Social Studies Education Research Research Articles

The learner's pathway to argumentation: an analysis of social studies inquiry design

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.Design/methodology/approachTo study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.FindingsFindings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.Practical implicationsThe existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.Originality/valueThis piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.

“This is for us, not them”: Troubling adultism through a pedagogy of solidarity in youth organizing and activism

ABSTRACT Social studies education research lauds the importance of schools as spaces to practice democratic values while also largely ignoring the agency youth exercise to shape their lives in the present. This article explores how young people organize and enact democratic practices within youth-mediated contexts in schools by examining the pedagogy of solidarity that adults must enact to support youths’ visions of democratic life. This qualitative study examines youth organizers’ response to the murder of a Black man in their community and how adults acted in solidarity or against their civic action. The findings elucidate how youth organizing and action can be re-framed as democratic actions and what it takes for adults to make this epistemic and ontological maneuver. The article concludes with a discussion about implications for social studies research when centering youth agency, as well as an analysis of social education beyond the classroom and adult-centered understandings of democratic education.

PRE-SERVICE ENGLISH TEACHERS' READINESS TO DEVELOP DIGITALIZED AUTHENTIC MATERIALS WITH ISLAMIC VALUES

Pre-service English teachers still need to gain the competence to develop authentic materials with Islamic values, reflected by their low perceived readiness. To reveal their readiness, this study was conducted by using narrative inquiry. The data were gathered from the storytelling of pre-service English teachers pursuing master's degrees at IAIN Kediri. Participants in this study were one male and one female student with teaching experience. The data were analyzed by using thematic analysis. The data showed that the pre-service teachers believed the readiness to develop digitalized authentic materials with Islamic values could have been more optimal. It is because of the existing instructional materials provided by the government, their lack of confidence as new teachers, and their limited autonomous access to their classes as a new teacher. English textbooks provided by the government are only general English. So, it makes the teachers follow the materials instead of developing authentic materials with Islamic values that are fundamentally needed by students studying in Islamic institutions, such as modifying the materials from books to reflect Muslim activities. Therefore, the pre-service teachers must expose themselves to integrated materials books and digital materials with Islamic values.

Social studies education research for sustainable democratic societies: Addressing persistent civic challenges

ABSTRACT Social studies education and research can and must play a central role in sustaining democratic societies. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of this vital journal that aims to strengthen social studies education, democratic societies face numerous serious challenges. Although today’s circumstances are unique, many of our current challenges have existed (and will continue to exist) in some form throughout the history of democracy. In this article, scholars from various sub-fields of social studies education explore how research, scholarship, and practice in the field can address seven of these persistent civic challenges: ecological sustainability, media literacy, equity and inclusion, civic engagement, political pluralism, civic competency, and sociohistorical change. Essays on each of these topics analyze relevant prior research and offer suggestions for how future research and scholarship can explore how educators can help to address these persistent civic challenges, with the goal of supporting robust participatory democracy.

Enhancing Practices in Social Studies Education: An Examination of Graduate Dissertations Employing Action Research

Practice-based research is perceived as significantly important to enhance the quality of social studies education in the literature. In particular, graduate dissertations have great potential for contributing to the literature, and using research methods, and designs that improve practice is valuable in graduate-level research. This study focuses on dissertations that employ action research. This practise-based research design can be used to find solutions to instructional problems and improve the quality of social studies instruction. The study's primary aim is to examine the graduate dissertations with action research design completed in the field of social studies education in Turkey in terms of various variables. Document analysis, a qualitative research method, was used, and 82 graduate dissertations adopting action research in social studies education were examined. Descriptive analysis was performed in data analysis. The results showed that only few graduate dissertations were completed by using action research in social studies education, these dissertations were mostly at the master's level, qualitative research methods were employed in most of the dissertations, teaching-learning approaches, methods, and techniques were mostly addressed in the data collections processes, and most of the dissertations did not involve an action or lesson plan.

