Although the social realist position is grounded in the fundamentally important observation that schools must engage students with knowledge that deepens and extends their understanding, rather than simply reproduce what they learn in everyday life, this approach commits a fatal flaw by equating such 'powerful knowledge' with the work of academic…

Today's media generally depicts negative or biased images of multicultural or ethnic groups based on certain symbols and semantics. Given these characteristics, it is important to provide an educational experience in which adolescents critically reflect on how the media presents distorted images of ethnic groups, especially migrants. Thus, the…

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has framed teacher education for decades, despite the difficulty of demonstrating that teacher preparation effectively develops PCK. Social studies educators have been especially wary of PCK, but their critiques have primarily challenged what knowledge is valued rather than its model of how teachers learn. This…

NCSS's framework for social studies education, "The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards," is centered on the concept of inquiry. As social studies teachers have worked to incorporate historical inquiry, many have understandably emphasized the teaching of historical thinking and democratic…

The protests of 2020 cast a national spotlight once again on police brutality and ongoing racial injustice in America. Within this context, many activists and even mainstream commentators have given more attention to a critical analysis of how American history has been taught, especially regarding race relations. The publication of the "1619…

Schools must develop educational interventions that assist students with disabilities to develop skills that are useful inside and outside of school (Fletcher et al., 2018). In this study, I will investigate how integrating visual arts into core social studies content benefits high school students within a self-contained special education…

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program releases its reports on student achievement in various subjects, the data are added to the NAEP Data Explorer (NDE) website. The NDE has been shown to support reflective educational practices in the social studies. Working with assessment data can stimulate ideas for how teachers…

Educators responsible for creating an introduction to religions course often struggle to design a syllabus that does not reinforce a world religions paradigm (WRP). This article offers an inquiry-driven course model for teaching about religion that guides students through a process for reading, contextualizing, and critiquing WRP-based information…

Since the mainstream U.S. history curriculum often excludes Asian Americans' struggles and resilience, many educators in the United States struggle to teach this subject. In particular, few studies explore how elementary social studies teachers use culturally relevant pedagogy to help Asian American students analyze and critique anti-Asian…

The current study investigates the impact of using an Instructional Model of Historical Empathy to teach the Holocaust on students' ability to contextualize historical events, recognize perspectives, and affectively connect to victims of the Holocaust. A three-day instructional unit was designed that incorporates primary sources from a variety of…

Middle school social studies teachers are increasingly working on argument writing in their classrooms so that students can successfully write counterarguments that acknowledge competing perspectives about historical and social issues by the end of eighth grade. The authors' prior research indicates that eighth-grade students "can" grow…

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the alignment between the stated goals and the discursive implications in a scripted curriculum published by Teaching Tolerance, a progressive education organization in the US. Social justice education and critical race theories ground the analysis of "Teaching 'The New Jim Crow': A…