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On December 14, 2010, University of Puerto Rico (UPR) student activists initiated the second wave of their strike at a disadvantage. The presence of the police force inside the campus raised the stakes for the student movement. No longer did student activists have the “legal rights” or control of the university as a physical public space to hold their assemblies and coordinate their different events. As a result, student activists had to improvise and (re)construct their spaces of resistance by using emotional narratives, organizing non-violent civil disobedience acts at public places, fomenting lobbying groups, disseminating online petitions, and developing alternative proposals to the compulsory fee. This second wave continued until March 2011, when it came to a halt after an incident that involved physical harassment to the Chancellor, Ana Guadalupe, during one of the student demonstrations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Building on Ron Eyerman’s (2005, p. 53) analysis on “the role of emotions in social movements with the aid of performance theory,” the author center this paper on examining student activists’ tactics and strategies in the development and maintenance of their emotional narratives and internet activism. By adapting Joshua Atkinson’s (2010) concept of resistance performance, the author argues that student activists’ resistance performances assisted them in (re)framing their collective identities by (re)constructing spaces of resistance and contention while immersed in violent confrontations with the police.

Ever since the establishment of the university as an institution, student activism has played a key role in shaping the political policies and history of many countries; “today, student actions continue to have direct effects on educational institutions and on national and international politics” (Edelman, 2001, p. 3). Consequently, and especially in times of economic and political crisis, student activism has occupied and constructed spaces of resistance and contention to protest and reveal the existing repressions of neoliberal governments serving as a (re)emergence of an international social movement to guarantee the accessibility to a public higher education of excellence. Thus, it is important to remember that the 2010-2011 UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but rather by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of social networks that have continued to create resistance and change in the island.

As of yet there is no thorough published analysis of the 2010-2011 UPR student strike, its implications, and how the university community currently perceives it. By elaborating on the concept of resistance performance, the author’s study illustrates how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism can develop, maintain, adjust, or change the students’ collective identity(ies). The author’s work not only makes Puerto Rico visible in the research concerning social movements, student activism, and internet activism; in addition, it provides resistance performance as a concept to describe various degrees of participation in current social movements.

This chapter explores the language of anti-violence activists, university coordinators, and due-process activists concerned with Title IX and campus sexual violence. Using an analysis of 32 in-depth interviews with anti-violence activists, due-process activists, and campus Title IX coordinators, the authors identify key themes in Title IX discourse, including ideas about cultural change and safety. In some instances, activists and coordinators discussed the need for cultural change, though often without agreeing on which campus cultures must be confronted. The authors also found the influence of the dominant discourse of the victims’ rights movement in interview subjects’ emphasis on safety and paternalism.

This chapter considers some of the divergent outcomes of youth mobilization and participation in offline spaces, particularly in the youth nonprofit. Critics of youth online political participation detail several shortcomings of online activism as compared to offline activism, but in so doing, these critics venerate offline activism as a utopic alternative. Based on qualitative research in three organizations that mobilize youth around issues of education reform, this chapter demonstrates that the offline youth activist nonprofit fosters political power among some youth while burning out other youth. For teenage activists, these nonprofit organizations offer political education, institutional leverage, and foster political efficacy. At the same time, older youth organizers who are paid staff in these same organizations struggle with having to reign in the radicalism of the youth they mentor, while performing invisible labor around the demands of their organizational funders. These organizational pressures work to burn out youth organizers and steer them away from politics. Online forms of youth activism bring about outcomes that both enhance the political capacities of youth as well as hinder their potential to transform social injustices. Far from utopic, offline movement contexts also foster these contradictory outcomes and should be considered more critically in the debates over the merits of offline versus online activism.

This chapter examined the lived experiences of first generation Asian immigrant student activists, who waged a powerful struggle against school violence in a large urban high school. Their struggle resisted the hegemonic practices of the district bureaucracy around racial harassment, bullying, and treatment of immigrant students, especially English Language Learners (ELLs). Mobilizing both inside and outside of school, the student activists initiated legal action, organized among their high school peers and in the Asian community, and disrupted dominant discourses about the Asian community and the abilities of first generation immigrant youth.

Using ethnographic methods such as interviews, focus groups, and analysis of archival data, the author focused on four student leaders from working class backgrounds, examining the identities and literacies they developed in the process of understanding the power dynamics between dominant institutions and racialized communities. Moreover, using the lenses of Bourdieusian and Freirean social theory, this qualitative study looked at the roles that culture and ideology, broadly construed, played in the young people’s political development and their post-secondary trajectories. This work also built on the work of Shawn Ginwright, Julio Cammarota, and Michelle Fine on youth activism and community change. The significance of this chapter lies in its contribution to the research about the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, class, immigration status, and youth activism, in particular for first generation immigrant youth.

This paper explores how the student movement in Taiwan transformed after the abolition of martial law. After democratization, there were three large-scale student protests, in 1990, 2008 and 2014. This paper explores the development through this period of student movement organizations, issues and interrelations between organizations and individuals.

The study of the process of transformation and development is based on an analysis of newspaper and magazine articles and books about the student movement. To provide an insider's view, magazines, statements and meeting memos written by activists are also included.

