A current topic in U.S. public schools is teaching issues of racial discrimination in American history. There are those motivated by political gain for elected office that are trying to shut down conversations about slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws in K-12 schools while others point out the central role that race has played in U.S. history…

In this article, the authors focus on a one-week research project examining Frederick Douglass's civic actions to challenge racial discrimination African Americans faced before and after the U.S. Civil War. Our one-week research project was implemented at a free public charter school in amid-sized Southern city. Our project connects to the…

Social studies teachers have to design classroom instruction to prepare students to be future democratic citizens. This means that middle school students need learning opportunities to grapple with issues of racism in our country's past and present. In this article, I discuss a six-day research project implemented in a sixth-grade U.S. history…

Kentucky's elementary social studies curriculum includes introductory knowledge in state and national history, providing an opportunity for teachers to include instruction on the influence of slavery on society before and after the Civil War, and sometimes on current events. For example, following the violent events in 2017 in Charlottesville,…

This study contributes to the limited research on emergent bilinguals, perspective taking, and second language reading of informative text. The explicit integration of Freire's (1993) notion of conscientizacao, or consciousness-raising, with the constructs of empathy and embodiment (Gee, 2001; Hurtado, 1996) and with translanguaging (García, 2009)…

This qualitative case study examines how fifth graders and their teachers participated in critical literacy instruction grounded in systems thinking on the topic of slavery. Systems thinking seeks to discover relationships and patterns in diverse underlying systems; critical literacy examines everyday texts, focuses on social justice and change,…

History labs invite students to examine primary and secondary source documents related to an essential question. The sources used in a history lab should represent multiple perspectives so that students are aware of the varying accounts of and opinions about historic events. By being exposed to multiple perspectives, students also learn about…