Social Studies Unit Research Articles

Content and Languages Integration: Pre-Service Teachers’ Culturally Sustaining Social Studies Units for Emergent Bilinguals

This qualitative study examines how pre-service teachers incorporate asset-based, multilingual and equity-focused pedagogies, prioritizing students’ funds of knowledge and advocating for culturally relevant and sustaining approaches. Through an analysis of 92 social studies unit plans developed by pre-service teachers in the final semester of their teacher credential program, the study highlights students’ efforts in integrating locally relevant curriculum, translanguaging, and inclusive pedagogies in their teaching. The study emphasizes the transformative potential of integrating linguistic and cultural resources into content area teaching to cultivate inclusive and equitable learning environments for emergent bilinguals.

Story of revision social studies units in the midst of racial isolation

Black teachers encounter various microaggressions in and around schools that make the profession taxing (King, 2016). While hurdling relational challenges, Dr. Bell funneled his energy and revised two units for fourth and fifth grade students in the learning community. One unit, Events Leading Up to the American Revolution received limited edits due to the restraint of planning time and COVID19 quarantine mandates before implementation. The second unit, Activism, received a major overhaul as it was originally cut short during the Spring 2020 semester. This article reflects Dr. Bell’s account of the year spent revising both Social Studies units that students engaged in. He includes the events that led to the decision to focus on Social Studies content and the reactions of students and their involvement as they learned content and participated in class discussions. His students enjoyed the interactive lessons, although a majority of the planning was done by him without much collaboration from his team members. As a result, this experience has inspired him to find an opportunity to develop a secondary social studies course.

The multimodal meaning-making of elementary students in social studies

During their participation in a classroom-based research project, 9-10-year-old students had opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. The Grade 4 students read, discussed and wrote about picturebooks during Language Arts, Social Studies and Science, and participated in a range of activities that focused on a selection of elements of visual art and design. For the culminating activity of an interdisciplinary Social Studies unit, which was one component of the case study research, the students designed a multimodal poster to communicate their learning about how interactions between Indigenous Peoples and European explorers lead to change. Photographs of four students’ Exploration posters and excerpts from their written poster descriptions reveal how the students purposefully selected and orchestrated specific semiotic resources of image and layout to represent and express meanings that realized their objectives as sign-makers in a particular context. Indeed, the students designed multifaceted symbolic images that communicated their historical understandings as well as their knowledge about the elements of visual art and design under study. Discussion of the students’ Exploration posters is situated in sociocultural and social semiotics theory, multimodality, and visual competences.

Student Meaning-Making of an Allegorical Picturebook in Social Studies

Participation in a classroom-based study provided Grade 4 students with multiple opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. Intentionally-designed instruction during the multifaceted research included a variety of activities focused on a selection of elements of visual art and design. Student participants read and discussed, and wrote about picturebooks during Language Arts, Science and Social Studies. The Rabbits, a picturebook that has been interpreted as a powerful and unsettling allegory of colonization, industrializaiton, and ecological destruction, was one selection of literature featured during a Social Studies unit on European exploration. The content analysis of the students’ responses to The Rabbits revealed how the students identified, described, and interpreted Shaun Tan’s use of color, visual point of view, and typography as fulfilling multiple, and often simultaneous, meaning-making purposes. The responses provided evidence of student engagement in sophisticated visual analysis and symbolic interpretation that deepened their critical understanding and appreciation of The Rabbits, as well as enhanced their understanding of curriculum. Overall, the findings extend the limited research on how student knowledge about and interpretation of elements of visual art and design in the artwork in picturebooks used for Social Studies pedagogy can simultaneously develop students’ visual reading skills, enhance their comprehension of curricular content, and build their higher-order thinking skills.

Engaging Middle School Students in Disciplinary Literacy Through Culturally Relevant Historical Inquiry

AbstractThe authors share design principles from a middle school social studies unit that explored questions of local history and engaged students in extended work with complex texts. The unit involved constructing a problem space for students to explore multiple historical texts. Within that problem space, students had opportunities to develop focal literacy practices of history, consider cultural connections to the subject under study, and evaluate current local policy through a justice lens that was informed by their deepened understandings of historical events.

