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[W]hen I hear people denounce our political scene as "post-truth," I have to wonder when exactly they think it was that politics was determined by the truth? The same goes for those who decry today's "fake news." […]To claim that with Trump's election we've entered a post-truth era of fake news is to claim that the U.S. was built on truthful politics and media. Political struggle isn't really about an existing truth but rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths […] The political project involves the power relations that compose truths, and the pedagogical project involves how we engage ourselves, each other, and the world in transformative processes. (Ford, 2018, paras. 1-4) This quotation captures my concern with an emergent liberal nostalgia narrative, a type of wounded innocence, fashionable in response to what many see as a contemporary affliction affecting democratic institutions. According to this story, Trump and his administration have moved us into post-truth times. As definitive nostalgia, this post-truth narrative constructs a never existing political consensus that has now been lost, from the functioning of formal politics to truth claims found in the academe.

How might we teach more successfully towards better relations between and among social groups? Recognizing factors that limit rapprochement with those with divergent worldviews has been a perennial concern for education research. However, more research is needed to understand how feelings of conflict arise, and thus this paper discusses terror management theory (TMT) as a generative theoretical framework for engaging with conflicting perspectives in classrooms and beyond. An awareness of existential processes that impact teaching and learning provides an opportunity to engage with divergent worldviews in a way that mitigates hostile responses. TMT can assist our understandings of the psychological process of worldview threat with the hope that we might better metacognitively anticipate our threat and defence cycles.

In this article, the author explores key distinctions relevant to aims talk in education. He argues that present formulations of aims fail to adequately capture or speak to several overlapping domains involved in schooling: qualification, socialization, and the educational in the form of subjectification (Biesta, 2010). Drawing off Egan and Biesta to differentiate the educational domain, the author details an ontological orientation to the educational "event" through the work of Badiou while grounding this exploration in ancient Western distinctions between sophistic and Socratic approaches to education as detailed by Bartlett. The article ends with a call for non-Indigenous educators to expand Canadian conceptions of educational aims and citizenship through Indigenous orientations to these vital education terms.

Schools are too often places in which answers are conveyed to questions students are rarely, if ever, asked. This article offers, therefore, some examples of content--animating and throughline questions--and assessment practices that centralize questions rather than answers. While animating questions return teachers to the mysteries that excite us as intellectuals (excitement that is crucial to share with students), they also spark throughline questions - provocative questions that give the content of our courses apparent purpose. Using a notion of dangerous teaching, I argue that such practices serve to disrupt the ahistorical stance of much of social studies and history teaching that offers students little opportunity to connect what they learn in schools to political charged debates over what and how they should be taught.

We all have a sense of evil, but many of us do not ponder its nature or the ways in which our beliefs about evil shape what we teach and learn about the actions of citizens in historical or contemporary times. We argue that the word and concept of evil can be detrimental to the development of good citizens when it is used as a political and educational shibboleth to shut down critical thought about traumatic historical and contemporary events. Read through the work of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou, however, a pedagogical engagement with our understandings of evil offers an opportunity to learn from difficult events in a way that might inform contemporary action towards a less violent future.

History and social studies not only help to suture together "imagined communities" (Anderson, 1983), they also convey understandings about how people effect change through time. This qualitative study investigates the reasoning of 4 secondary history teachers about agency as both a question of the shape of human interactions and content of human motivations expressed through their teaching and in relation to scholarship in sociology and history. Participants account for the content of agency (with varying degrees of emphasis) with appeals to socioeconomic positions and experiences. A tension exists, however, concerning how best to reconcile such experiences with the motivational force of ideals and existential tensions behind people's actions. Relating to the shape of agency, participants raise questions about the relative roles played by, and interaction between, leaders, discourses and ideals, and social movements. This study explores the ways in which these findings reflect broader forms of cultural reasoning about agency and the benefits of bringing teachers and scholarship together around key historical concepts. (Contains 7 notes.)

A key challenge confronting teacher educators is to help their students identify perspectives that depart from dominant historical narratives of a nation-state's development so as to potentially derive alternative meanings of shared pasts from marginalized perspectives. In this article, we examine the nature of this challenge both as a theoretical issue and empirical engagement with two classes of history and social studies teacher candidates. We identify several tensions involved in work with multiple perspectives that shape historical narratives: avoiding culturally reductive or stereotypical images of others, the taming of historical complexity for ease of communication, and something of a fraught encounter with the dissonance that echoes at the heart of historical identifications and perspectives. As we conclude, there is much to learn about teaching from engaging these tensions that emerge when we re-read in a writerly manner what and how we have been taught.

