This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower.

This edited book provides a global view on evolution education. It describes the state of evolution education in different countries that are representative of geographical regions around the globe such as Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North Africa, South Africa, North America, South America,Middle East, Far East, South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.Studies in evolution education literature can be divided into three main categories: (a) understanding the interrelationships among cognitive, affective, epistemological, and religious factors that are related to peoples’ views about evolution, (b) designing, implementing, evaluating evolution education curriculum that reflects contemporary evolution understanding, and (c) reducing antievolutionary attitudes. This volume systematically summarizes the evolution education literature across these three categories for each country or geographical region. The individual chapters thus include common elements that facilitate a cross-cultural meta-analysis. Written for a primarily academic audience, this book provides a much-needed common background for future evolution education research across the globe.

Evolution and Religion in American Education shines a light into one of America’s dark educational corners, exposing the regressive pedagogy that can invade science classrooms when school boards and state overseers take their eyes off the ball. It sets out to examine the development of college students’ attitudes towards biological evolution through their lives. The fascinating insights provided by interviewing students about their world views adds up to a compelling case for additional scrutiny of the way young people’s educational experiences unfold as they consider—and indeed in some cases reject—one of science’s strongest and most cogent theoretical constructs. Inevitably, open discussion and consideration of the theory of evolution can chip away at the mental framework constructed by Creationists, eroding the foundations of their faith. The conceptual battleground is so fraught with logical challenges to Creationist dogma that in a number of cases students’ exposure to such dangerous ideas is actively prevented. This book provides a detailed map of this astonishing struggle in today’s America—a struggle many had thought was done and dusted with the onset of the Enlightenment.

The American Educational History Journal is a peer?reviewed, national research journal devoted to the examination of educational topics using perspectives from a variety of disciplines. The editors of AEHJ encourage communication between scholars from numerous disciplines, nationalities, institutions, and backgrounds. Authors come from a variety of disciplines including political science, curriculum, history, philosophy, teacher education, and educational leadership. Acceptance for publication in AEHJ requires that each author present a well?articulated argument that deals substantively with questions of educational history.

Researchers who conduct ethnography in science education tend to have a deep commitment for transforming science to improve the lives of people in underserved communities. This edited volume explores how contemporary ethnographers in science education bring to light the local production of scientific knowledge and the ways it is implicated in larger social and political struggles. Ethnographies in science education contribute to understanding the experiences of linguistically, racially, and economically diverse populations who have been historically excluded from participation in science. An anthropological approach has also been instrumental in explicating the situated practices by which students enact science in the classroom and in their lives beyond schools. This edited volume brings together ethnographers in science education to contribute a global perspective on science teaching and learning in school and university classrooms, at home, and after school programs. Included are examples of ethnography in science education from the UK, Argentina, Canada, and the USA in which contributors point to promising directions for theorizing the ‘culture’ of science education as we undertake educational reform. The authors in this volume argue that ethnography is not only a valid approach for the study of science education, but also they contend that it is essential to the development of more equitable practices for instruction and learning. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnography and Education.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The current controversy over teaching evolution in the public schools has grabbed front-page headlines and topped news broadcasts all across the United States. In the Beginning investigates the movement that has ignited debate in state legislatures and at school board meetings. Reaching back to the origins of antievolutionism in the 1920s, and continuing to the promotion of intelligent design today, Michael Lienesch skillfully analyzes one of the most formidable political movements of the twentieth century. Applying extensive original sources and social movement theory, Lienesch begins with fundamentalism, describing how early twentieth-century fundamentalists worked to form a collective identity, to develop their own institutions, and to turn evolution from an idea into an issue. He traces the emerging antievolution movement through the 1920s, examining debates over Darwinism that took place on college campuses and in state legislatures throughout the country. With fresh insights and analysis, Lienesch retells the story of the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial and reinterprets its meaning. In tracking the movement from that time to today, he explores the rise of creation science in the 1960s, the alliance with the New Christian Right in the 1980s, and the development of the theory of intelligent design in our own time. He concludes by speculating on its place in the politics of the twenty-first century. In the Beginning is essential for understanding the past, present, and future debates over the teaching of evolution.

No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this faith tradition as it has developed between the eighteenth century and the present. Moving through five sections, each centered around one of Marsden’s major books and the time period it represents, the volume explores different methodologies and approaches to the history of evangelicalism and American religion. Besides assessing Marsden’s illustrious works on their own terms, this collection’s contributors isolate several key themes as deserving of fresh, rigorous, and extensive examination. Through their close investigation of these particular themes, they expand the range of characters and communities, issues and ideas, and contingencies that can and should be accounted for in our historical texts. Marsden’s timeless scholarship thus serves as a launchpad for new directions in our rendering of the American religious past.