Combating Racial Inequity Through Local Historical Analysis: A Community-Informed Social Studies Unit

One way for teachers to use engaging and relevant social studies curriculum is by delving into local history to help students understand the influence that community activists have had on national policies and events. In this article, we provide teachers an approach to incorporate topics of racial inequity in their classrooms by showcasing a dynamic social studies unit that reveals the role of local history and community activists during the national Civil Rights Movement. As an example within the unit, we present a local, historical narrative that describes the activism of three local Black teachers in Palm Beach County, Florida, whose efforts in the 1940s significantly impacted the foundations of what was to become the Civil Rights Movement. We then present a multicultural social studies unit developed from this local history and guidelines for teachers to enact their own locally informed social studies unit. This content will help teachers expose students to the rich history of their community’s past by sharing ways that teachers can incorporate culturally relevant instruction of racially charged topics into the classroom.

“Unless You Were Native American…Everybody Came From Another Country:” Language and Content Learning in a Grade 4 Diverse Classroom

Set amidst an increasingly tense discourse about immigration and substantial pressures on educators, this study examines a three-week fourth-grade social studies unit as taught to a class with a large number of English learners located in a low-income school in the Pacific Northwest. Using ethnographic and sociolinguistic perspectives, we provide evidence of how the teacher leverages a wide array of instructional strategies and scaffolds to build language skills and content knowledge within a fast-paced unit on 19th-century Westward Migration. Embedded within such instruction is the construction of narratives that highlight regional examples of a linguistic and ethnically diverse community and that connect immigration trends on a global scale to local history. These strategies and narratives are then used in a summative lesson about immigration that affirms students’ family stories as part of the U.S. history still being written.

Characteristics of Social Studies Lesson Study in Mikawa Area, Aichi Prefecture, Japan: The Case of 6th Grade “I want to know more about the nearest country, Korea!”

The purpose of this research is to clarify the characteristics of social studies lesson study in the Mikawa area of Aichi Prefecture in Japan and to show comparative viewpoints on social studies lesson study in Indonesia. For that purpose, I took up the practice of “I want to know more about the nearest country: Korea!” Through the examination of this practice, I identified the following three points as what we achieve through social studies lesson study: (1) we are creating a conceptual diagram of the social studies unit; (2) we are preparing a teaching instruction plan; and (3) we are conceiving a temporary arrangement and a method of practice. In this study, I examine the significance and the problem.

Politicizing pedagogy

Recent scholarship on civic education has introduced some useful ways to engage students in learning about controversial topics, debating them, and participating in democratic life. However, while those are valuable tools for active citizenship, they’re not sufficient. Democratic education should focus on issues that matter intensely to students’ local communities, the author argues, and it should be grounded in the core skills of the academic disciplines. To illustrate, he describes a social studies unit he taught at an urban high school in Oakland, Calif., focusing on a pair of competing narratives about the crack epidemic of the 1990s, with attention to the ways in which public perceptions depend on the source of the given argument and the context from which it originates.

특수교육 기본교육과정 초등사회과의 성취기준과 교사용 지도서의 단원목표 분석

특수교육 기본교육과정 초등사회과의 성취기준과 교사용 지도서의 단원목표 분석

Introducing the Historical Thinking Practice of Contextualizing to Middle School Students

ABSTRACTThis article describes the design of a social studies unit about the Johnstown Flood of 1889 with a particular emphasis on how specific unit resources engaged middle school students in learning about the geographical and historical context of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. We also report on how the resources supported the teaching and learning of the historical thinking practice of contextualizing.

社会科メディア・シンフォニック電子教科書の開発 : 小学校高学年/中学校社会科用国際単元ソフト『世界の国々』

社会科メディア・シンフォニック電子教科書の開発 : 小学校高学年/中学校社会科用国際単元ソフト『世界の国々』

Research-Based Lessons That Support Student Independent Reading in Social Studies

High school social studies teachers face unique challenges in helping their students learn independently from text in their discipline. In this article, a set of research-based practices that couple independent student reading with high-quality instruction proven to improve content learning for high school nonnative English speakers is provided. Specific examples of each practice within a social studies unit are used to illustrate how to promote independent student reading and understanding that is integrated with the content.

