Students used inquiry to invest folklore in their community. As part of the C3 inquiry arc students defined questions, connected folklore to a discipline, gathered data from their community and communicated information. Students' agency drove each of the projects as the students determined how much they would investigate each topic. Students…

Participation in a classroom-based study provided Grade 4 students with multiple opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. Intentionally-designed instruction during the multifaceted research included a variety of…

Set amidst an increasingly tense discourse about immigration and substantial pressures on educators, this study examines a three-week fourth-grade social studies unit as taught to a class with a large number of English learners located in a low-income school in the Pacific Northwest. Using ethnographic and sociolinguistic perspectives, we provide…

As the development of active, democratic citizens has become, arguably, the primary purpose of social studies education, the model of instruction in citizenship education varies significantly. Although current models of citizenship education typically foster a sense of societal conformity and law-obeyance to the exclusion of social change, this…

Learning about local government seems boring and irrelevant to most young people, particularly to students from high-poverty backgrounds. The authors explore a promising approach for solving this problem, Storypath, which engages students in authentic learning and active citizenship. The Storypath approach is based on a narrative in which students…