Powerful Social Studies Research Articles

It Can Be Done: Engaging and Powerful Social Studies Education Using Technology

My biggest fear about teaching a social studies methods class with COVID restrictions was talking at my teacher candidates and not modeling interactive and engaging social studies education. Social studies education should be engaging and student-centered. In this article, I offer technological adaptations to lessons that center around three main ideas of history/social studies teaching: Promoting Historical Inquiry, Facilitating Discussions, and Supporting Civic Engagement. With advances in technology and digital learning tools, challenging and active social studies instruction can be achieved in a virtual or hybrid learning environment.

Adding International Elements to a Social Studies Teacher Education Program

Here the author shares his attempt to add, without financial cost, substantive and dynamic international experiences to the secondary social studies teacher education program he facilitates. He provides thick descriptions of (1) the overarching goals of a collaborative, online, international learning project, (2) the curriculum materials he helped design and the classroom experiences he orchestrated, and (3) the project’s international context. Moreover, this paper advocates for internationalization by describing a 5-week, inquiry-based project that featured university students in Japan and the US using an online video discussion platform to asynchronously introduce themselves to international peers, share their understanding of powerful social studies instruction, explore similarities in social studies education between the two nations, refine their understanding of international education, and share ideas for a wise-practice classroom activity that could be taught to secondary students in both nations. Because this article shares the project’s rationale, schedule, assignments, and assessment rubrics, it may prove helpful for teachers and teacher educators as they envision ways to further prepare students to think and act globally.

Black Critical Patriotism: An Inquiry for Social Justice

Black Critical Patriotism: An Inquiry for Social Justice Terrance Lewis (bio) Ahmaud Arbery, COVID-19, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, Breonna Taylor, and the election of President Joseph Biden. [1] These pivotal events and others from 2020 revealed much about societal norms and conditions currently existing within the United States of America, which many consider to be post-racial. While many of those events affected all communities in negative ways, no community felt it worse than those who have been historically excluded from fully benefiting from the rights and privileges guaranteed to all citizens born or naturalized in America. [2] To add to that, I believe many of the events from 2020 not only revealed but exacerbated the unfair societal conditions already facing members of historically excluded communities, leaving many questioning the validity of America’s claim to be a post-racial society. I find it impossible to consider America a post-racial society without questioning the existence and impact of dominant power structures stemming from one of the darkest moments in American history, the period of enslavement. Those power structures, in my opinion, continue to be dominated by race, gender, and class. Furthermore, research and the recent racial injustices occurring in 2020 suggest historically excluded communities within the United States do not have equal experiences with the same political systems promising equal opportunity for all. [3] Unfortunately, this reality is not isolated, and has continued to occur since the arrival of diverse groups in America. Therefore, the time has come for America to speak honestly regarding the negative ramifications of enslavement currently existing within society. In complete honesty, this will be easier said than done, especially given the current amount of polarization in American society. [4] A quick view of social media platforms will show the difficulty of engaging in simple civil discourse regarding [End Page 19] anything considered controversial or political.[5] However, I believe civil discourse and open discussion are the first steps in dismantling the dominant power structure in America and making America a more equitable country for its entire citizenry. While every entity and everyone has a role to play, schools are uniquely positioned to play a major role achieving this goal. Given the diversity of perspectives present in most schools, they are gold mines for teaching students how to civilly discuss, engage, and respond to those with whom they might differ. This type of instruction will be critical in achieving and sustaining worthwhile change beneficial to everyone living in American society. Furthermore, a proper and effective social studies education requires such instruction. According to the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Position Statement, a powerful social studies education prepares students to be productive citizens, requires students to “confront multiple dilemmas,” and “encourages students to speculate, think critically, and make personal and civic decisions on information from multiple perspectives.” [6] It goes on to say powerful social studies should be value-based and include multiple points of view. While I agree with all these assertions, I believe an effective social studies education goes a step further by equipping students with tools to challenge and ultimately change dominant power structures they deem unjust or unfair. Critical pedagogy, social justice pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching include the major components associated with this form of teaching. [7] Therefore, any conversation examining the impact of dominant power structures must occur through a lens of social justice where all perspectives are included, heard, and respected. I believe that this will lead to the creation of a more equitable society. While the results of this practice are promising, this must be a collaborative effort. Although much of the conversation surrounding the teaching of civil discourse occurs within the field of social studies education, it needs to be included across all content areas. All content areas present opportunities for students to engage and discuss with others who have differing experiences and perspectives. Given these opportunities, social studies classes must take the lead in modeling and implementing this work. Nevertheless, research suggests many students are not engaging in active or critical learning requiring them to consider multiple perspectives, debate, or engage in discussion, which are all skills needed for productive civil discourse...

