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…

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…

This article draws from a year-long ethnographic study documenting the use of comics in a school. Focusing on literacy work in a social studies classroom, it documents how comics were welcomed into and challenged classroom spaces. Comics were introduced, read, and engaged with collaboratively. While comics were able to support strategic practices,…

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…

The purpose of this exploratory, descriptive study was to understand what and how students learn about the Holocaust in private Christian/Catholic middle and high schools. Christian schools have been criticized for putting more emphasis on teaching religion than on providing a quality education. A convenience sample of middle and secondary English…

Scholars contend that disciplinary literacy is a productive route for all secondary learners, including those identified as struggling readers, to build knowledge. Relatedly, scholars point to disciplinary literacy as a socially just alternative to decontextualized skill instruction and deficit positioning. Yet, little research has examined how…

In this interpretative case study, the researchers examined the beliefs and practices of 10 self-identifying race-conscious social studies teachers. Using critical race theory as the lens, the results showed that most of the teachers made race explicit in their classrooms, included race in units not typically considered race-related, and focused…

Transnationalism is a phenomenon that has consequences for education, broadly defined. Even as youth engage in transnational practices that expand their knowledge across borders, immigrant students in U.S. schools are often framed narrowly as "English learners" and their forms of knowledge may be erased. Synthesizing literature at the…

This project began as a content analysis of five South Korean high school Social Studies textbooks. Yet, it has evolved into an epistemological experiment to pursue the question of "what does it mean to leave America for Asia, at least methodologically, for the researcher who left Asia for America?" Using the textbooks as a mediating…

Current Norwegian curricular guidelines oblige schools to educate citizens with a critical perspective on society. From a discourse theoretical perspective, this obligation implies that various school subjects, and in particular social studies, offer discourses on social issues that allow for different points of view and critical evaluation.…

High school social studies teachers are always struggling to "cover the content" while addressing an ever-expanding set of additional demands. The Common Core expects literacy instruction to be incorporated into social studies. NCSS's new C3 Framework emphasizes teaching students to ask questions, evaluate sources, and communicate…

This is an instrumental case study of 1 novice and 1 experienced secondary social studies teachers' concurrent assessment practices within tightly structured, standardized-tested curricula and flexible elective curricula. It is anchored by 2 questions: (1) How did the teachers' assessment stances and practices manifest across the 2…

The author explores the articulations of six social studies student/teachers after a viewing of "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts". The film, a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the people in and around New Orleans, constitutes an encounter with what Deborah Britzman (1998) calls "difficult…