The power of democracy is its adaptability to a changing world. We can envision and work toward a society that is more just than the present. History education is more relevant now than ever. We offer ideas and strategies that can transform the history classroom into a space for understanding the past with the explicit purpose of learning from the…

By some estimates, over 1.2 billion tons of soil was blown across the Great Plains during the height of the Dust Bowl. The so-called "black blizzards" these massive dust storms caused suffocated cattle, sickened children, and destroyed thousands of family farms. Formerly prosperous farmers, unsure why they had such bad luck, wondered if…

This article details how a team of fourth-grade teachers in Rockingham County, Virginia used the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) to deepen student understanding of Barbara Johns and the Moton Student Strike's fight for racial justice in Virginia and to reframe their overall approach to Black history in general. Although Rockingham County Schools are…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is an integral measure of academic progress across the nation and over time. It is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, mathematics, reading, and U.S. history. The program also provides…

During their participation in a classroom-based research project, 9-10-year-old students had opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. The Grade 4 students read, discussed and wrote about picturebooks during Language…

One of the major contemporary topics in education is teaching issues of race in K-12 social studies classrooms. Over the last several years, at least 35 states have passed or proposed legislation to prohibit or restrict conversations about race in K-12 schools. Most supporters of this legislation argue that teachers are indoctrinating students and…

In this manuscript, the authors discuss a seven-day research project that occurred within the Birmingham metropolitan area where fourth graders researched the role that public issues played in the creation of two suburban school systems in their city. We coded student work samples to look for themes. Emergent themes from student work samples are…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, mathematics, reading, and U.S. history. The results of NAEP are released as The Nation's Report Card. District staff play an essential role in…

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian hate had been on the rise. By making sure all voices are heard, especially those who are underrepresented, librarians can be agents of civic engagement. This article examines how Sarah Sansbury knew then how her elementary students could bring about justice through awareness and, she hoped,…

Background/Context: Across the nation, people living in the United States are embroiled in conflict over the meaning of its past. Many of the most fervent conflicts relate to acts of historical violence: war, enslavement, conquest, and colonization among them. Elementary school students commonly study the early colonization of the land now known…

Children in the United States live in a land of many nations, with nearly 600 federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native sovereign tribal nations and hundreds more not recognized by the federal government. Although children often study U.S. colonial history in elementary school, many non-Indigenous children may grow up unaware of…

What should U.S. schools teach about U.S. actions abroad when students in the classroom have varied or conflicting memories, ideas, and experiences? Should schools teach the dominant narrative of U.S. benevolence and innocence in world affairs so as to instill patriotism in children? What kind of patriotism are we concerned with here? Or should…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), first administered in 1969, is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, geography, mathematics, reading, science, U.S. history, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The…

Using narrative research as a qualitative methodology, we (two white critical whiteness scholars) tell a story about how a dismantling and rebuilding of whiteness occurred in a fourth-grade classroom across three vignettes. Using a close read of Reverend Thandeka's primer on the ways white children are socialized, we wrestle with what pedagogy…

In this article, Harper B. Keenan investigates the treatment of violence in elementary history education through a case study of a fourth-grade unit on the colonial history of California featuring "the mission project," a long-standing tradition in California's elementary schools that has students construct a miniature model of a Spanish…