Evolution is central to biology education and yet, it is often one of the most misunderstood and controversial topics that biology educators must teach. Research spanning the last four decades has shown that students continue to struggle, even with direct instruction, to understand the process of evolution by natural selection. In my first…

Living in a conservative and traditional society, Kazakhstani people are generally reluctant to openly discuss sex education with their children. However, issues such as family violence, teenage pregnancy and high rates of STIs demonstrate the need to implement good-quality school-based sex education. Access to sex education is the inherent right…

The language and cultural priorities in Australian Indigenous education have been priority areas since the inaugural national Indigenous education policy was launched in 1989. For over thirty years, these priorities have sat awkwardly in the largely non-Indigenous teaching profession and classroom teachers continue to struggle with how to embed…

The article examines the mutual relations between education, biopolitics and authority. The objective is to deconstruct authority in relation to three biopolitical issues: abortion, sexual orientation, and IVF. This deconstruction is performed by analysis of the manifestations and strategies of authority employed in Polish textbooks for four…

This qualitative, multi-site case study examines two cases focusing on the dialogic relations of secondary English students and their teachers, as they interact with print and non-print pop culture texts related to sports and/or music as part of a curriculum unit on a politically sensitive topic. The purpose of this inquiry is to examine…

Traditional commercial textbooks at the college level are slow to update, often have problematic language or content related to queer and trans identities, and are likely to be prohibitively expensive. As an alternative, I explore the benefits of using open educational resources (OER) and free-to-access resources for a human sexuality course. I…

In this essay we explore how pernicious social narratives affect schooling and suggest rethinking leadership may ameliorate issues of injustice in education. We reject the idea that school leaders must necessarily be politicians who serve as bureaucratic management-oriented functionaries. We claim instead they are intellectual leaders who might…

History education that deals with the controversial and sensitive past is a vehicle for peacemaking in conflict-affected societies. However, its success is dependent on teachers taking risks to challenge entrenched 'us versus them' views of history. How does a student teacher in Northern Ireland grapple with risk-taking when learning to teach…

In this article, Emil Saetra examines how teachers and students construct and experience aims and goods in classroom discussions of controversial issues. This study is situated within the emerging tradition of empirical ethics, and the research strategy comprised two main steps. First, Saetra used interview data to analyze, via the experiences of…

This article presents an analysis of historical thinking operations deployed in a student debate on Chile's difficult past. A discussion was held in a public school during the second semester of 2019 on sensitive issues in recent history. Twenty-seven students between eleven and fourteen years of age participated in the activity, corresponding to…

Posthumanist and antiracist thinkers contend that justice, as articulated by Karen Barad, demands response-ability to ghosts of the past and those yet to come. Normative conceptions of the child do not account for these ghostly engagements. When such normative conceptions direct a teachers' gaze, the child speaking with ghosts may feel they too…

Dealing with controversial issues is one of the most important tasks teachers perform. In this article, the author presents a few core concepts and research findings that are essential for understanding what teaching controversial issues is all about and why it is so important to develop capability in this methodology.

Climate change science is complex and perceived to be controversial in nature by some stakeholders. Yet from the perspective of educators and policy makers, climate change science is an important topic to be taught in secondary science education. The presence of controversy can influence teachers' instructional decisions and cause confusion about…

The protests of 2020 cast a national spotlight once again on police brutality and ongoing racial injustice in America. Within this context, many activists and even mainstream commentators have given more attention to a critical analysis of how American history has been taught, especially regarding race relations. The publication of the "1619…

Gay academics in China are governed by both the repressive political climate and heteronormative culture on campus. This intersectional experience is still underexplored in the literature on queer teachers. Drawing on 40 gay academics' interview narratives, this article focuses on their concerns about addressing queer issues in the classroom in…