Addressing polarization in the classroom

Casey Burkholder (she/her) is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Social Justice in Youth and Child Studies and an Associate Professor at Concordia University. Previously, Casey worked as an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick (2017-2024). In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance&activism, gender, sexuality, DIY media-making, art production, queer joy, and participatory archiving, Casey engages in research for social change through participatory visual approaches to local issues with 2SLGBTQ+ youth, adults, elders and teachers. She is the co-founder of the Fredericton Feminist Film Collective, and is the PI of Pride/Swell+ and SexualityNB.

Daniel Cere is Associate Professor of Religion, Law, and Public Policy in the Faculty of Religious Studies. He also chairs the CREOR Religion and Globalization committee as well as the Catholic Studies committee in the Faculty of Arts. Cere collaborated with former Dean Ellen Aitken in forging a McGill partnership with an international network of universities, the Faith and Globalization Initiative. He has directed the international summer course for the Faith and Globalization Initiative that networks with over 30 universities across the world. He also helped to design and direct the Birks Forum on the World’s Religions and Public Policy launched in 2011. His work on religion and public policy has focused on debates over issues related to gender, sexuality and marriage. He is the director of the Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture, and a founding director of the Newman Institute of Catholic Studies.

Noah Weeth Feinstein studies how people make sense of science in their personal, social, and political lives - and how educational platforms such as schools and museums can help. He recently contributed to a National Academies report on science literacy, and he is currently studying how science museums seek to become more equitable institutions. Dr. Feinstein also writes about environmental and sustainability education, public knowledge, and educational responses to the "post-truth era," and has become increasingly interested in the role of education in climate change adaptation.

Maya Goldenberg is a professor of Philosophy whose research addresses the fundamental epistemic question, "How do we know what to believe?" (or when are knowledge claims justified) in health care. Her past scholarship has addressed this question in the pressing context of evidence-based medicine, the decision-making framework that relies on clinical trial evidence to inform individual patient care. While evidence-based medicine is the standard of best practice in health research and health care, there has been inadequate attention to the philosophical assumptions underlying this transfer of knowledge from the laboratory to the bedside. More recently, she had broadened her research into the science-values complex to investigate vaccine hesitancy as illustrative of poor public trust in scientific institutions.

Wayne Journell is Professor of Social Studies Education and Associate Chair of the Department of Teacher Education and Higher Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Dr. Journell's research focuses primarily on the teaching of politics and controversial issues in secondary education, with secondary interests in teaching social studies with technology and via inquiry. Dr. Journell has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including being a two-time recipient of the Exemplary Research in Social Studies Award from the National Council for the Social Studies. He is also the current editor of Theory & Research in Social Education, which is the premier empirical journal in the field of social studies education, and editor for the Research and Practice in Social Studies book series at Teachers College Press.

Bruce Maxwell is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the Université de Montréal, where he is involved in the training of future teachers and school leaders on the themes of education law, professional ethics and the history of educational ideas. An ethicist and philosopher of education, his research focuses on school law, ethical development in the professions, and ethical and legal issues in education. After completing bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy at McGill University and Université de Montréal respectively, he taught at the college level until 2003. From 2004 to 2007, he was a lecturer while completing his doctoral studies at the Institute of Educational Sciences at the University of Münster in Germany. In 2008, he returned to Montreal to undertake a postdoctoral fellowship in ethics at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l'Université de Montréal. In 2009, he became a professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, specializing in ethics and education law, and in the ethics component of the ethics and religious culture program. He has been a professor of education law at Université de Montréal since 2020.

Campbell F. Scribner is a scholar of educational policy, history, and philosophy. Although his work covers a broad chronological range, all of it centers on conflicting notions of democracy in American schools. His books include A is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education (Cornell University Press, 2023), which explores the many meanings of property destruction; Spare the Rod: Punishment and the Moral Community of Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2021), in which he and Bryan Warnick examine the history and philosophy of school discipline; and The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2016), which examines the legal and political controversies around school district  boundaries. He is currently working on a biography of Philip H. Phenix, a philosopher and curricular theorist active during the 1960s. Other interests include civic education, educational law, and conservative educational thought.

Vivek Venkatesh is Dean of the Faculty of Education and a James McGill Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Since 2017, Vivek has held the UNESCO co-Chair in Prevention of Radicalisation and Violent Extremism. Vivek is a filmmaker, musician, curator and applied learning scientist whose research and research-creation programs focus on community resilience and pluralism through a resolutely public pedagogical approach. His feature films include documentaries about underground cultural scenes including Blekkmetal (2015), Where in the hell is the Lavender House? (2019) and Enslaved 25. Vivek’s research-creation projects engage the multiple challenges of xenophobia at their roots through the development of four unique participative artistic projects: BANAL, Halka, Landscape of Hate and Landscape of Hope. All four projects expand knowledge mobilization activities far beyond traditional academic paths, and include film and music production, and curation of live performances by musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, and writers. These projects have reached more than 6,500 people at festivals in Canada, Norway, and Iceland with upcoming BANAL performances scheduled in Mexico (2024) and India (2025). Vivek is co-editor of the book series titled Extremity in Society and Culture, being published by Rowman & Littlefield/Lexoington Press.

Bryan Warnick is professor of Philosophy of Education in the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State University. He earned his BS degree in philosophy and psychology from the University of Utah, graduating magna cum laude. After serving as a research associate in Medical Ethics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, Dr. Warnick completed his MA and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Philosophy of Education. He teaches and conducts research in the area of philosophy of education, specializing in the ethical dimensions of educational policies and practices. Recent topics of interest include the ethics of school punishment, the phenomenon of school shootings, democratic education, the relationship between religion and education, the implications of capitalism for education, and student rights in school settings.

Jaeden Wilson (he/him) is a second year PhD student at McGill University. He completed his B.Ed. in Secondary English education at McGill and then his M.Sc. in Research Design and Methodology in Education at the University of Oxford. Through his research, he seeks to work with trans youth in the pursuit of equity in secondary schools – with a particular focus on intersectionality. Specifically, he is focused on what utopian imagination and trans youths’ agency can teach educators about improving educational practices, pedagogies, and policies.