Despite limitations and challenges, teaching about difficult histories is an essential aspect of social studies courses and units across grade levels. This practical resource highlights stories of K–12 practitioners who have critically examined and reflected on their experiences with planning and teaching histories identified as difficult. Featuring the voices of teacher educators, classroom teachers, and museum educators, these stories provide readers with rare examples of how to plan for, teach, and reflect on difficult histories. The book is divided into four main sections: Centering Difficult History Content, Centering Teacher and Student Identities, Centering Local and Contemporary Contexts, and Centering Teacher Decision-making. Key topics include teaching about genocide, slavery, immigration, war, racial violence, and terrorism. This dynamic book highlights the practitioner’s perspective to reveal how teachers can and do think critically about their motivations and the methods they use to engage students in rigorous, complex, and appropriate studies of the past. Book Features: Expanded notions of what difficult histories can be and how they can be approached pedagogically.Thoughtful pictures of practice of some of the most complex histories to teach. Stories of K–12 teachers and museum educators with the research of leading scholars in social studies education. Examples from a wide range of educational contexts in the United States and other countries. Resources useful to teachers and teacher educators. Contributors include LaGarrett J. King, Cinthia Salinas, Stephanie van Hover, Amanda Vickery, Sohyun An, H. James (Jim) Garrett, Christopher C. Martell, and Jennifer Hauver.

In this collection, scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia examine the concepts of villainification and anti-villainification in social studies curriculum, popular culture, as well as within sociocultural contexts and their implications. Villainification is the process of identifying an individual or a small group of individuals as the sole source of a larger evil. Anti-villainification considers the messy space in between individual and group culpability in order to help students develop a sense of responsibility to each other as humans in communities on this planet. Chapter authors examine topics related to U.S. politics, financial education, Holocaust education, difficult histories, apocalypse fiction, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, technology use, LGBTQ school experiences, rape culture, geographies of invasion, and the female body. Taken together, these inquiries into villainification offer thoughtful and powerful insights for teaching about historical wrongdoing in more nuanced ways, addressing the responsibility we all have to create a better world. Contributors: Heather P. Abrahamson • Danelle Adeniji • Erin C. Adams • Rebecca C. Christ • Brandon Haas • Keri Helgren • Brittany L. Jones • Wayne Journell • Daniel G. Krutka • Melissa McQueen • Bryan Smith • Ryan M. Smits • Oren Baruch Stier • Amanda Thomson • Andrew Thomson • Bretton A. Varga Book Features: Pushes the field of social studies to develop a more nuanced understanding of the villains of the past and present.Invites educators to become more thoughtful about not only curriculum but also the world around us.Helps readers to more deeply understand how easily forms of banal evil can touch our lives within and beyond the classroom, and what we might do about it.Examines how systemic forces can influence “average” individuals to cause or contribute to great societal harm.Includes teacher-friendly engagements with theory, using examples from middle and high school classrooms.Offers a wide range of contexts related to social studies education, including civics, economics, geography, and history. “Encourages educators and students in the context of social studies education to delve deeper into exploring the nuanced aspects of contemporary and historical forms of evil.” —From the Foreword by Michalinos Zembylas, professor, Open University of Cyprus

Learn how to enact justice-oriented pedagogy and foster students’ critical engagement in today’s history classroom. Over the past 2 decades, various scholars have rightfully argued that we need to teach students to “think like a historian” or “think like a democratic citizen.” In this book, the authors advocate for cultivating activist thinking in the history classroom. Teachers can use Teaching History for Justice to show students how activism was used in the past to seek justice, how past social movements connect to the present, and how democratic tools can be used to change society. The first section examines the theoretical and research foundation for “thinking like an activist” and outlines three related pedagogical concepts: social inquiry, critical multiculturalism, and transformative democratic citizenship. The second section presents vignettes based on the authors’ studies of elementary, middle, and high school history teachers who engage in justice-oriented teaching practices. Book Features: Outlines key components of justice-oriented history pedagogy for the history and social studies K–12 classroom.Advocates for students to develop “thinking like an activist” in their approach to studying the past.Contains research-based vignettes of four imagined teachers, providing examples of what teaching history for justice can look like in practice.Includes descriptions of typical units of study in the discipline of history and how they can be reimagined to help students learn about movements and social change.

