Elementary-aged children are often positioned as not developmentally ready to learn about race, racism, and injustice. Yet, the classroom materials used in most schools misrepresent history, withhold knowledge about racial injustice, or fail to uplift stories of resilience and resistance. For almost a decade, this groundbreaking resource has been…

This article engages with three commonly traversed social studies topics--depictions of violence and death from the French Revolution, during the Vietnam War, and regarding U.S. histories of racial segregation--through the lens of Achille Mbembe's "necropolitics" (i.e., political and social machinations of power that determine who lives…

Thinking at the nexus of epistemic injustice, childhood studies, transgender studies, and gender and racial justice in literacy education, this article illustrates how curricular engagement with questions of age, gender, race, and power can simultaneously complicate and flatten knowledge about power relations. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography…

This qualitative case-study looks at how one preservice teacher uses multimodal counter-storytelling to push back on dominant historical narratives in social studies teaching. It examines how the teacher conceptualizes the use of critical arts and humanities as pedagogical tools to represent historically marginalized voices and disrupt dominant…

In this qualitative study, researchers used critical race theory to examine the experiences of social studies standards committee members in 18 states and the District of Columbia. They found that while many participants articulated goals of increasing the teaching of race and racism in their state's social studies standards, at least in part,…

As the COVID-19 pandemic invaded our lives in March of 2020, schools were forced to close their doors and urgently transition to remote learning. This action research study is about pre-service elementary teachers (PSTs) in a social justice-focused social studies methods course who used this unprecedented time as valid curricular material. While…

Previous scholarship about LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum has tended to focus on teachers' perspectives and drawn on binaries such as presence/absence. Extending past research, this article describes the experiences of youth, primarily but not exclusively LGBTQ+ youth, with LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum with respect to intersecting identities and power…

As a social studies teacher educator in the United States, it is crucial that I work to better understand myself and my teaching in regard to anti-racism. As a community, we need to study ourselves both as individuals and as programs to better ourselves as teacher educators who care deeply about racial justice, both for our own students and for…

In a previous study conducted before the emergence of the #MeToo Movement and the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, the authors examined feminist teachers and found differences based on their liberal feminist or critical feminist perspectives. In this study, the authors examine the same participants five years later to determine if…

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…

Background/Context: Within the United States, wealth disparities are growing and upward social mobility is becoming increasingly difficult to attain. These trends call into question the American Dream ideology that anyone can succeed through hard work. This meritocratic ideal has traditionally been one of the unifying ideologies promoted through…

This case study explores the presence of deficit thinking among social studies educators in the State of Florida. Included in this research is an analysis of semi-structured interview data that focused on pivotal experiences and participants' understandings of the connection between social class and academic achievement, mobility, and race and…

Researchers and theorists in education have offered persuasive arguments and evidence documenting the need for, and benefits of, education for social justice. Despite these efforts the intersection of social justice with interdisciplinary curricular designs remains underexplored. This article argues that social justice education is enriched…

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…

In comparing one public school to another, discussions frequently include talk concerning the socio economics of a school or district, which then leads to talk about the advantages that one socioeconomic setting has over another. Educators tend to agree that low academic achievement frequently associated with a low socioeconomic status is a…