Critical What What? A Theoretical Systematic Review of 15 Years of Critical Race Theory Research in Social Studies Education, 2004–2019

Since its introduction as an analytic and theoretical tool for the examination of racism in education, CRT scholarship has proliferated as the most visible critical theory of race in educational research. Whereas CRT’s popularity can be viewed as a welcome sign, scholars continually caution against its misappropriation and overuse, which dilute its criticality. We draw from the cautionary ethos of this canon of literature as the impetus for examining CRT’s terrain in social studies education research. Starting from Ladson-Billings’s watershed edited CRT text on race and social studies in 2003, this study provides a comprehensive theoretical review of scholarly literature in the social studies education field pertinent to the nexus of CRT, racialized citizenship, and race(ism). To guide our review, we asked how social studies education scholars have defined and used CRT as an analytic and theoretical framework in social studies education research from 2004 to 2019, as well as how scholars have positioned CRT within social studies education research to foreground the relationship between citizenship and race. Overall, findings from our theoretical review illustrated that contrary to the proliferation of CRT in educational research, CRT was slow to catch on as a theoretical and analytic framework in social studies education, as only seven of the articles in our analysis were published between 2004 and 2010. However, CRT emerged as a viable framework for the examination of race, racism, and racialized citizenship between 2011 and 2019, with a majority of these studies emphasizing (a) the centrality of race as a core tenet of CRT, (b) idealist interrogations of race, (c) the perspectives of teachers of color and White teachers in learning how to teach about race, and (d) the role of race and racism in curricular analyses that serve as counternarrative to the master script of the nation’s linear social progress in social studies education.

Becoming “Hijas de la Lucha”: Political subjectification, affective intensities, and historical narratives in a Chilean all-girls high school

ABSTRACT This article explores the processes by which Chilean female feminist public high school students used political and historical narratives and symbols during the feminist movement of 2018. It analyzes how these particular usages were crossed by affective intensities that worked to produce students’ political subjectivities as collective and agentic. This affective work was produced with other members of the school community and sometimes was met with anger, policing practices, and desires to exclude students from particular historical narratives. The data for this article were produced within a yearlong critical ethnographic study on the processes of production of high school feminist students’ gender and political subjectivities in Chile, which included participant observation, testimonios interviews, art-based collective testimonios workshops, and analysis through affect theory. The findings show the types of historical and political narratives and symbols used by students, what affective intensities that crossed these symbols did to the students’ political subjectivities, and the conflicts these intensities produced within the school community. The article concludes by examining how these findings might open new questions within the field of social studies education research.

Recent Trends in Social Studies Education Research in Japan Connecting Normative Research and Empirical Research

Recent Trends in Social Studies Education Research in Japan Connecting Normative Research and Empirical Research

An Analysis of Research Trends in Journal of Research in Social Studies Education Using Text Mining and Network Analysis

An Analysis of Research Trends in Journal of Research in Social Studies Education Using Text Mining and Network Analysis

Trends of Social Studies Education Research in Korea since the 1990s: Focusing on Ph.D Dissertations at Seoul National University and Korea National University of Education

Trends of Social Studies Education Research in Korea since the 1990s: Focusing on Ph.D Dissertations at Seoul National University and Korea National University of Education

Analyzing Richard Nixon’s “Political Death and Resurrection” to Strengthen Students’ Civic Thinking Skills

While historical thinking has a rich literature, civic thinking has been an underdeveloped area of research in social studies education. I discuss in this article three activities designed to strengthen students’ civic thinking skills by examining the “political death and resurrection” of Richard Nixon in the 1960s. These three activities help students critically analyze politicians’ remarks to grasp direct and indirect messages contained within political statements and advertising. The steps and resources to implement these activities are provided. The development of students’ civic thinking skills helps them analyze a politician’s arguments and judge for themselves the merits of a candidate and his or her statements and policy recommendations.

