“What is slavery?”: Third-grade students’ sensemaking about enslavement through historical inquiry

ABSTRACT This study investigates how 19 third-grade students developed their understandings of enslavement during a six-week social studies inquiry. Using Teaching Tolerance’s key concepts as my analytic framework, I analyzed the students’ pre- and post-concept maps and classwork to understand their learning. The findings show that students conceptualized enslavement as interactions between individuals—such as getting whipped by an overseer or forced to work by a master—but did not focus on the systemic nature of power and economic gain. Furthermore, students’ sensemaking about race was limited to naming enslaved people as African Americans without naming the enslavers as whites. These results point to the need for critical inquiries on enslavement in elementary schools that explicitly focus on systemic race/ism and white supremacy. I provide implications to support antiracist teaching about enslavement in K–5 social studies education and teacher education.