This document is the first of a semi-annual "stocktaking" publication to analyze various political trends impacting education and young people. Bellwether hopes to help the field separate signal from noise and provide context around various issues and trends affecting the sector. The impact of COVID-19 school closures on schools and…

The accessibility of new media combined with emerging patterns of migration are challenging current definitions of community as we see a shift from close-knit face-to-face interactions to more diverse 'glocalized' networks that defines community as a social rather than a spatial dimension. These changes mean that social connections, and…

This case study presents a problem-based learning (PBL) model that guides general education history students to practice and acquire more advanced problem-solving skills -- those found in postformal thinking systems -- and to apply these thinking skills to develop and share solution alternatives both to periodized historical issues and to current…

In 2021, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) implemented its recognition standard on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), identifying their combined importance in assuring quality in higher education, and recognizing their essentiality in realizing the vision of higher education as a public good. Recent Supreme Court decisions…

Overwhelmingly, elementary social studies standards focus on Native Americans in past tense. If elementary teachers follow state curriculum for social studies, students are often not provided the opportunity to learn about Native people in the present. The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the number of current state elementary (K-5)…

Social skills play a central role in shaping individuals who are able to adapt and contribute to society. This article analyzes the comparative social studies curriculum in Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), focusing on how students' social skills are developed through their approach to learning. The research method used is a…

The coronavirus pandemic has presented an opportunity to rethink how social studies education is framed. Using global citizenship education to teach about the pandemic properly places global health within the purview of all people and builds an onramp for teachers and students to make this kind of theoretical framing a mainstream part of social…

Open classroom climate for discussion (OCC) is consistently associated with positive civic outcomes for students, but research on the determinants of OCC primarily focuses on individual- and school-level indicators or uses qualitative or non-representative samples. This study considers how teacher instructional practices influence the presence of…

Research conducted in the twentieth century found urban Catholic schools in the U.S. had a legacy of providing high quality educational opportunities for low-income students and students of color. In an era of declining Catholic school enrollments, urban Catholic school advocates have argued that urban Catholic school closures would deny these…

An increasing number of school districts encourage discussion of current events in classrooms. However, teachers' ability and willingness to manage these conversations may be hampered by concerns about what they are or are not allowed to disclose, especially because their First Amendment speech protections do not fully extend into the classroom.…

Purpose: As technology enables the rapid spread of mis- and disinformation, a critical challenge for scholars and practitioners involves building student's news media literacy (NML), a subset of media literacy education centered around journalism. This paper aims to offer a case study of secondary civics classrooms that use NML lessons and current…

The aim of this confirmatory grounded theory case analysis was to investigate the perceptions of high school civics teachers on the new Illinois civics curriculum and how this relates to concepts of citizenship. This qualitative study involved focus groups consisting of 20 public high school civics teachers to investigate the use of the…

The author of this article presents an innovative economics course based on current events and news, using "The Economist" as the primary course text. The course constructs shared learning around news in real time to inspire and excite students' ability to see economics in their world. The course supports Allgood and Bayer's…

The use of court cases as educational tools is widely established and deeply entrenched as an effective approach to legal studies education. Exploring legal concepts against the backdrop of a known outcome, in the form of a verdict or a judicial opinion, provides certainty and a foundation for the analytical extension of precedent to new and…

The most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey enables educators, policy makers and the wider community to compare Australian students with each other, as well as with their counterparts across the world. PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the…