Journal of Social Studies Research最新文献

This paper shares findings of a qualitative project exploring teacher candidates' reflections on their own social studies inquiry teaching using video capture and annotation technology (VCAT). Teacher candidates' annotated video and written reflections were collected and analyzed. Findings include important understandings of teacher candidates’ scholarship-aligned recognitions of strengths and areas for growth as well as areas where they had underdeveloped or novice negotiated conceptions of inquiry-centered instruction.

Document-based history instruction (DBI) was implemented in a middle school special education setting to promote the development of disciplinary cognitive processing and higher order thinking using historical thinking as a framework for students with learning differences (ld). A convergent mixed methods action research design was utilized to explore a) how DBI influenced students’ disciplinary cognitive processing and higherorder thinking when reading multiple historical documents b) the affordances and constraints of using DBI in a special education classroom. Using quantitative data sources (e.g., highlighted documents, reading comprehension responses, and an ondemand writing task) and additional qualitative data (e.g., interviews, fieldnotes, classroom artifacts, and audio recordings), we uncovered insightful evidence to support the potential of DBI for students with ld. In one academic year, when reading multiple historical sources, students learned how to efficiently highlight content knowledge and academic vocabulary, interrogate historical sources, and corroborate information from different sources.

The primary objective of this article is to detail how two teachers in the same school site, in the American Southeast, taught war to the children of soldiers. Taken from an extensive qualitative case study involving eight teachers, this article examines the pedagogies engaged in by two teachers who expressed a desire to teach war more critically to their students. Critically here means but is not exclusive to raising student consciousness to issues of war not typically taught including investigating how power, race, gender, and sex operate in war, more closely examining decisions evaluating them for their justness or unjustness. In short a more authentic exploration of war. One teacher engaged a pedagogy of tension the other a pedagogy of facts. Both resulted in a less than critical examination of war. A pedagogy of tension reflected this teacher's reaction to pressure from the community and fear of surfacing or inflicting trauma upon students. A pedagogy of facts reflected the second teachers' beliefs that focusing teaching on facts will allow her to teach a more critical rendition of war. A qualitative empirical study, data was collected through interview and classroom observation.

Undergirded by theories of civic identity development, transformative pedagogies, and the promotion of identity exploration in the academic curriculum, this qualitative study examines five high school students’ perceptions of support for their civic identity development and identity exploration within a twelfth-grade Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. Government course. Classroom observations, teacher and student interviews, and artifact collection over the course of a three-month research period informed individual and cross-case analysis. The findings of this study indicate that the frequent use of discussion-based practices is supportive of identity exploration for students in different statuses of civic identity. All participants perceived support from their AP U.S. Government teacher and all perceived unique value in various class activities. The role of the instructor as an intentional agent for civic identity development and adolescent identity exploration is considered.

Social studies teachers are often reported as remaining reluctant to engage their students in discussions of contemporary social and political issues. It is therefore critically important to investigate instances of such discussions when they do occur. This paper, part of a larger qualitative study that included six middle and high school classrooms and 24 observed discussions, considers how students are positioned in classroom discussions of social and political issues. By thinking in terms of positions and Ellsworth's (1997) notion of “modes of address”, the authors conceptualize political discussions in terms of the delicate relations between intent and outcome, the social and personal, certainty and surprise. This paper identifies three modes through which students are invited into relation to social and political life via discussions of current topics: task-oriented participants, distanced commentators, and/or as implicated citizens.