"Countering Miseducation: Situating K-12 Social Studies Education within the Black Intellectual Tradition" combines two separate articles-Part I "Re-membering" The Teachings of PtahHotep: Educational ...Implications of the Oldest Book in the World" and Part II "Locating Early 20th Century K-12 Black Social Studies Educator, Leila Amos Pendleton, within the Black Intellectual Tradition." Our aim is to speak to limitations and new possibilities in Social Studies education. We address lesser known Black intellectuals, PtahHotep in ancient Egypt Kemet and Leila Amos Pendleton, African American educator and social activist, and how their intellectual contributions expand the contours of school-based instructional knowledge for teachers and diverse learners. Moreover, this article uses African-centered perspectives to place key issues surrounding standards-based Social Studies instruction within the context of the Black Intellectual Tradition. In Part III, we conclude with a duoethnography discussion on the aforementioned intellectuals and the implications of their work for the continued development of Social Studies education.
The developing discourse around social investment and impact investing makes strong claims regarding the possibility of both furthering one's own interests while simultaneously acting for the benefit ...of others—“doing good and doing well”. Such claims are central to UK‐ and US‐centric attempts to reform capitalism in the face of multiple global crises. This article uses Foucault's writing on (neo)liberal governmentality to analyze a particular manifestation of the logic of “doing good and doing well”: the attempt to build a market for social investment in the UK between 2010 and 2016, a project closely related to the development of the broader impact investment movement. Building on a close reading of Foucault's writing on the role of self‐interest, it is argued that two incompatible versions of social investment are present within the development of the market: one (the “innovative version”) that assumes purpose and profit are fully compatible, and one (the “principled version”) that assumes it is important to maintain a boundary between them. The relevance of these findings and the approach used is discussed in relation to the social studies of market, and ongoing efforts to develop a critique of “doing good and doing well”.
Fear has shaped events throughout U.S. history, as those who have possessed fear have weaponized this emotion to justify violence and oppression while others have used fear as an impetus for radical ...resistance. Fear, however, has been an under-researched emotion in history education. Using critical discourse analysis methods, in this article I aim to move fear from the periphery to the forefront by analyzing how fear is discussed in Virginia's U.S. History Standards and Curriculum Framework. Drawing from theories of BlackCrit and Feeling Power, three findings emerged from this study: The standards only describe fear as an emotion possessed by white people, the inclusion of Black suffering does not lead to Black fear, and Black people do not fear. This work illuminates the importance of examining emotions, particularly fear, in social studies education and has implications for both K-12 teachers and teacher education.
Since its introduction as an analytic and theoretical tool for the examination of racism in education, CRT scholarship has proliferated as the most visible critical theory of race in educational ...research. Whereas CRT’s popularity can be viewed as a welcome sign, scholars continually caution against its misappropriation and overuse, which dilute its criticality. We draw from the cautionary ethos of this canon of literature as the impetus for examining CRT’s terrain in social studies education research. Starting from Ladson-Billings’s watershed edited CRT text on race and social studies in 2003, this study provides a comprehensive theoretical review of scholarly literature in the social studies education field pertinent to the nexus of CRT, racialized citizenship, and race(ism). To guide our review, we asked how social studies education scholars have defined and used CRT as an analytic and theoretical framework in social studies education research from 2004 to 2019, as well as how scholars have positioned CRT within social studies education research to foreground the relationship between citizenship and race. Overall, findings from our theoretical review illustrated that contrary to the proliferation of CRT in educational research, CRT was slow to catch on as a theoretical and analytic framework in social studies education, as only seven of the articles in our analysis were published between 2004 and 2010. However, CRT emerged as a viable framework for the examination of race, racism, and racialized citizenship between 2011 and 2019, with a majority of these studies emphasizing (a) the centrality of race as a core tenet of CRT, (b) idealist interrogations of race, (c) the perspectives of teachers of color and White teachers in learning how to teach about race, and (d) the role of race and racism in curricular analyses that serve as counternarrative to the master script of the nation’s linear social progress in social studies education.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry ...design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.Design/methodology/approachTo study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.FindingsFindings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.Practical implicationsThe existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.Originality/valueThis piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.
PurposeThis paper aims to describe a professional development workshop designed to enhance teachers' pedagogical content knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThe program draws on a carefully ...articulated definition of pedagogical knowledge as elaborated by Shulman, and features the work of scholars focused on pushing new interpretations of the meaning of Gettysburg, especially in polarized political times.FindingsTeacher participants have been found to draw new meaning from their visit that, for many, has had a profound impact on the way they make sense of Gettysburg as a historic site of political importance.Originality/valueThe program offers a model for professional development providers interested in enhancing the pedagogical content knowledge of teachers and engaging them in examination of the past for the purpose of re-examining contemporary political concerns.
PurposeIn the Fall of 2020, three teacher educators in Ohio collaborated on a three-month long online professional development series on how to write Focused Inquiries, a la the Inquiry Design Model ...(IDM).Design/methodology/approachThe authors detail the contents of the six group professional development (PD) sessions and share the lessons that the authors learned as a result of leading this training.FindingsGiven this study’s mixed results, the authors often came back to the questions of “maybe it was us? Maybe it was the pandemic? Maybe there wasn’t enough training? Or maybe IDM creation isn’t a skill that all teachers possess and maybe that’s ok?” The authors share the struggles with these questions and situate all of this within the current culture wars raging around schools today.Originality/valueFinally, the authors offer the current approach to inquiry training for teachers that situates inquiry creation later in the process after significant structured introductory work.
In addition to the continuing need for citizens who can address the challenges of human communities, growing concerns have arisen regarding all life on the planet. Indeed, one of our most urgent ...conditions is the decline of the environment upon which all life depends. Yet, despite our concerns, there remain vastly differing views regarding the nature of the challenges, their fundamental causes, and how to address them. Among the reasons for these differing views are widespread misperceptions of the relationships between humans and the environment, and thus between our rapidly deteriorating social and environmental conditions. To correct these misperceptions, I argue that we must help our students develop a critical ecological perspective with which to interpret the basic connections between humans and the world. Inquiry Island-The Prequel: A Critical Ecological Social Studies Experience is a simulation activity designed to help students develop such a perspective. Like the original Inquiry Island, this updated version introduces our social and environmental challenges and explores how to address these problems through civic action. However, the newer version better reflects our current socioenvironmental conditions and more accurately depicts the deep human-environment interconnectedness essential to the development of a critical ecological perspective.
This paper is as an invitation to rethink social studies of economization and geographies of marketization at a time when the heydays of neoliberal marketization seem to be over. After briefly ...summarizing the thrust of the economization/marketization approach, we make two suggestions to develop the perspective further. The first is to make use of economic geography’s heterodox tradition and contribute to the ongoing “provincialization” of the neoclassical market. Second, theorizing actually existing market arrangements as necessarily involving struggles between competing logics and rationalities, we open social studies of economization and geographies of marketization for questions of social inequality, marginalization and exclusion.
The popularity of project-based learning has been driven in part by a growing number of STEM schools and programs. But STEM subjects are not the only fertile ground for project-based learning (PBL). ...Social studies and literacy content, too, can be adapted into PBL units to benefit teaching and learning, the authors argue. They review key studies on PBL in social studies and literacy education, two examples of successful social studies/literacy PBL units, and conclude with tips for developing social studies and literacy projects in classrooms.
