In this article, a research project is discussed that examines the political messages within the paintings commissioned by the U.S. Food Administration to cause civilians during World War I to donate ...food for the war effort. Sixth grade students in my research project analyzed the paintings commissioned by the U.S. Food Administration and then created their own painting based on arguments in Hoover’s Food in War Speech on why U.S. civilians should donate for the food conservation effort. They also wrote a metacognitive writing piece through a Director’s Cut explaining the political messages in their painting to cause U.S. civilians to donate for the food conservation effort during World War I. I analyzed the sixth grade students’ paintings and Director’s Cuts. The findings from five students’ paintings and Director’s Cuts are provided. Finally, I close the article with a discussion section to examine takeaways from how my research study potentially adds to the body of literature on teaching with visual primary sources that contain political messages.
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 benefits of doing this type of social studies instruction. Next, a brief overview of the benefits of using trade books focusing on social studies topics is provided. Finally, three activities are given. Each activity uses a social studies trade book connected to three different civil rights activists during the 1950s and 1960s: Thurgood Marshall, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Fannie Lou Hamer. The steps and resources to implement these activities are provided.
This six-day research project examined the potential for how trade books and primary sources can be used in concert with each other to develop middle school students' disciplinary thinking skills in ...the manners advocated for in the C3 Framework. The project was focused on the trade book Thurgood, a picture book biography about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Students drew images and used words to describe Thurgood Marshall's civic identity and answered metacognitive analysis prompts explaining their thinking and work. Students' work samples suggest that they employed a nuanced integration of both civic and historical thinking to articulate how Thurgood Marshall's lived experiences influenced his civic action and civic identity.
The role of literacy in social studies education has been greatly elevated over the last decade. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) models through the indicators of its C3 Framework ...how to strengthen K-12 students' disciplinary thinking, literacy, and argumentation skills in the four core social studies disciplines: civics, history, geography, and economics. One resource that social studies teachers can use to address the indicators within the C3 Framework is comic books. Comic books employ both visual and textual modalities to convey meaning, through text boxes, people's facial expressions, and imagery to capture the author's arguments. The various modes of communication utilized in comic books allow students to construct meaning. In this article, we discuss how to use two comic books, Batman: Ten Nights of the Beast, and Suicide Squad: Trial by Fire, to teach about the Cold War in the 1980s. We start by giving a brief historical overview of the Cold War in the 1980s. Then, the focus of the article shifts to provide an examination of the potential benefits of utilizing comic books. This section also discusses how popular culture reflects the issues, values, and beliefs of an historical era. Two activities are given that scaffold how high school social studies teachers can employ these comic books to analyze important components of the Cold War in the 1980s. The steps and resources needed to implement our activities are provided.
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