This article presents the findings from a yearlong narrative inquiry of teacher enactment of state mandated curricular reform in middle level social studies. Four brief narratives and cross-narrative themes are presented to provide examples of the complexities of teacher decision making and positionality when implementing new reforms. Analysis…

Bansho (Japanese board writing) is becoming an area of interest among researchers and educators as it serves as an asset to make a searching inquiry into teaching. This study aimed to identify the principles of teacher's decision-making in bansho process. Data of the study were drawn from a sixth-grade Social Studies lesson in a school in Japan.…

This phenomenological study examined how eighth grade students in a privileged suburban community and school district understood their civic identities and saw their roles and responsibilities as citizens. Through analyzing artifacts the student participants generated in their eighth grade civics social studies class and conducting semi-structured…

Historical fiction is often used as a resource in elementary classrooms to integrate social studies and English-Language Arts (ELA), a practice that teachers often use as a time-saver when schedules are limited for social studies in an elementary classroom. Using historical fiction as a basis for integration can give students more opportunities to…

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of secondary teachers who grade student work, including their grading beliefs, decisions, and feedback practices at Discovery Hills Unified School District. The theory that guided this study was self-determination theory as it helps explain the…

Examining the connections among teacher characteristics, instructional decision-making, and student learning in social studies education are both complicated and contentious. In the current study, we shed light on middle grades social studies teaching and learning--a black hole of research in the subject area. Using data from the National…

This article addresses the teaching of disability history, specifically concerning the historical figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Drawing upon literature from multicultural education, disability history and disability studies in education (DSE), the authors discuss historical content and teaching ideas for instruction about FDR. The…

What ideological views toward citizenship education do teachers possess? Does a teacher's Civic Education Ideology relate to how and what they teach? This study addresses these questions by developing a psychometric scale measuring teachers' level of conservative, liberal, and critical Civic Education Ideology in one Midwestern state in the United…

Young learners need to cultivate new democratic skills and dispositions to fully participate in civic dialogues, but many teachers have yet to integrate suitable experiences into their curricula. These new media skills apply established aspects of citizenship like deliberation, pluralism, and participation towards engagement with various forms of…

This study investigates the hands-joined learning framework as an approach to personalize and provide instructional scaffolding within project-based learning. The authors include a case description of hands-joined learning in a middle school social studies classroom and critically examine middle school student feedback in relation to two aims: (a)…

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is increasingly popular in K-12 schools, not just in the United States but around the world. PBL is a great way to engage students in their learning. In this article, the author presents what PBL is and is not.

This qualitative case study explored the implementation of critical citizenship education in an eighth grade social studies classroom. This research was guided by Johnson and Morris' (2010) framework for studying critical citizenship education and took place in a public charter school located in a capital city in the southeastern United States.…

This case study explored how a social studies teacher and a TESOL teacher collaborated to teach an eighth-grade civics and economics course in a diverse classroom with Latinx emergent bilingual students. The researcher employed a theoretical framework of culturally and linguistically relevant citizenship education (CLRCE), which includes five…

The focus of this article is on digital literacy and students' use of digital sources. We are examining how students choose digital video sources when doing group work with tablets in a social studies project. The analysis centers on how students collaboratively negotiate and reason around their choice of video sources during an assignment about…

The protests against the Budget Repair Bill in Wisconsin during the spring of 2011 provide a powerful moment in which to examine social studies teachers' curricular, pedagogic, and personal political decisions in the context of a local, controversial current event. We engaged 7 middle and high school social studies teachers from small and large,…