Journal of Social Studies Research最新文献

This article compares case studies to better understand how third grade teachers, serving low-income (including Title I) schools, adapted their instruction in the midst of a global pandemic to better support their students' learning about locally-relevant civic issues. Civic perspective-taking components were embedded in the unit design with the aim of building deliberative, inclusive classrooms. The team designed lessons drawing from theories of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Using semi-structured interview data, we examined teachers' reported thinking and perceptions about students’ needs and their own struggles to deliver purposeful, equitable instruction. Findings indicate that as teachers collaboratively designed the lessons they discussed how to balance relevance and sensitivity in relation to content that mirrored students lived realities. This study advances our understanding of what challenges teachers overcome to integrate culturally-sustaining practices in their social studies instruction.

Thinking at the axes of homonationalism, civic education, and queer-inclusive social studies, this article complicates the uneven relationships between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) exclusion and belonging. Arguing that more attention should be paid to how Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) spaces may function to render particular imaginaries of the queer civic subject, and the U.S. queer civic subject in particular, more viable than others, I extend both the conceptual and methodological directions of out-of-school social studies research to underscore how equity – as a concept – becomes connotative of particular types of civic action and life. Highlighting how LGBTQ + youths' talk can be discursively read and traced as a pedagogical text, I emphasize how a ‘good’ queer citizenry, and indeed a ‘good’ queer life, is one that follows the logics of cis-hetero-patriarchy and American exceptionalism. In so doing, I document the rhetorical reification and discursive production of queer complicity and community.

This phenomenological case study investigates how planning community-centered civics inquiries can prepare elementary pre-service teachers to better address inequities facing rural communities, including those located on Indigenous reservations. Specifically, the study addresses this research question: How does community-centered planning inform pre-service teacher readiness to support place-conscious and anti-colonial civics education within elementary contexts? Findings suggest that guided, community-centered planning leads to enhanced pre-service teacher confidence in preparing to facilitate equity-oriented elementary education, particularly as related to evolving understandings of civics content competence, relational commitments, and responsibilities of rural teachers.

Informed by Critical Race Theory, this quantitative study supports civic educators in understanding the role of classroom climate and racial identity in students' civic engagement during a statewide middle school civics mandate (n = 4707). Findings reveal that students of color experience higher civic engagement and lower civic attitude scores than white-identifying peers, after controlling for school, classroom, and affluence indicators. Students' perception of whiteness (or perhaps majority status) appeared to correlate with positive civic knowledge and civic attitude, but relative civic inaction. These findings suggest differences in civic outcomes as early as middle school between white-identifying students and students of color. Such differences offer implications for civic education interventions that address not only effective instruction, but civic inequities, students’ perceived agency, and curricular content.

Ever-increasing numbers of teachers are expressing commitments to social justice education today, but few experienced critical or democratic education in their own schooling or in their teaching practicum. Thus, teachers’ critical democratic commitments can be difficult to put into practice, especially in classrooms where students with diverse and unequal positionalities are engaged in learning together – what I call “heterogeneous” classrooms. Education that is “democratic” (that includes a range of warranted perspectives) can seem to come into conflict with education that is “critical” (that elevates and centers marginalized perspectives). We have little research depicting how educators meet such challenges.

This paper depicts an experienced and committed social justice educator wrestling with difficult problems in the enactment of critical democratic education. Mr. Crane regularly engaged his racially and linguistically heterogeneous students in discussions of social issues, and during these discussions regularly encountered practical facilitation challenges posed by inequality among students. He wrestled with how to elevate students of color's views without spotlighting them, and how to challenge dominant perspectives without shaming the students who voiced them. Drawing on qualitative data from classroom observations and interviews, I depict Mr. Crane making sense of and mobilizing emergent instructional responses to these challenges – with, by his own reckoning, mixed results. One instructional routine, an impromptu version of a critical inquiry, was flagged by Mr. Crane as a promising method for navigating some of the trickiest problems of critical democratic education practice.

This paper's findings demonstrate that enacting critical democratic education is not easy. Even experienced and committed social justice educators struggle with how to put their critical values into practice. By making visible one experienced critical democratic educator's recurring problems of practice, my research acknowledges the difficulties of this work and contributes to problem-framing. Furthermore, by deconstructing a promising routine for impromptu critical inquiry during classroom discussions of social issues, this research contributes a model of effective critical democratic education in practice.