This study investigates how 19 third-grade students developed their understandings of enslavement during a six-week social studies inquiry. Using Teaching Tolerance's key concepts as my analytic framework, I analyzed the students' pre- and post-concept maps and classwork to understand their learning. The findings show that students conceptualized…

Research indicates that history-based curricula--specifically textbooks and trade books--about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) are problematic and limited. If race relations are arguably America's long, unsettled tension, then Dr. King was one of its most impactful figures. Using the relevant historical research as a framework and the…

Theorists have begun to explore the ways in which the narratives our children read influence the democratic ideals we wish to impart. In a nation so stratified along both racial and socioeconomic lines and with a long history of various forms of systemic oppression, this issue is particularly relevant to how children in the most inequitable…

Exploring controversial and difficult events and issues with young children can be challenging. The Civil Rights Movement is an abstract, perhaps remote, issue for young children today. However, it is an important part of our country's history and a theme worthy of study. This article suggests ways to use photographs to explore this mature subject…

This article, written by one of the teachers in the Ypsilanti Perry Preschool Project (1962-1967), critically examines the prevailing narrative about the preschool project's relationship to the High/Scope Educational Foundation. It describes what the author and other teachers actually did, the principles that informed their practice, and…

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks' bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view…