How can youth become leaders in their communities' resilience efforts? The Lentes en Cambio Climático (LECC) filmmaking program aimed to empower students to investigate how a changing climate affects their lives and use their own findings to inspire local resilience. Secondary students in LECC created films that explore the experiences of…

Hmong Americans are originally a preliterate, seminomadic, and agrarian ethnic hill tribe from Southeast Asia and have now been in the United States for the last four decades. From the 1960s to the mid 1970s, the Hmong joined forces with the U.S. during the Secret War in Laos. After the U.S. pulled out of Laos in 1975, the new Laotian regime began…

This study examines the experiences of 15 Latinx sixth-grade students in Los Angeles who participated in a yearlong journalism-based media literacy program embedded in their social studies classes. Students researched, interviewed, wrote, and published articles on the Internet about social justice themes, like immigration, racism, and LGBTQ…

In the face of everyday classroom challenges, students display resilience by responding with increased agentic engagement. We hypothesized that this tendency toward greater initiative and lesser passivity was both an outcome of autonomy need satisfaction and autonomy-supportive teaching and a predictor of students' future capacity to experience…

This article features a collaborative autoethnographic examination of three adolescent-researchers' digital literacies. The participatory design punctuates the role of the adolescent-researchers as they explored their meaning-making practices. Such collaborative research, which included three adolescents and their parents, not only resurfaces…

Middle grades transitions pose challenges to many students who meet these tasks with varying levels of success. Contemporary developmental and strengths-based literature offers Hope Theory (Snyder, 2002), a research supported approach that can mitigate risks in school transitions. This article describes how middle grades educators can apply the…

Educators are often unaware of assets Mexican Indigenous children possess that originate from their cultural practices. Using Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Indigenous Heritage Saberes, our studies focus on three unique Indigenous learning communities that provide opportunities of empowerment for these students. We examine the experiences of…

The barriers to school attendance that affect young Aboriginal people in Australia are diverse, immense and well documented; however, except for a handful of studies, Aboriginal students' voices receive no platform for policy makers to hear them. In this paper, we present results from yarning circles about barriers to school attendance conducted…

The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the extended use of student-designed games. 207 students (grades: eight, nine, eleven) from one school participated. They were randomly divided in Experimental (student-designed games) and Equivalent group (traditional instruction). Both experienced the same learning units (two, 12 sessions) over the…

Efforts to solve and control social problems are the responsibility of social studies teaching and learning in junior high school. One way to support such efforts is by empowering students' critical thinking skills. For effective empowerment of critical thinking skills, emancipatory learning was developed. The goal is to enable students to…

Despite evidence that youths' literacy practices and identities are important contributors to literacy learning, studies of secondary literacy instruction often focus on understanding classroom storylines from the perspectives of teachers and schools. The purpose of this case study was to examine how one youth, Leo, shaped the storyline of his…

The purpose of this study was to explore, using the voices of diverse high school students, the classroom factors that are important for promoting classroom belonging and engagement. Thirty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with tenth grade students about classroom belonging and behavioral engagement in their favorite and least…

A growing body of research has suggested that teachers who give their students the opportunity to voice their opinions by purposefully negotiating the curriculum can improve engagement and realize a number of important affective goals. In this paper, we describe the study of one teacher, Jennifer, as she attempted to purposefully negotiate the…

Citizens Leadership Academy (CLA) in Ohio is preparing its middle schoolers for success in high school, college, and life. CLA is second among all public schools in the city on student growth. The school's eighth graders reach and surpass proficiency at a rate that is more than three times that of their peers across the city. Reading and math…

Despite the use of various anti-bullying programs, bullying continues to plague middle schools. However, there is an approach to bullying that complements other programs and can be easily integrated into course curriculum. This approach uses young adult novels to encourage adolescents to use perspective taking and empathy building through…