Primary Objective: This study examines student reaction to a unit of instruction teaching war through a more critical lens focusing on anti-war movements and how student sense of civic agency was impacted. Research Design: A design study that centered student voice on activism and experiences of a unit of instruction of the USA at war. Design…

Students, especially young children, recognize differences. This guided inquiry positions elementary students to consider the (dis)abilities they see and do not see. This article couples trade books emphasizing diverse perspectives--general, American, people of color, international contexts, fiction, and disparate (dis)abilities--with evocative…

Second-graders engaged in complex reading, writing, and thinking about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Close readings of secondary and primary sources situated students to discover incongruencies between what is reported within trade-books and what is revealed within historical documents. Scaffolding directed students' scrutiny of…

In this article, I discuss one approach of implementing thematic teaching in the high school social studies classroom exploring the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. First, a short summary for the type of high school social studies classroom envisioned in the C3 Framework by NCSS is discussed. Then, I define thematic teaching and the…

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United…

On August 18, 2020, The United States will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment which gave women the vote. Belle La Follette played an important role in helping women gain the right to vote guaranteed in this amendment. She advocated for women in her home state of Wisconsin and across the country. This article…

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…

When John Lewis sought to change segregation laws in 1960 Nashville, Tennessee, he did so through nonviolent sit-ins. Throughout U.S. history, activists like John Lewis have turned to social change tactics outside of the institutions of democracy from which they have been largely excluded. However, social studies curricula rarely frame these…

The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, a year after being passed by Congress. It extended the right to vote to many women, but not all. Excluded from this landmark constitutional victory were women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who was born in Guangzhou (then Canton), China, in 1896, but who immigrated to New York as a child. From 1882 to…

This article traces how Mexican American Studies (MAS) scholar activists led and supported a statewide movement for MAS in Texas. As a Xicana feminist scholar activist, Saldan~a draws from her retrospective memory and personal archive of organizational notes, movement documents, personal testimonies before the State Board of Education, and photos,…

Scholars of citizenship education have long regarded deliberation as the default framework for democratic discussion in the classroom and beyond. Turning to the history and theory of rhetoric, we question why the deliberative model of the Athenian assembly has been developed for social studies pedagogy without including the litigative discourse of…

This article examines coverage in social studies curriculum and U.S. history textbooks, specifically, of women in the American Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and considers how social studies teachers can broaden the narrative they teach to include more gender-related issues and the work of women activists. The author found that despite a rich body of…

There are significant apertures between the history told within historians' scholarship and teachers' curricular resources. The Civil Rights Movement (hereafter, CRM) of the 1950s and 1960s did not start with Rosa Parks' arrest in Montgomery, though it was a spark that inflamed a long-smoldering fire. Nor did it end with Dr. King's dream in…

We charted how one educator's use of proleptic language--or language that invoked students' imagined future identities as if they are fully realized in the present--situated students in communities of academic and professional practice, both within the tangible community of the classroom and within those intangible communities consisting of…

A project-based approach to studying the civil rights movement can stimulate student engagement and their sense of connection to this historic period. The authors taught this project-based learning (PBL) unit on the American civil rights movement multiple times in the past 10 years to classes of middle school, high school general education,…