As a legacy of the student movement in the 1980s, the 1990 Wild Lily protest advocated democratization and organized a cross-school alliance. This pattern declined, however, because it proved hard to recruit participants after democratization. Instead, student activists returned to education-related issues, and the scale of student organizations remained small. The 2008 Wild Strawberry protest was carried out by autonomous, self-organized groups, which reflected the emergence of individuals as activists. Afterward, student movement organizations attempted to create multiple networks consisted of various issues and participants. These groups built solidarity by cooperating on education and political issues and became the base for the 2014 Sunflower protest.

This paper explores the rarely described historical context for the student movement between large-scale student protests in Taiwan and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelation of organizations and individuals in contemporary social movements.

Given the historical legacy of policing Black bodies, this research focuses on the structures of anti-Blackness within school policing and the strategies students of Color activists use as they work to defund or abolish police departments in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

Specifically, this article looks to Twitter as a counter-storytelling space for students of Color activists to organize and build movements to end anti-Black school policing. Through the frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and Black critical theory (BlackCrit), this research applies inductive coding to analyze 42 Twitter posts from three students of Color-led organizations based in Los Angeles.

This document analysis presents four themes, which describe four dominant strategies students of Color activists use in their campaigns to defund or abolish school police in the LAUSD: (1) centering Blackness and Black student experiences, (2) making demands for the elimination of funding and support for school police, (3) calling for a shift in funding to support Black students and (4) employing multiple tactics concurrently.

These findings demonstrate the importance of developing and centering a critical understanding of anti-Blackness to achieve racial and educational justice within social movements.

Moreover, the demands of students of Color activists reflect visions of public schools free from anti-Black school policing.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

The Oaks Leadership Scholars engage in a year-long program grounded in transformative leadership and framed by Project Based Learning to develop identities as advocates and activists. Analysis of Scholars’ reflections throughout the year indicate increased representation of their selves as advocates and activists over time and identifies significant events – such as a museum tour and engagement in their year-long project – in the program year. The findings of the study indicate that The Student Leader Activist Identity Continuum is an effective way to conceptualize the year and when paired with intentional teaching of transformative leadership, and can impact Scholars’ concept of self in relation to justice and equity work. The findings of this study indicate areas for future study and could inform curriculum revisions.

In March 1969, Brisbane student and political activist Margaret Bailey was suspended from Inala High School – ostensibly for “undermining the authority” of her teacher – prompting claims of political suppression. Through a case study of the subsequent campaign for Bailey’s reinstatement, the purpose of this paper is to explain the emergence of the high school activist as a new political actor in the late 1960s.

The paper draws on newsletters and pamphlets produced by Brisbane activists, alongside articles from the left-wing and mainstream press, to reconstruct the key events of the campaign and trace the major arguments advanced by Bailey and her supporters.

Initiated by the high school activist group, Students in Dissent (SID), the campaign in support of Bailey lasted over two months, culminating in a “chain-in” staged by Bailey at the Queensland Treasury Building on 8 May. Linking together arguments about students’ rights, civil liberties and democratic government, the campaign reveals how high school activism was enabled not only by the broader climate of political dissent in the late 1960s, but by the increasing emphasis on secondary education as a right of modern citizenship in the preceding decades.

This is the first study of the campaign for Bailey’s reinstatement at Inala High School and one of the only analyses to date of the political mobilisation of high school students in Australia during the late 1960s. The case study of the Bailey campaign underlines that secondary school students were important players in the political contests of the late 1960s and, if only for brief periods, were able to command the attention of education officials, the media and leading politicians. It represents an important historical precedent for contemporary high school activism, including the global School Strike 4 Climate movement.

The purpose of this paper is to address the use of Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) to investigate the learning style preferences of undergraduate students at the American University of Ras Al Khaimah (AURAK) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) culture. It also investigates whether there are significant differences across the four dimensions of learning styles due to students’ demographics.

Questionnaires were distributed to a sample of 200 undergraduate students at AURAK in the UAE. The majority of students were Arabic native-speakers. Descriptive statistics were used to present the main characteristics of respondents and the results of the study. The independent samples t-test, Mann–Whitney test and Kurskal–Wallis test were used to find out if there are significant differences across the four dimensions of learning styles due to students’ demographics.

The results of the study illustrated that undergraduate students at AURAK have preferences for the reflector (15.0), pragmatist (14.2), theorist (13.9) and activist (12.3) learning styles. Moreover, there are only significant differences between Emirati and non-Emirati students across the four learning styles and between single and married students in the theorist learning style.

This study has a number of limitations. First, the findings of the study are based on the data collected from only one university. Second, the sample is limited to undergraduate students and, therefore, it excludes graduate students who might have different experiences. Third, the results are based on a self-reported questionnaire which might affect the reliability of the results. On the other hand, it has a number of implications for educators and students. Educators will benefit from the results of this study in the sense that they need to adopt teaching styles and strategies that match the learning styles of the majority of their students. Students themselves will benefit from knowing their own learning style.

The present study validates a learning style theory developed in a western culture in an Arabic culture.