"Art and Social Justice Education" offers inspiration and tools for educators to craft critical, meaningful, and transformative arts education curriculum and arts integration projects. The images, descriptive texts, essays, and resources are grounded within a clear social justice framework and linked to ideas about culture as commons. Essays and a…

Gainer talks about the importance of connecting students' background knowledge, experiences, and interests to curricular goals. He highlights the voice of DeAndre, an eighth-grade boy in special education classes, whose participation in an after-school club led to the creation of a video. According to Gainer, "[W]hen given the opportunity to…

O'Brien (2003), when redefining the competencies of struggling students, said it makes sense to provide opportunities for at-risk or struggling students to explore topics of interest including, but not limited to, inquiry into popular media. This use of popular media should be a welcomed addition of the use of technology to improve students'…

One of the biggest challenges facing middle school social studies educators is creating powerful lessons that engage young adolescents in acquiring knowledge, stimulate critical thinking skills, inspire passionate interest in social studies and social issues, encourage active participation in civic life, and provide them with opportunities to…

It is time for new ideas and models for art education. Current developments in contemporary art, learning theory and in art education itself demand new approaches and provide inspiration and guidance for change. Each area brings particular components to the table but they all have one primary element in common: a call for art education that is…

Digital storytelling provides an opportunity for children and adolescents to design multimodal narratives that represent and reflect upon their lives and interests. In the article we look at how two English language learners, Diego, a male Mexican-American kindergartener, and Allie Feng, a female Chinese-American junior in high school, drew upon…

Substance use and HIV risk behaviors are increasing among African-American youth. Interventions that incorporate youth values and beliefs are needed to reduce this trajectory. Hip-hop plays an important role in the lives of many African-American youth and provides a context within which to prevent risky behaviors. The current study examines the…

The authors present activities that help students understand collective behavior in historical and contemporary settings. This topic is particularly appropriate for social studies content areas such as sociology, psychology, American history, and world history, yet it can also be included in the curriculum of other subject areas, such as language…

In this article, the author presents his survey on contemporary idol worship (idolatry) which is a new turn in mankind's phenomenon of social idol worship and an important manifestation of the cultural reconfiguration of contemporary times. The principal group of persons presently engaged in idol worship consists of children and young people.…

Researchers who have investigated the public understanding of science have argued that fictional cinema and television has proven to be particularly effective at blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. The rationale for this study lies in the notion that to teach science effectively, educators need to understand how popular culture…

Visual images create desire. As artifacts from contemporary visual culture, visual images inform everyone about society, telling everyone who they are and what they value. They register subliminally within everyone's psyches and alter everyone's perceptions, sometimes without everyone's knowledge. Visual images seem to keep coming and often…

Although the nature of the relationship of music on students' emotional development remains an issue for continued research, my overall purpose is to provide adults with research-based methods to help children become better consumers of hip-hop music. First, I identify research-based recommendations to prepare adults as facilitators of children's…

This article provides a conceptual account and empirical analyses of the development of "boundary-crossing competence"--the ability to function competently in multiple contexts--using representative cases from two after-school programs with immigrant and low-socioeconomic status students. Our findings suggest that organizational designs…

Comic art is one of the most popular storytelling media around the globe. From classic American comic strips to Japanese Manga, comics cover subjects ranging from humorous teen angst to social commentary. Comics class in an afterschool program is a natural draw for many young people. Older youth, in particular, vote with their feet when it comes…

During the 2004-2005 school year, Maya Kadakia conducted a pilot study of her master's project which focuses on how student engagement is affected by a curriculum that incorporates popular culture. She created a Language Arts unit which incorporates the video game Morrowhid. Maya teaches seventh grade Language Arts and Social Studies at a diverse…