Revision and Participation Patterns in Grades 5 and 6 Wiki Writing

Our study examined middle grade students’ participation in wikis during their two-month social studies unit co-taught by two teachers as part of a larger action research project. Using an analysis of 42 grades 5 and 6 students working together in eight wiki writing groups, we report on the frequency and types of revisions they made to collaboratively-written essays, and the distribution of the workload across group members in each of the wiki groups. Discussion data with 16 students from these wiki groups helps contextualize our analysis.Our findings suggest that given their extended time to write, students revised frequently, making replacements more often than they deleted, added or moved content. Students indicated a willingness to change others’ contributions and to have their own contributions revised by others in order to improve the quality of the essays. The majority of their revisions were at the word level, rather than at sentence, paragraph, and whole-text levels. One student in each group contributed significantly more frequently than any other group member. There were no gender or grade patterns in the frequencies or types of contributions that students made to the wikis.

Use of Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM) in Social Studies: Gifted and Talented Students' Conceptions

Problem Statement: There have been several studies that have investigated curricular interventions for gifted students to address their educational needs. For most courses and disciplines, a standard curriculum may not be sufficient for the majority of gifted students. Here, among other curricular efforts in the education of the gifted, an Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM)--which can be assumed to be responsive because of the interrelated dimensions of its structure and its dimensions such as an epistemological concept, advanced content, and the process-product--was assessed to address different aspects of gifted children. In literature, propositions of social studies curricula and instruction for gifted and talented learners indicate the necessity for the implementation of programs projected in the Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM). A review of the literature on social studies and gifted education also indicates that it may be important to study the lack of implementations for gifted and talented learners in the area of social studies by highlighting students’ thoughts in an implemented curriculum unit. Purpose of the Study: This study examines students’ thoughts on a differentiated social studies unit based on the ICM and its instruction. The aim of the study is to identify gifted students’ conceptions when the Integrated Curriculum Model is used in social studies.

Professional development for scaling pedagogical innovation in the context of game-based learning: teacher identity as cornerstone in “shifting” practice

A dominant discourse on “scaling-up” small-scale innovations based on a limited number of successful classroom trials pervades the educational literature. We view this discourse as insensitive to the professional work of teachers and the human side of school change. Our research investigated how teacher professional development could be conceived and conducted to support take up of digital game-based learning in the context of a 3-week social studies unit on governance and citizenship. Students played a mobile game in their own time. In the classroom, teachers enacted dialogic pedagogy to facilitate students’ meaning-making of their gameplay experience. Our findings indicate that teacher identity, constituted by their interwoven knowing–doing–being–valuing is central to any effort to scale pedagogical and technological innovation. We modified our original model for the appropriation of innovation uptake by teachers to one that places teacher identity as the centrepiece of the model and cornerstone in “shifting” teacher practice.

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.

Seamless Integration of Technology into an Industrialization Unit of Study

A significant number of inventions and innovations appeared during the time known as the Industrial Revolution. Changes in technology quickly transformed American life in the past and continue to impact businesses, communities, and schools today. Technologies like Skype™, Prezi®, and Poll Everywhere™ provide new methods for engaging students in learning and assess their understanding of content. Each of these technologies is free and can be used in one-computer classrooms or computer labs. These technologies can enhance the learning experience by engaging students in critical thinking and collaboration, allowing real-world applications of the content, and profiling various perspectives while utilizing digital tools that captivate students’ interests. We showcase a myriad of ways that these technologies can be seamlessly integrated into a social studies unit on Industrialization.

Using Evidence-Based Multimedia to Improve Vocabulary Performance of Adolescents With LD

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that is commonly used for guiding the construction and delivery of instruction intended to support all students. In this study, we used a related model to guide creation of a multimedia-based instructional tool called content acquisition podcasts (CAPs). CAPs delivered vocabulary instruction during two concurrent social studies units to 32 SWD and 109 students without disabilities. We created CAPs using a combination of evidence-based practices for vocabulary instruction, UDL, and Mayer’s instructional design principles. High school students with and without learning disabilities completed weekly curriculum-based measurement (CBM) probes (vocabulary matching) over an 8-week period along with two corresponding posttests. Students were nested within sections of world history and randomly assigned to alternating treatments (CAPs and business as usual) that were administered sequentially to each group. Results revealed that students with and without disabilities made significant growth on CBMs and scored significantly higher on the posttests when taught using CAPs.

Applying Research in Reading Comprehension to Social Studies Instruction for Middle and High School Students

Secondary-level content area teachers face unique challenges in helping their students successfully read, understand, and learn content from complex texts in their discipline. In this article, a set of research-based practices designed to provide effective and feasible instruction to improve students’ reading and comprehension of text and content is provided. Specific examples of each practice within a social studies unit are used to illustrate how to promote text reading and understanding that is integrated with the content.