In recent years, social studies teachers have described feeling startled and unprepared to navigate politically fraught conversations in the classroom alongside the vitriolic political bullying they also reported. Just as young people need space to practice civic skills, so too do teachers need space to practice pedagogical skills. This article…

In 2014, Virginia's Montgomery County school division adopted a place-based social studies curriculum titled "My Place in Time and Space" for fifth grade students. The curriculum promotes an awareness of the impact of place on local knowledge and disciplinary understandings in southwest Virginia, while also connecting local history to…

In the United States, people get very little news about Africa, and what news they do get is about war or famine, with little historical information or context. In this article, the authors describe how they developed and implemented a Pan-African Summit simulation project in order to give their approximately 100, 9th-grade students (in five World…

In social studies classes, there is a longstanding interest in how societies evolve and change over time. However, as stories of the past unfold, it is often difficult to identify a direct link between causes and effects, so students are forced to accept at face value the interpretations of economists, political scientists, historians,…

The "Darfur is Dying" website was the winning entry of a contest called Darfur Digital Activist, launched by MTV's 24-hour college network (mtvU). The site describes the winning game as "a narrative-based simulation where the user negotiates forces that threaten the survival of his or her refugee camp. It offers a faint glimpse of what it is like…