African Americans and the Vote: Echoes From the Past

4 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 2 82 No.2 LA VONNE I. NEAL, Ph.D., Professor Emerita and Retired Associate Vice President, Administration and Finance, Northern Illinois University; Email: lneal1@niu.edu ALICIA L. MOORE, Ph.D., holds the Cargill Endowed Professorship in Education at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas; Email: moorea@southwestern.edu FOREWORD AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE VOTE: ECHOES FROM THE PAST By: Alicia L. Moore and La Vonne I. Neal “I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.” —Septima Poinsette Clark The theme for this Black History Bulletin issue is “African Americans and the Vote.” We begin this issue with a powerful introduction—”Looking Back, Reaching Forward: African Americans and the Vote,” written by guest editor Dr. Conra D. Gist, Associate Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education in the College of Education at the University of Houston. She sets the stage for the authors—educators, lawyers, and activists such as Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, and Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP, who illuminate current Black voter suppression laws that echo the laws of the past and the collaborative networks used then and now to defeat them. Additionally, in the spirit of Septima Clark, the authors have developed culturally responsive lesson plans that feature inquiry and critical thinking skills by incorporating the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, described below: What binds purpose, preparation, and practice together in this document is the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, released in 2013 (NCSS, 2013). The C3 Framework is a set of interlocking and mutually reinforcing dimensions of practice that focus on the intersection of inquiry, ideas, and learners. As a collaborative effort that began in 2010, the C3 Framework was built on the following shared principles: (1) social studies prepares the nation’s young people for college, careers, and civic life; (2) inquiry is at the heart of social studies; (3) social studies involves interdisciplinary applications; (4) social studies is composed of deep and enduring understandings, concepts, and skills from the disciplines; and (5) social studies emphasizes skills and practices for democratic decision-making. The four dimensions of the Inquiry Arc in the C3 Framework center on the use of questions to spark curiosity, guide instruction, and deepen investigations, and ideas in real-world settings in order to become active and engaged citizens in the twenty-first century. As the statement on what meaningful and powerful social studies instruction ought to look like, the C3 Framework served for the 2016 committee as the milestone for the kinds of knowledge, skills, and dispositions social studies teacher preparation programs are required to cultivate. Each standard outlined in this document is framed by the ethos of the C3 Framework—to enhance the rigor of social studies education by building the critical thinking, problem solving, and participatory skills that enable students to become informed citizens.1 Notes: National Council for the Social Studies, National Standards for the Preparation of Social Studies Teachers, January 1, 2018, available from https://www.socialstudies.org/standards/teacherstandards, 8. ...

Preservice teachers’ visions of themselves: powerful teachers or powerful social studies teachers?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to share findings from research on preservice social studies teachers’ visions of themselves as they prepare to enter their student teaching experience.Design/methodology/approachThe guiding research question for this study asked, “How do preservice social studies teachers articulate their visions of themselves as powerful social studies teachers just before their student teaching experience?”FindingsThe authors found that their visions of themselves emphasized aspects of powerful teaching, yet lacked explicit and important connections to social studies teaching. In their discussion and conclusions, they share the implications of these findings for their social studies teacher education program and other social studies education programs generally.Originality/valueThe authors contend that while powerful teaching is important, without an emphasis on powerful social studies teaching, they may struggle to achieve social studies teaching goals and purposes, such as teaching for democratic living, the common good, or citizenship. The distinction between powerful teaching and powerful social studies teaching, the authors believe, should be of concern for social studies teacher educators interested in positioning student teachers to create classroom spaces focused on the common good, national and global societies, or the deepening of democracy.

