This study explores the potential of empowering children as peace agents through education by using the case of the TEC4Schools program. The program is based on Allport's Contact Theory and promotes prolonged exposure to the 'other' culture among culturally diverse groups of students. It is based on the hypothesis that extended contact periods…

The Critical Literacy (CritLit) project promotes using critical texts to engage readers in examining their lived experiences and understanding of social justice issues. This study used a qualitative participatory approach with a narrative design to research the students' engagement in a book club using critical texts. Participants were fourth- and…

Emotion is a central aspect for protecting the environment in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). As such, positive emotions toward nature can increase motivation to learn and take environmental action. This qualitative case study explored the complex interrelationship among place-based education, emotions and values related to ESE,…

Discussions about power have only recently begun to appear in the learning sciences literature. Most of this important work takes a critical perspective; the present work complements these efforts by examining power sharing as a catalyst for empowerment in teacher-researcher co-design. Even though teacher-researcher collaborations are discussed in…

Elementary students are often hampered by a tendency to ascribe innovation to increasing human intelligence or individual agency rather than increased information, better access to information, or collective and institutional agency. As a result, they struggle to build evidence-based interpretations of the distant past. A fifth-grade…

Objective: This article describes the process and outcomes of an abstinence-orientated empowerment program that was delivered to an adolescent multicultural population. Method: The study employed a time-limited pretest-posttest OXO design with an N of 130 drawn from youth in public schools from fifth grade to ninth grade. A paired-samples t test…

What happens when standards, teaching for understanding, research based strategies for improving student achievement, and teacher inquiry become a whole? Power Teaching results. A prototype in development at an urban, elementary school in the South, power teaching connects the dots of state standards, Harvard Project Zero's teaching for…

The Youth Empowerment Strategies (YES!) project is an afterschool empowerment program and research project for underserved early adolescents. Central to YES! is an empowerment intervention that provides early adolescents with opportunities for civic engagement with other youth around issues of shared concern in their schools and neighborhoods.…

This article describes an afterschool program called "Poetic High" in which the author shares insights on the transformation of oneself as a teacher into more of a guide and a mentor. It outlines the process of transforming the attitudes of students from being passive learners into being poets of learning and life. The Poetic High created by this…

This qualitative study uses an analysis of literature circle discussions to illuminate larger issues of gender and social class for a group of fifth-grade students. By examining how four students were positioned and positioned themselves within these literature conversations, I demonstrate that the roles reproduced certain gender- and…