This essay explores the institutionalized master narrative of public institutions and how the mandated policies enacted by public institutions impact social studies teachers when they are delivering instruction to their students. A socio-transformative constructivist framework guides the essay in order to affirm that knowledge is socially…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Student Voice." Contents include: (1) How Can We Address a Problem that We…

The highly publicized imposition and retraction of the "family separation" border policy by the current U.S. Administration was not an anomaly in U.S. history. In this manuscript, we place these troubling recent events in the context of decades of U.S. immigration policies and politics. We then describe the consequences of family…

The year 2017 will mark the 75th anniversary when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 or EO 9066 on February 19, 1942. EO 9066 led to the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into ten racially segregated concentration camps throughout the U.S. This article discusses the educational and literary…

This essay suggests a queer reading of the poem "My Japanese Fan" by American children's writer Laura Richards. Published in 1890, the poem stands out as conspicuously queer even today. While describing a Japanese figure of ambiguous gender, the poem outlines for its young readers terms for defining sexual identity that lie outside…

Nonsectarian Sabbath or Sunday schools served as an important entry point for public schooling in the first decades of the nineteenth century. These schools provided the basic spelling, reading, and writing instruction often required for admission into public schools. Singing was also an essential component of Sunday schools, and basic instruction…

The year 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the Supreme Court's most important decisions on race, justice, and equality. In 1967, the Court in "Loving v. Virginia" held that states could no longer prevent people of different races from falling in love and building a family together. The decision had been a long time coming. For…

Students in the United States learn about the history of enslavement throughout their educational experiences. Yet our understanding of what students from different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds know about this difficult period in American history is limited. In this study, we use mixed methods to examine written narratives of students'…

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…

As society continues to confront the implications of fake news and misinformation for American democracy, particularly the effects on public institutions, it is natural to turn to examples from the past. Digital libraries and archives provide students with unprecedented access to media from the past. Digital history includes the raw materials of…

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 essay explores the ways that museums educate adults, and reveals that, as cultural educators, museums have the ability to promote hegemonic stories through their displays. I discuss these ideas through my visits to two museums in Atlanta, Georgia, USA: the Atlanta History Centre and the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History.…

Traditional narratives of U.S. history largely exclude Asian American histories, particularly at the elementary level. This qualitative case study examines how three Asian American elementary school teachers included Asian American histories in their social studies curriculum and scaffolded student understanding by sharing their own hybrid…

This chapter summarizes the complex history of colonization of the Indigenous peoples of what is now the United States from the perspective of leadership education. The authors review the dilemmas and challenges of bridging fundamental cultural differences regarding leadership education and concrete steps toward decolonizing leadership education.

This study examines the movement to integrate LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) history into high school US history courses. Using such primary sources as government documents, classroom resources, and organizational agendas, and oral history interviews with teachers, gay rights activists, and scholars, the study probes grassroots…