Powerful Social Studies Teaching With Poetry and Primary Sources

ABSTRACTGiven the current marginalization of the social studies within elementary classrooms it is vital that elementary educators seek integrative techniques that promote the social studies. This article explores one such example of integration taught by the authors within an elementary classroom. The three-day lesson taught to fifth-grade students aimed to teach a justice-oriented conception of citizenship through the use of historical biographies, found poetry, and primary sources. By the end of the third day, the students had used both general literacy practices (e.g. shared reading, visual literacy, close reading) and disciplinary literacy (e.g. sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating), demonstrating that integration can be a powerful means to teach the social studies while also maintaining the integrity of the disciplines.

Theorizing the Use of Aesthetic Texts in Social Studies Education

The researching and practicing of social studies education is often infused with poetry, art, literature, film, photography, and music. Engagements with and production of these aesthetic texts can promote critical thinking, foster empathetic thinking, and aid historical analysis. This article provides 3 potential theoretical explorations for why this might be so. The authors theorize aesthetic encounters in social studies education by deploying the terms of aesthetic experience, aesthetic conflict, and relational aesthetics. Each of those theoretical terms aids in the exploration of why aesthetic texts are so compelling and crucially important for social studies education. Further, these theoretical terms have potential to frame future research within social studies education. The complicated aesthetic dimension to powerful social studies pedagogy, research, and practice is described herein.

Building Civic Bridges: Community-Centered Action Civics

Project-based learning is an example of powerful social studies learning in which student engage in active inquiry. Action civics is a relatively new educational practice in which students act as citizens through a cycle of research, action, and reflection about problems they care about in their community. Building Civic Bridges offers teachers a model for students to develop and enact inquiry-based projects that reflect positive, and active, civic dispositions.

Powerful Social Studies Unit Design: A Companion to Powerful Social Studies Teaching and Learning

Social studies education suffers from a distorted rendering of purpose and mission. Rather than pragmatically employ the social sciences to furnish the material for inquiry into normative and moral issues, social studies classrooms too often focus on declarative, disconnected, atomized, and meaningless content. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has responded to this problem with suggestions for Powerful Social Studies Teaching and Learning (PSST&L) to ensure meaningful, active, value-based, challenging, and integrative learning experiences. Yet, unless teachers consciously and deliberately coordinate learning experiences within the course and its units, the goals of PSST&L may very well be neglected. In response to this problem, this article seeks to advance the idea of Powerful Social Studies Unit Design (PSSUD), which positions teachers to work as curricularists in order to negotiate the hazards of textbooks and standards and design macrocurricula in issued-centered, project-based, thematic, and reverse-chronological ways to ultimately reclaim the social studies and citizenship education from the tyranny of the social sciences.

Committed to differentiation and engagement: A case study of two American secondary social studies teachers

Abstract This case study examines two 10th-grade US History teachers who collaborated to create and implement an integrated, thematic eight-week unit on war with an emphasis differentiated instruction. Drawing on the National Council for the Social Studies (2010) framework for powerful and purposeful social studies instruction, the case study uses multiple sources of data, including 38 lesson observations, analyses of the teachers' lesson plans and student work, and interviews of teachers. Initially, the teachers were successful at engaging students in simulations, small-group discussions, and higher-order thinking. As the unit progressed, however, the teachers reverted to transmission-style teaching with an emphasis on breadth over depth. Changing teaching practice requires overcoming barriers associated with prior experiences and deeply-held beliefs about teaching and learning.

