In March 2016 when North Carolina's House Bill 2 (HB2)--the "bathroom bill"--was introduced and passed, I was teaching at a state university in North Carolina (N.C. Gen. Assem., 2016). In the Spring semester of that year, on March 23, HB2 was passed in a 12-hour special session meeting by the North Carolina legislature. The following…

Teaching about sexual violence in the past is likely to solicit emotional reactions from students, including the potential for them to share their own personal histories related to the topic. According to statistics compiled by the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN, 2020a), university students are a particularly vulnerable population;…

Transformative teacher education: is there such a thing? Yes. For a week long, intensive summer experience and monthly follow-up sessions for a year, the author had the opportunity to engage with like-minded educators from around the world. Each educator is committed to successfully educating and developing pathways of opportunity for culturally…

Critical, collaborative learning activities in teacher education programs prepare pre-service and in-service teachers to work collectively with a social justice stance in their work. However, at the university-level, this kind of collaboration is rare among teacher educators, as education professors are often siloed into their content areas,…

This article relates the authors' experience in a course that they have co-taught periodically called Honors Africans in Film. It is an upper-level, undergraduate course that engages honors students in watching and analyzing mainly Hollywood movies that are set in Africa. The challenge they present to their mostly U.S. American students is to…

This paper provides examples of activities that can be carried out by Spanish-speaking professors who are willing to step outside of the classroom walls with their students and participate in community projects--to help democratize the various forms of cultural capital as well as promote social justice and political awareness by working hand in…

Peace and conflict studies (PACS) education in recent decades has become a popular approach to social justice learning in higher education institutions (Harris, Fisk, and Rank 1998; Smith 2007; Carstarphen et al. 2010; Bajaj and Hantzopoulos 2016) and has been provided legitimacy through a number of different United Nations (UN) declarations…

For some time, the word "diversity" has been used to convey to members of Western societies that they live in a social climate of openness and welcome. Diversity might refer to any number of social identities or categories, and often is twinned with the phrase social equity to signal its attachment to a progressive agenda. In this…

This article expands on a co-authored project with Timothy Laurie on the practices and ethics of higher degree research (HDR) supervision (or advising): "What does good HDR supervision look like?" in contemporary universities. It connects that project with scholarship on the relevance of "common sense" to questions of…

Education is the self-declared "heart" of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), already generating partnership projects and programs with such organizations as the Canadian Teachers' Federation, the Assembly of First Nations, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The CMHR has…

Most colleges and universities in the United States today offer one or more undergraduate courses on the Holocaust in History, Sociology, Literature, or other Humanities disciplines. Enrollments are strong, and many faculty members find themselves teaching such courses at the request of their chair or dean. However, most faculty will not have been…

According to the authors, in 2008 and 2009 a coalition of faculty, anchored by Women's Studies, challenged a proposal to bring United States Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) courses onto their urban public university campus. This proposal, initially approved by the faculty governance advisory committee on academic affairs, was…

Much has been written recently on the increased pace of scholarly life and its ill effects. More generally, work intensification has been identified as a widespread malaise in contemporary workplaces, and academia is no exception. In this article the authors make the argument that the kind of higher order thinking that is a critical part of the…

In this article, the author discusses her successes and struggles as a junior faculty member, in building critical community with and among a diverse group of graduate students. Drawing from and expanding upon the current literature, she presents a definition of critical communities and then makes an argument for why teachers need to promote…

In this article, the author presents his reflection about the song "Don't Cha" by the Pussy Cat Dolls (2006), which makes a strong statement in a postmodern way about women, and sometimes men, who see themselves in the world as central players in a dramatic narrative that highlights their own victimization as happy, powerful, and glorious. These…