In this manuscript, the authors examine three young adult novels using critical literacy as a lens for addressing issues of power and justice around sexual violence and the actions taken by characters to make social change in their fictional schooling contexts. This piece uses scholarship around youth activism in young adult literature to engage…

The purpose of the research was to determine the opinions of middle school students about the inclusion of controversial issues in social studies course. In this mixed methods study, an explanatory design was used, and the participants involved middle school students studying in Kirsehir, Osmaniye, and Diyarbakir provinces of Turkey during the…

Often intersecting with systemic inequity and injustice, young people's exposure to community violence has been linked to a myriad of developmental impacts. A growing literature demonstrates the potential of peace education programs to promote resilient and prosocial outcomes for these individuals. Still, more work can be done to understand…

This research is motivated by the high level of imitation of adolescents on the negative behavior of adults, in addition to the high concern of educators on the failure of character education in schools. As many as 40% of adolescents have been bullied at school and 32% reported being victims of physical violence indicating high levels of juvenile…

This article focuses on the Middle and High school level history education of a particular minority group within the Middle East, the Armenian diaspora. In this analysis, the target group includes the third, and sometimes the fourth, generation of refugees, therefore, these students are not only entirely Lebanese, but they have also no other…

Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchies that encourage both direct physical aggression and indirect harm through marginalization and exploitation. Although formal education systems are shaped by gendered patterns of social conflict, enmity, and inequity, schools can help young people to…

Schools in South Korea are experiencing problems such as bullying and school violence, so solutions are needed. Developing students' empathy could reduce or prevent these problems. Thus, the purpose of this study was to apply an empathy-based learning model to elementary social studies classes and document its effects on students' empathy at…

Jade Speaks Up is an Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC)-funded programme. It supports teachers to use process drama and other activities to introduce the topic of domestic violence while at the same time developing emotional literacy, trust, and self-calming skills. This article draws on qualitative and quantitative evaluation data to show…

Seeking to meet Freire's (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back:…

Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for perpetrators' actions. Students in a mixed ability class were given explanations of differing levels of complexity to evaluate, drawing on a wide range of complex…

This paper argues that multicultural education is an essential way of creating a safe and respectful campus. Examined from the perspective of power relations, schools are viewed as a site that helps maintain existing power relations by reinforcing the assimilation ideology. A drawback of this is that only one set of perspectives is valued. As a…

Black and brown people are being murdered by police officers at an alarming rate, and nothing is being done about it.

A successful middle school team of teachers employed effective middle level philosophy to structure a curriculum around themes that were relevant, challenging, integrative, and engaging for their particular students and community. Realizing that their young adolescents were involved in tough, delicate issues in their out-of-school lives, the…

The focus of this article is a school-based respectful relationships (RRs) pilot project involving grade 8 and 9 students. The project sought to develop a primary prevention approach to gender-based violence (GBV) in Australia. Of particular concern is the curriculum delivery component of a whole school approach that was piloted over a 10-week…

A 5-session curricular unit on the topic of face-to-face conflict mediation and on-screen media violence was administered to 85 sixth graders. Repeated measures analyses were employed to study the 57 students for whom matched questionnaires were available. Results show students became more likely to choose a non-aggressive approach to two of three…