Pre-Service Teachers’ Middle-Level Lessons on World Religions: Planning, Teaching, and Reflecting

The purpose of this study was to examine how 22 elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) planned and taught lessons on world religions to 7 th -grade students. Pre- and post-lesson interview transcripts, lesson observations, as well as PST lesson plans and reflection journals served as data sources. Prior to teaching, the PSTs lacked adequate knowledge of world religions, were apprehensive about the task, and sought to teach without bias. Despite attempts at powerful and purposeful social studies teaching that was student-centered, the PSTs portrayed a bias toward Christianity, lacked solemnity, and were unprepared for student reactions. Because nearly each state includes world religions in its social studies standards, teachers must improve their capacity and willingness to teach world religions effectively.

Ways of Being a Social Studies Teacher: What are Prospective Teachers Thinking?

In this study we explored prospective social studies teachers’ memories of their middle and high school social studies teachers. Our goal was to determine what lessons, if any, their apprenticeships of observation taught them about teaching. Analysis of interviews with these prospective teachers indicated they talked about five ways of being a social studies teacher: an information giver, a content knowledge expert, a “character”, a caring, committed teacher, and “powerful.” After discussing these five ways of being a social studies teacher we present implications for teacher educators interested in building upon prospective teachers' initial conceptions of powerful social studies teaching and learning.

Modeling Powerful Social Studies: Bridging Theory and Practice with Preservice Elementary Teachers

This article reports on the practice of a teacher educator in an elementary social studies, teacher education course while he attempts to promote a view of powerful social studies teaching and learning through modeling powerful social studies lessons and publicly sharing his thinking about the lessons as they unfolded. Findings from this self-study of practice describe the challenges and highlight the potential of using modeling in teacher education as an intellectual and pedagogical method to facilitate preservice teachers’ learning about teaching social studies.

Teaching Powerful Social Studies Ideas Through Literature Circles

The author describes the use of literature circles in a social studies methods course for elementary preservice teachers and analyzes their effectiveness in teaching powerful social studies ideas. Literature circles encourage students to take more of a leadership role in the classroom, expect their active involvement, and challenge them to think more deeply about social studies content within texts. Students can compare different perspectives on the same historical event, such as the encounter between Columbus and the Taino, and reasons for including and omitting important ideas. Students can also note similarities and differences among cultures and current and historical events through literature circle discussions. However, teachers must carefully select texts which focus on powerful social studies ideas, emphasize the goal of thoughtful discussions when introducing literature circles, and be ready to raise significant issues ignored in the literature circle discussions during follow-up class discussions.

