A Mission-Based Argument for Private K-12 Student Press

Although the First Amendment does not guarantee student press within public schools, it does help affirm the value of such opportunities to student communities. Private schools do not enjoy such constitutional support, but may have a more powerful tool closer to home: their own school mission statements. This study coded nearly 500 private K-12 school mission statements to determine whether the priorities identified by these programs align with the documented benefits of student journalism and found a strong connection between both.

Yoga Spirituality in the Context of US Institutions

This chapter examines yoga as a spiritual and a social practice. It considers three institutional contexts for interpreting yoga spirituality: religion, law, and education. Social institutions such as public schools and courts of law must arbitrate interpretive contests by formulating and applying definitions for the purposes of educational policy and legal precedent. In making such determinations, it would be naive to accept all assertions of identity and meaning as full disclosures. Sometimes the same people describe the same practice as “spiritual” or “secular,” depending upon whether the legal context is First Amendment religious free exercise clause protection or establishment clause restriction. Decisions about how to categorize practices rest in large part on pragmatic concerns. This case study invites scholars of spirituality to pay closer attention to how legal and social contexts shape how people think and talk about practices in relation to the interpretive categories of “spirituality,” “religion,” and “secularity.”

Teacher Speech Inside and Outside of Classrooms in the United States: Understanding the First Amendment

Concerns often arise about the First Amendment rights of public school educators in the United States both inside and outside of their classrooms. As such, after setting the legal context, we analyze teachers’ free speech rights in a variety of settings. In order to do so, we discuss illustrative cases analyzing the legal landscape of teachers’ free expressions rights in U.S. public schools. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview highlighting Supreme Court cases and selected opinions from lower courts involving teacher speech impact the expressive rights of educators in public schools rather than serve as a comprehensive analysis of all such speech cases.