In this study, a group of teacher educators converse about their teaching practice in light of a new provincial K-12 program of social studies. The most noteworthy feature of this new program is its explicit call for teachers to include Aboriginal and Francophone perspectives as they teach to the program's two central themes of "identity" and "citizenship". I read teacher educators' conversations about their practice to identify a set of educational questions that I argue speak both to and beyond this specific programmatic context. These questions concern whose expectations should guide teacher education practices, the relevant role of dis/comfort in education, and the ways in which a "politics of clarity" shapes a particular understanding of both curriculum and practicality in the work of teacher educators. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)

Schools can be places where students articulate a preferred social future and exercise informed judgment with others toward that goal. Yet, educators have few examples of what a curriculum explicitly concerned with undertaking such a process might look like. Distinct from questions about how best to receive an Other or social science investigations of what may constitute educational "best practices," Kent den Heyer explores here the ways in which the work of Alain Badiou provides for a more proactive arrangement of knowledge in schools organized to instigate truth-processes that might supplement individual and socially inherited commitments. Through this exploration, den Heyer argues for the democratic and life-affirming benefits of scholars and teachers who take up a "disciplinary ethic of truths." He provides one of potentially many curricular examples of such an arrangement of knowledge.

While the politics of curriculum reform occupy adults, high stakes get played out in crowded classrooms. As a component of democratic inquiry, how might teachers engage students in a study of those agendas shaping their education? What sorts of conceptual resources could help? To begin to answer these questions, I briefly review scholars who address the emergence in several countries of what Kliebard names as a "social efficiency" agenda in education. I then examine two strong examples of literature in "authentic" practices as a curriculum conversation contesting this agenda. While supportive of the intent of scholars concerned with authentic practices, I assert that they insufficiently address ways in which students might engage with issues shaping their experience of formal education and offer two conceptual resources with which to do so. (Contains 2 notes.)

The historical fiction novel straddles the factual and the fictive recreation of past motivations that animate historical events. Through reading a work of historical fiction, Ursula Hegi's novel "Stones from the River," Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk offer a theoretical consideration of the following questions and their classroom implications: What is the role of historical fiction in enabling the imaginative grappling with historical fact? Or, in what ways does historical fiction enable us to come to terms with the ethical imperatives of learning from the past? What role does agency play in historical imagination? These are questions of ethics. They are, therefore, also questions of education.

In this article, the authors use qualitative and quantitative research to identify the performance of social actors whose decisions impact students and teachers, elucidate a set of measurements for their performance, and offer both a theoretical and research justification for these measurements. The work challenges two faulty assumptions behind the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation that make it more likely that school curricula will continue to be unrepresentative of diverse experiences and that far too many children will continue to attend schools under unnecessarily trying conditions. The first faulty assumption is the legislation's location of school "problems" or the "problems with schools" as beginning and ending at the school door. A second assumption that the authors' development of research-based rubrics seeks to challenge is a prevalent attitude in US society regarding individual responsibility for personal success or failure, which supports the thrust of NCLB in the public imagination. Like the ill-distribution of economic possibilities despite people's hard work, rubrics holding the various public stakeholders in education are required to appropriately expand responsibility for student success beyond schools and teachers. (Contains 4 tables and 2 notes.)

This article reports on a review of research into students' reasoning about social change and causes they attribute to selected historical events. In this review, I distinguish studies into social change and causality as two methodological approaches to historical understanding before relating findings into the ways that students reason about agency in social change. I consider two of many possible explanations for these findings, one each from a cognitive and a social psychology perspective. I then turn to sociology for two articulations of agency as tools to enhance students' historical thinking and reflection on their variegated capacities as agents of social life: a) personal agency as nested moments of re-"iteration," "practical evaluation," and "projectivity" and b) historical agency as collectively expressed struggle over the ideals, images, and stories people use to reiterate a past in the present so as to imagine personal and social projects. I argue throughout that student attention in classrooms to assumptions about agents and agency used in historical explanations enhances both their historical explanations and capacities as citizens. Rather than citizens, however, I begin this article with a feminist argument that teachers address students first and foremost as agents. (Contains 3 notes.)

States justify school subjects as necessary preparations for the future. Yet, while put to heavy rhetorical use, we know little about how (if at all) teachers connect a futures dimension to their subject matter teaching and learning. A futures dimension, after all, inheres in human deliberations ranging from our everyday decisions to the more refined claims made in, for example, historical scholarship. This article examines the use of futures as a rhetorical device, how science and social studies teachers take up the future and an example of how we might include such in classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on cartographic outline of concepts necessary to combine information ethics with global citizenship to interpret the privatization of the public sphere. It states that the public sphere comes to modern fruition through the interests of the newly self-conscious merchant class and democracy began in discourse. It mentions that readers are offered narrative to locate themselves within the possible intersections of information ethics and democratic citizenship.

The article examines the role of public intellectuality in the public education in the U.S. It is said that public and private experiences will become intelligible if the arts of inquiry is employed in intellectuality. The prime objective of the Public Knowledge Project directed by John Willinsky of the University of British Columbia is to examine the ways in which educational research can serve as political deliberation and professional development.