Pluralism in Scholarship and Experience

Ira Katznelson Pluralism in Scholarship and Experience I HAVE KNOWN ARISTIDE ZOLBERG FOR 40 YEARS. WE HAVE BEEN colleagues at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. We have taught together and have edited a book together (Katznelson and Zolberg 1986). To have had the privilege of reading, w orking with, observing, and participating w ith an intellectual and personal friend whose analytical power probes fundam ental questions w ith great acuity has been one of life’s best privileges. If I had chosen the title for this conference about Aristide’s schol­ arship, it would have been th at of a book w ritten by another form er colleague at the University of Chicago, the late Wayne Booth, the great literary critic who w rote Critical Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism. From the beginning, Aristide’s w ork has explored the power and limits of pluralism. His has not been a rom antic embrace—a simple w arm support for m ultiple cultures—for he has always understood that w ith pluralism comes danger, sometimes death. But he also has cele­ brated deep pluralism for offering hum ankind some of its most noble, m ost profound, and m ost m oving experiences. Probing this range, Aristide has always insisted on the quest for critical understanding, a search that has taken him on m any expeditions, some literal, others conceptual and analytical. He has taught many deep lessons about why, what, and how to study. The why always comes first. Only spend tim e and energy, he counsels (and this is w hat he practices) w hen the questions at hand are im portant, and not just for scholars. Only study, he advises, w hat you passionately wish to understand because the answers m ight m atter. social research Vol 77 : No 1 : Spring 2010 405 Do so, he recommends, by being open to using the full kitbag of tools available to social scientists (thus refuse to waste time in sterile m eth­ odological warfare), but always with a historical, a comparative, and an institutional sensibility. We once lived together in a political science departm ent in the Midwest. At m any m eetings concerned w ith faculty hiring, one of a small num ber of distinguished Straussian political theorists would justify a grudging vote for someone w ho did statistical research by deploying imagery, quoting the ancients, about the full body, explain­ ing that a body needs all its parts, including its feet. W ith that, they could vote for a left toe. Aristide would get incredibly im patient w ith th at kind of speech; sooner or later he would explode, saying some­ thing like, “You are the left toe!” Here, as elsewhere, he refused the choice between theory and in-the-trenches work, knowing that both, together, are required for powerful social studies to proceed. Not only has he hated bias about research methods, he has used a variety of approaches to chase after an understanding about hum an heterogeneity, knowing that these m atters have been embedded from the start w ithin the history and lineage of the W estern liberal tradition, a tradition to w hich Aristide is indebted and w hich he would like to strengthen, but not credulously. His realism is normative. The challenges he has probed are rooted in liberalism ’s found­ ing m om ents, including Magna Carta of 1215. That great docum ent contains 63 chapters or clauses that were forced on King John by rebel­ lious m agnates who w anted rights and liberties. W hat makes Magna Carta so significant is how it put everyone, including the king, under the rule of law. “All these customs and liberties we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom insofar as they concern our own relations w ith our own subjects,” it proclaimed. W ith this first codification of the m odern notion of rights came the question that Aristide has chased for m any decades, the question of membership. W ho gets those rights? W ho are “our own subjects” eligible for rights. W ho belongs? Other key Zolbergian them es already appear...

Early Childhood Social Studies Learning for Social Justice

Early childhood social studies students deserve to learn in a powerful, in-depth fashion about their interests with teachers who facilitate cognitive and affective growth. Humanistic teachers offer democratic learning experiences characterized by exploration and inquiry within a challenging and caring environment. Growth toward acceptance of all types of diversity and every classmate is featured. Through discussion about social studies topics, learners proceed to graphically represent what they learn. This powerful social studies learning is found in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The tenets, strategies, and approaches are easily transferable and modified to create powerful and exemplar early childhood social studies learning for social rights and social justice. Early childhood is the perfect place to set social justice learning in motion.

Standards, Firewalls, and General Classroom Mayhem: Implementing Student-Centered Technology Projects in the Elementary Classroom

If integrating technology means nothing more than enhancing the traditional delivery system of social studies content, where laptops replace notebooks, where PowerPoint slides replace handwritten overheads, where e-textbooks replace hard copy textbooks, then we will be no closer to the NCSS vision of transformative, powerful social studies instruction. (Doolittle & Hicks, 2003, p.75)

Learning and Teaching about Cultural Universals in Primary-Grade Social Studies

In this article we develop the argument that topical units on cultural universals are well suited as means for introducing students to social studies, although these units need to be more powerful than those found in the leading publishers' textbook series, and they do not need to be couched within the traditional expanding communities curricular sequence. We also overview 2 related lines of research designed to inform planning for more powerful social studies teaching in the primary grades. The first line of work features developmental studies indicating that the mostly tacit knowledge that children accumulate about cultural universals through everyday experiences is limited, disconnected, and frequently distorted by naïve ideas or outright misconceptions. The second line of work features educational studies in which units on cultural universals are constructed around big ideas and then implemented in first- and second-grade classrooms. Data collected during these implementations support the feasibility of these efforts and suggest practical guidelines on topics such as what needs to be included in lesson plans in order to enable teachers to work effectively from them, which aspects of cultural universals appear to be worth developing (given social education goals), how initial plans for topic development may need to be elaborated to ensure desired understandings, how traditional text materials may be supplemented profitably with fictional and nonfictional children's literature selections, and how students' potential for life application of what they are learning (and related self-efficacy perceptions) can be augmented through activities calling for students to interact with their parents at home.