A Dream and a Bus: Black Critical Patriotism in Elementary Social Studies Standards

Extant conceptions of patriotism in social studies curricula are centered upon blind allegiance to the state or a belief in ideals of a liberal democracy. Yet these conceptions fail to account for the complex racial experiences that mediate citizenship and civic action, especially for Black persons. In this article, we advance a theory of Black critical patriotism, which is rooted in the idea of personhood and, reciprocally, resistance to subpersonhood. Using Black critical patriotism as a theoretical framework, we examined how Black resistance, activism, and intellectual agency are represented in K–5 social studies standards across the United States. Findings revealed that Black critical patriotism is limited to temporal freedom movements and emphasizes individual acts of patriotism as opposed to sociopolitical traditions of Black collective resistance. Furthermore, Black critical patriotism was accredited to two historical figures, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, with their activism sanitized to fit within the master narrative of American progress. In light of our findings, we conclude with recommendations for elementary teachers to excavate standards in order to more accurately contextualize Black history and racialized citizenship. We also call for future research in social studies education that advances nuanced conceptions of racialized citizenship.

日米の社会科教育研究は「思想」をどのように捉えてきたか ― 方法論的考察を通して ―

日米の社会科教育研究は「思想」をどのように捉えてきたか ― 方法論的考察を通して ―

More than a feeling: Tracing the progressive era origins of historical empathy in the social studies curriculum, 1890–1940s

Understanding historical empathy is a bourgeoning subfield of social studies education research. Students demonstrate historical empathy by analyzing sources 1) to determine historical context, 2) identify perspectives of historical figures, and 3) make affective connections to historical content. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine primary sources from educational leaders and organizations during the Progressive Era in American public school education in order to trace the origins of historical empathy as an implicit goal in the social studies curriculum. Our guiding research question is “How does the work of Progressive Era organizations and educational leaders impact how Americans viewed historical empathy?” We purposefully selected documents from Progressive Era organizations and certain leaders whose work formed a strong foundation of social studies education history. We conclude with an examination of the importance of historical empathy today in order to demonstrate the importance of historical empathy as a curricular aim of social studies education.

“Try Not to Giggle if You Can Help It”: The implementation of experiential instructional techniques in social studies classrooms

This qualitative study examined how social studies teachers implemented experiential instructional techniques by closely analyzing videotaped lessons taught over four years in third through 12th grade classrooms across 16 school districts. Data analysis indicated that of the 438 lessons, only 14 involved experiential instructional techniques, and their implementation generally failed to reflect the potential benefits of this instructional approach. Twelve of the experiential exercises (a) lacked a clear instructional purpose related to the content; (b) did reflect an instructional purpose, but it was ultimately thwarted by the activity׳s unanticipated dynamism; or (c) encouraged the development of significant misconceptions about the content, while one of the two lessons without these problems demonstrated the strategy׳s use for reinforcement of factual recall rather than critical thinking. Implications for social studies education research and practice are considered.

Trends in Theoretical Research in Social Studies Education in 2014

Trends in Theoretical Research in Social Studies Education in 2014

Trends in Practical Research in Social Studies Education in 2014

Trends in Practical Research in Social Studies Education in 2014

Virtuous Subjects: A Critical Analysis of the Affective Substance of Social Studies Education

This essay invites social studies educators to consider critical theoretical insights related to affect, emotions, and feelings from what has been termed “the affective turn” in social sciences and humanities scholarship. Developments in theorizing affect and recent research in social studies education are related to affective elements of social studies. Two specific affects—pride and shame—are considered within specific contexts of teaching civics and teaching history. The affective dimensions of social studies education require critical reflection and analysis to understand the complex nature of affect in social studies education.

Trends of Theoretical Research in Social Studies Education in 2013

Trends of Theoretical Research in Social Studies Education in 2013

Trends of Practical Research in Social Studies Education in the 2013 Academic Year

Trends of Practical Research in Social Studies Education in the 2013 Academic Year