This article, which was completed in January 2020, expands the author's presidential address, which was delivered at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Annual Conference in Austin, Texas, on November 22, 2019. In her address, Heafner discusses the new ecology of social studies and focuses on concerns over the civic health of our…

Critics of school choice claim support for educational options was an outgrowth of racist, segregationist views following the U.S. Supreme Court's Ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In this paper, I examine these claims by analyzing the development of the public school system in the United States and the historical records from Citizens for…

This paper explores contradictory constructions of teacher work across policy discourse and professional practice. It draws from a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 political speeches published on England's Department for Education website between 2010 and 2018, and qualitative interviews with two executive leaders working in…

Fourth graders in Miss Dause's and Mrs. Hicks's mathematics classes at South Mountain Elementary School in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, worked with the data from the Inauagural Address problem that was previously published published in the February 2013 issue of "Teaching Children Mathematics". This activity allowed students to showcase…

In this project, teachers use mini-speeches, or monologues, as if told by famous scientists from the past, as a springboard to motivate children to think about these scientists as everyday people. The introductory speech describes or introduces the kinds of behaviours, skills, and knowledge the scientists possessed. Talking about the way they…

In seeking a disciplinary literacy model that would enable students to express well-developed perspectives and argue contrasting views with the sound use of evidence, the authors developed a student-driven model that emphasized historical investigation, offered substance, and scaffolded reading and writing. To support their project, they created…

Studies in education over the past decade highlight the hijacking of educational agendas by neoliberal rationalities and logics. I illustrate these processes in relation to transnational campaigns for girls' education, where the purpose of "education" is reduced to producing wage-based labor and an accumulation of skills that enhance…

John McNamara's historically rich descriptions of his adolescent community life in one school where he taught the same children from grade one to grade eight sends a warm message of the merge of elementary and middle-school personalities as they are beginning to understand the wonder of growing up. Their letters and speeches remember the impact of…

In preparation for her school's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Elizabeth Brown developed an integrated language arts and social studies one-week unit of study on the civil rights movement, where she reinforced reading, writing, and speaking skills. The overarching goals for the five-day lesson on Dr. King's "I Have a…

During this five-day unit, students will enter the world of a Japanese classroom. They will talk about school uniforms, "fill" their backpacks with school items, and learn how to do a simple self-introduction in front of their peers. Students will participate in the cultural customs of a Japanese classroom and view pictures, videos, and…

The leadership and career experiences of the principal in other eras are relatively missing from both the writings about school administration nowadays and the social history of schools. Exploring past forms of leadership might shed light on enduring aspects of leadership and its contextual-historical influences as well as on the development of…

This study examined the functions that student talk served during partner reading events in a second grade classroom. Five major themes of talk emerged from the data including organizational, disputational, word strategy, meaning making and personal talk. All of these types of talk functioned to support partner reading except for personal talk,…

Standardization discourse is dominantly linked to tests; yet standardization occurs in practices of everyday social life, too. This research seeks to understand standardization processes involved in the writing done by a class of seventh grade students, half of whom did not do well in school or on tests. Acting as participant observer in a…