed how gender influences the evaluations of showing respect to peers on peer social competence. This study used multi‐group structural equation modeling (MSEM) to examine how (a) cross‐evaluators' views on showing respect mediated the relation between multiple measures of social complexity and children's social competence and (b) whether gender moderated the above relations. Two hundred and sixteen participants were chosen from third to sixth graders (111 girls; Mage =10.30). They completed self‐reports of social competence and showing respect, and peer reports of classmates' showing respect, overt aggression, physical victimization, mutual friends, and social competence. Self‐evaluations of showing respect were negatively related to group‐level social competence. Peer evaluations of showing respect mediated the association between peer relations (specifically, number of mutual friends and overt aggression) and individual‐level and group‐level social competence. Gender moderated three paths in the model, namely links between overt aggression and (a) peer evaluations for showing respect; (b) group‐level social competence; and (c) individual‐level social competence. Negative associations were stronger for girls than for boys. The research findings suggest that gender norms shape the complex relations between children's showing respect and social competence, and an understanding of these relations must take into account differences in evaluations made by children and their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a theoretical contribution that bridges literature and theory in psychology, anthropology, and environmental education to address persistent concerns over how to create desired cultural change for more responsible environmental citizens. Cultural and personal narratives shape how we view ourselves, including our relationship to the environment. The frontier narratives that moved Americans westward, for example, have fed into Americans' drive towards excessive consumption and resulted in soil depletion among other challenges. Thus, it is important to consider how we form personal narratives and how personal narratives can shape our larger cultural narratives about our relationships with the environment. In this paper, we argue that childhood narratives are influenced by children's autobiographical memories (Fivush, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 37:59-82, 2007). Children's autobiographical memories become narratives when they are retold with others and given cultural meaning (e.g., Nelson and Fivush, Psychological Review 111(2):486-511, 2004). Psychological literature suggests that individual narratives not only shape the development of identity (Bluck and Alea, Critical Advances in Reminiscence Work pp. 61-75, 2002) but also reshape and inform larger cultural narratives (e.g., Fivush, Annual Review of Psychology 62:559-582, 2011). Applied to environmental education and activism, we suggest a new framework where simply by providing a space for and encouraging children to talk about ecological experiences, such as tending a garden or taking a walk, these experiences may shape a child's personal narrative (Fivush, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 37:59-82, 2007), creating a positive environmental identity (Clayton and Opotow 2003) and promoting a larger cultural narrative of environmental resiliency. If we change our children's stories then, we change ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]