The broad aim of most sexuality educational programs is to improve and promote health among students (Epstein and Johnson 1998; Allen 2005; Aggleton and Campbell 2000). Various education programs aim for young people to receive preparation for their sexual lives and be educated against sexual abuse and exploitation (Carmody 2009; Bay-Cheng 2003),…

The author describes the 2012-2013 school year at East Hampton High School in New York, which began with tragedy. In late September, a sixteen-year-old student, an immigrant from Ecuador, committed suicide. This was the second suicide in three years, followed two weeks later by the third, committed by a student about to transfer to the school.…

Taking a cue from U.S. military operations, surveillance cameras, police officers, metal detectors, hall sweeps, expulsion, zero tolerance policing, and biometrics contour young people's everyday life in public schools. Given this influx in policing and surveillance in schools, recent critical scholarship broadly attends to the increase in…

Creating safe, caring school environments continues to generate ongoing conversation in the media, professional journals, and academic research, especially through the persistent attention given to incidents and impact of bullying on youth. In Canada, several provincial governments have instituted or are debating the implementation of antibullying…

This article discusses how the white savior syndrome renders the misrepresentation of the potential of people of color to resist and lead the transformation of oppressive conditions within their own social context. Indigenous resistance requires endogenous (internal) leadership such that all social justice actions derive from and continue to flow…

This article examines teaching practices and pedagogies shown in three Hollywood movies. Although some government reports and the media articles may assert that the quality of teaching in public schools is poor, by contrast mainstream movies of the "urban high school" genre often champion teachers who are able to make a difference in classrooms…

The exploration of poetry as transformative reflects a literary movement attentive to larger struggles over signs and meanings. It is a movement that emphasizes textual play and seeks to alter the social, cultural, and institutional relations in which meanings are generated. Poetry in this sense, then, emphasizes the power of words as a form of…

This article explores how a curriculum of film becomes organized by the teacher's worries about what film may open up in class. The author focuses on her own worries about showing Gus Van Sant's (2003) film, "Elephant," an elliptical and dreamlike study of the murders in 1999 of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, to a class of…

In this article the author analyzes a composition written by an 18-year-old student from Puerto Rico fluent in Spanish and English, who struggled with writing in both languages. She analyzes the student's work from a framework of discourse and narrative analysis and the tenets of oral culture. Her intent is to clarify the structural complexity of…

In order to examine how large-scale testing affects writing pedagogy and students' composition processes, the author conducted a study that centered on two high school senior English classes in the state of Kentucky. Since 1991, Kentucky has implemented a large-scale writing assessment and system of teacher and school accountability. Generating…

In this article, the authors attempt to explore some of the ways in which youth subjectivities are constituted in the neoliberal order, the ways in which their behaviours are criminalized, and the harrowing manner in which schools, as one site, are complicit in a larger cultural disinvestment in youth. The authors accomplish this through an…

This paper discusses the potential of youth popular culture to create an engaging and empowering 21st-century curriculum in schools. Specifically, it investigates three key questions around the issue of developing a culturally relevant curriculum for students traditionally disenfranchised by U.S. schools: (1) What popular cultural literacies are…