A recent study claiming to provide a basis for gifted education to drop the construct of overexcitabilities in favor of the construct of openness to experience and align itself with the Five Factor Model and a talent development perspective on gifted education is shown to be without merit. An analysis shows that the study supports the conclusion…

The authors used a youth lens to interrogate representations of adolescent characters and experiences that reinforce or contradict social constructions of youths across young adult novels commonly read in secondary classrooms. The authors found examples across all 10 examined novels of adolescent characters taking on adult-like roles, exercising…

This article advocates for the need to develop a more critical approach to theorizing human rights curriculum and critiques dominant/western liberal interpretation of human rights discourse that claims to be humanitarian and benevolent. Liberal approach to (global) human rights discussion places emphasis on individual rights and views concepts…

This article argues that current approaches to participatory design research (PDR) risk eliding the affective life of making educational change by locating change in cultural mediation alone. Locating change only in mediation subordinates affect, potentially overlooking lived dimensions of learning and being essential to lasting, transformative…

This paper aimed to problematise what is meant by 'difference' and consider what such a reinterpretation might mean for methodological interventions in sex education research. Our concern is the tendency for sex education research to treat difference as a set of categories to be "added-on", such as religious difference, cultural…

Character education considers teachers to be role models, but it is unclear what this means in practice. Do teachers model admirable character traits? And do they do so effectively? In this article the relevant pedagogical and psychological literature is reviewed in order to shed light on these questions. First, the use of role modelling as a…

High school social studies teachers are always struggling to "cover the content" while addressing an ever-expanding set of additional demands. The Common Core expects literacy instruction to be incorporated into social studies. NCSS's new C3 Framework emphasizes teaching students to ask questions, evaluate sources, and communicate…

In a thematic study she calls The Hero's Journey, the author introduces the classical archetype of the hero and the journey of the hero with Homer's "The Odyssey." After all, the wily tactician dreams up the idea for the wooden horse trick, thereby winning the war for the Greeks. He visits hell and, against all odds, makes it back. He defeats the…

Preparing children and adolescents for sexual safety and reproductive responsibility lies at the heart and purpose of puberty/sexuality education. The document of International Technical Guidance released by UNESCO in December 2009 aims to provide an evidence-based and rights-based platform offering children and adolescents vital knowledge about…

Within the past decade, adolescents have become an increasingly scrutinized age group in the United States and abroad. The stereotypical image of youth and of adolescence by extension--as a boisterous embodiment of the "unruly" stage of life between childhood and adulthood--has long dominated discussions about definitions of and subsequent policy…

The significance of media literacy pedagogy in American public schools is crucial in helping teenagers comprehend the visual media world in which they live. The world is currently a place where our youth are inundated with visual messages that must be received, interpreted and critically analyzed. The dilemma is not so much in the reception of the…

This article describes the formation and enactment of a student and teacher-generated framework for re-authoring a troubling representation of Black masculinity in a popular culture narrative. This data-driven framework highlights the ways students and teacher provided a means for literacies to serve students' desire to re-author images and words…

Those who view the right to a religiously neutral, empirically-based public education as fundamental have been able to do little more than watch in terror as abstinence-only sex education, which excludes information on either safe sex or birth control, has come to prevail in United States (US) schools. Among causes for concern are abstinence…

Discusses how myth may be applied in the classroom to the reading of a popular novel, Felice Holman's "Slake's Limbo." (MM)

This dissertation presents a method for teaching secondary students many recognized critical approaches to the study of literature, so that they may choose the methods that function best for them with a given work. The novels of a contemporary American author, Jack Matthews, are used to show how the method operates. The investigator reports many…