Leveraging National Survey Data to Examine and Extend Notions of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Social Studies Instruction

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A growing body of research on culturally and linguistically responsive social studies instruction continues to identify essential understandings regarding the teaching and learning of social studies among multilingual students. Yet a preponderance of these studies utilize ethnographic and other highly contextualized qualitative methods. In order to make this growing body of knowledge more accessible to a larger audience of researchers and educators, the present study examined pedagogical approaches and areas of curricular emphasis that social studies teachers reported using in the landmark Survey on the Status of Social Studies. The results of the present study deepen insights into the differentiation that social studies teachers of emergent bilingual students employ. Data analysis reveals that teachers with beginning emergent bilingual students, teachers with intermediate emergent bilingual students, and teachers without emergent bilingual students reported using instructional strategies and engaging curricular topics with different frequencies. The findings align common social studies approaches to the scholarship on culturally and linguistically responsive social studies instruction to provide a typology that extends the literature for social studies educators.