In this article, the authors explain how they leveraged the popularity of the "Star Wars" franchise to introduce a task steeped in popular culture as a fun way to engage their students in investigating complex mathematics that have real-life connections to careers in toy design and engineering design in general. The authors share various…

Creative pedagogies within youth work practice are well established. Practitioners working with young people are often called upon to utilise their own personal and professional 'toolboxes', as a way of supporting 'Creative Arts Youth Work'. However, within Higher Education (HE), creative methods for teaching and learning within the university…

Racializing affect draws on Black feminist theories to extend affect theory and related poststructuralist approaches within literacy studies. The authors examined literacies via a study of affect and youth of color in career and technical education (CTE) and the reconfiguration of CTE to enable radical change in the racializing experiences of/with…

Students are often portrayed as mindless consumers of popular culture, but a spike in social media engagement by Millennials and Generation Z reveals that K-12 youth are often at the helm of creating media content and impacting the trends which constitute popular culture. Coupled with the realities of this shifting landscape, an increasingly…

Trust is an important element of the learning processes and overall academic achievement of university students. It represents the highly sensitive domain of the intrapsychic life of each student. The paper states the original premise that trust or distrust respectively can be specifically related to anomalous psychical experience. As some…

Netflix series "Sex Education" is popular with young people in a way school-based programmes rarely are. Analyzing the first three seasons, this paper explores "what" and "how" educative content is offered and how young people are addressed as sexual subjects. It is argued that "Sex Education" radically…

Evidence suggests that participating in geek pop culture (e.g. fandoms, digital gaming, live action role playing, board gaming, etc.) can enhance women's interest in STEM by increasing their STEM-related efficacy. This study proposed that this effect hinges on the type of social experiences that women have in geek culture. Inclusive experiences…

This narrative inquiry research study explores the ways in which hip-hop culture functions as a form of resistance to the oppressive and traditional spaces that constitute predominantly white institutions (PWIs) of higher education. Despite the prevalence and power of hip-hop among Black collegians, little is known about how hip-hop can assist…

Joseph Campbell, a literature professor from Sarah Lawrence College, first recognized that the ancient story, the "Epic of Gilgamesh," followed a pattern of recounting the adventures of an archetypical hero that most stories and myths from all cultures across recorded history have followed. He called these similar patterns the monomyth…

This article provides tips on how popular media, specifically that of science fiction and horror, can be utilized in the classroom to elucidate complex concepts concerning race and ethnic relations. Drawing from the television series "Lovecraft Country," I highlight how concepts found in the work of authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois and…

Studies show the importance of non-cis-heteronormative referents for LGBT+. The object of this paper is to explore LGBT+ referents for teenagers on the basis of the results of the "Survey on Adolescence and Sexual Diversity," which was distributed to Spanish high school students in the fourth grade of compulsory secondary education The…

Chemistry is often seen as an abstract and content-heavy subject. Many students struggle with chemistry because they attempt to memorize the content without understanding the concepts. As a result, students often have misconceptions. COVID-19 has driven teaching and learning online, and an escape room teaching method, which is a way to enhance…

While many college courses on "world religions" have as their foundation an assortment of institutionally-authoritative, primary sources selected from a canon of sacred texts, this paper argues for a critical reevaluation of such textually-based teaching methodologies in light of the religious literacy standards set by the American…

The success of films such as "Avengers: Endgame," "Black Panther," and "Captain Marvel" has established the superhero genre in modern popular culture. Many students will have seen these films, or at the very least they are familiar with a number of the superhero characters. In the physics classroom, content based on…

This historical study explores John Dewey's ideas regarding music and music education through primary sources (his published writings, correspondence, and transcriptions of class lectures) and secondary sources (biographies and related scholarly literature). Dewey's belief that he was unmusical is presented, including via a consideration of his…