Kentucky's elementary social studies curriculum includes introductory knowledge in state and national history, providing an opportunity for teachers to include instruction on the influence of slavery on society before and after the Civil War, and sometimes on current events. For example, following the violent events in 2017 in Charlottesville,…

This article introduces the fifty states project, a year-long study of the United States that uses crowd sourcing to bring authentic materials into the social studies classroom. The project started five years ago, when author Kelly McPherson decided that she wanted to have a care package sent from all 50 states to help students learn about the…

Background/Context: Across the nation, people living in the United States are embroiled in conflict over the meaning of its past. Many of the most fervent conflicts relate to acts of historical violence: war, enslavement, conquest, and colonization among them. Elementary school students commonly study the early colonization of the land now known…

In this article, the authors focus on a one-week research project examining Frederick Douglass's civic actions to challenge racial discrimination African Americans faced before and after the U.S. Civil War. Our one-week research project was implemented at a free public charter school in amid-sized Southern city. Our project connects to the…

In schools similar to the one in this study, where over 75 percent of the students were non-White, students come to their classrooms having lived experiences with racism, and yet, in many classrooms, racism is never discussed or it is relegated to the past. This means, in many classrooms, there are White teachers who are unwilling or unable to…

Children in the United States live in a land of many nations, with nearly 600 federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native sovereign tribal nations and hundreds more not recognized by the federal government. Although children often study U.S. colonial history in elementary school, many non-Indigenous children may grow up unaware of…

Our 4th grade year has become known as "the field trip year", with over 10 trips carefully aligned with learning units across the year. This article describes the first trip of the year, which in many ways sets the stage for students' effective use of field trips as engaging extensions and applications of classroom learning. The Pike's…

Social studies teachers have to design classroom instruction to prepare students to be future democratic citizens. This means that middle school students need learning opportunities to grapple with issues of racism in our country's past and present. In this article, I discuss a six-day research project implemented in a sixth-grade U.S. history…

What should U.S. schools teach about U.S. actions abroad when students in the classroom have varied or conflicting memories, ideas, and experiences? Should schools teach the dominant narrative of U.S. benevolence and innocence in world affairs so as to instill patriotism in children? What kind of patriotism are we concerned with here? Or should…

In this study, we examine evidence of transfer from reading instruction to students' learning of language arts and historical content as demonstrated by their independent writing and growth in background knowledge. We taught a unit in a sixth-grade language arts classroom in which students learned about design elements of graphic novels (e.g.,…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), first administered in 1969, is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, geography, mathematics, reading, science, U.S. history, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The…

Using narrative research as a qualitative methodology, we (two white critical whiteness scholars) tell a story about how a dismantling and rebuilding of whiteness occurred in a fourth-grade classroom across three vignettes. Using a close read of Reverend Thandeka's primer on the ways white children are socialized, we wrestle with what pedagogy…

In this article, Harper B. Keenan investigates the treatment of violence in elementary history education through a case study of a fourth-grade unit on the colonial history of California featuring "the mission project," a long-standing tradition in California's elementary schools that has students construct a miniature model of a Spanish…

Young children can engage in close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking when age-appropriate texts are coupled with discipline-specific tasks. Prior knowledge is an impediment, though. Primary elementary learners simply do not have much of a historical schema. Because of primary elementary students' familiarity with Thanksgiving,…

The purpose of this APA BEA Racial Disparities Task Force report is to examine the role of racism and bias on educational opportunity and achievement disparities experienced by children. Specifically, we seek to link racism explicitly to opportunity gaps by examining how racism operates on multiple levels. Using critical race theory,…