For the past 2 decades, the field of social studies education has seen an increase in research on the use of discussions as an essential instructional technique. This book examines the importance of using quality dialogue as a tool to help students understand complex issues in social studies. This edited volume provides a collection of well-known, evidence-based discussion techniques, as well as classroom examples showing the methods in use. While using discussion as an instructional method is widely considered a best practice of civic learning, actual high-quality discussions are rare and notoriously difficult to facilitate. Making Classroom Discussions Work is designed to guide teacher educators and classroom teachers in facilitating equitable and productive discussions that will boost learning and democratic engagement. Book Features: Emphasizes the rationale for using discussion in social studies teaching. Collects strategies that have been proposed in disparate journal articles and books in one convenient volume. Presents research-based challenges and supports for conducting and assessing discussions in the social studies. Includes methods and tips to help teachers make discussions more equitable in their classrooms.

COVID-19 offers a unique opportunity to transform the K–12 social studies curriculum, but history suggests that changes to the formal curriculum will not come easily or automatically. This book was conceived in the space between the dismantling of our old way of life and the anticipation of what comes next. The authors in this volume—leading voices in social studies education—make the case that COVID-19 has exposed deficiencies in much of the traditional narrative found in textbooks and state curriculum standards, and they offer guidance for how educators can use the pandemic to pursue a more justice-oriented, critical examination of contemporary society. Divided into two sections, this volume first focuses on how elementary and secondary educators might teach about the pandemic, both as a contentious public issue and as a recent historical event. The second section asks teachers to reconsider many long-standing aspects of social studies teaching and learning, from content and instructional approaches to testing. Book Features: Guidance on how to teach about the COVID-19 crisis as a recent, controversial historical event.Examples of teaching approaches and classroom projects that align with the C3 Framework.Lessons about COVID-19 for use in K–12 classrooms, as well as chapters on the history of pandemics and on how teachers can help students cope with death and grief.A critical examination of the idea of American exceptionalism, the role of race and class in U.S. society, and fundamental practices within social studies education. Contributors: Sohyun An, Varenka Servín Arcos, Brooke Blevins, Lisa Brown Buchanan, Yun-Wen Chan, Ya-Fang Cheng, Rebecca C. Christ, Christopher H. Clark, Kristen E. Duncan, Leonel Pérez Expósito, Anna Falkner, David Gerwin, Maggie Guggenheimer; Michael Gurlea, Tracy Hargrove, Jennifer Hauver, Mark E. Helmsing, David Hicks, Karon LeCompte, Kevin R. Magill, Catherine Mas, Sarah A. Mathews, Carly Muetterties, Amber Neal, Katherina A. Payne, Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, Sandra J. Schmidt, Lynn Sikma, Amy Taylor, Stephanie van Hover, Cathryn van Kessel, Bretton A. Varga, Cara Ward, Tyler Woodward, Holly Wright

The Social Studies Curriculum, Fifth Edition updates the definitive overview of the issues teachers face when creating learning experiences for students in social studies. Renowned for connecting diverse elements of the social studies curriculum—from history to cultural studies to contemporary social issues—the book offers a unique and critical perspective that continues to separate it from other texts. The social studies curriculum is contested terrain both epistemologically and politically. Completely updated and revised, the fifth edition includes fourteen new chapters and covers the politics of the social studies curriculum, questions of historical perspective, Black education and critical race theory, whiteness and anti-racism, decolonial literacy and decolonizing the curriculum, gender and sexuality, Islamophobia, critical media literacy, evil in social studies, economics education, anarchism, children’s rights and Earth democracy, and citizenship education. Readers are encouraged to reconsider their assumptions and understandings of the purposes, nature, and possibilities of the social studies curriculum.

We are surrounded by data and data visualizations in our everyday lives. To help ensure that students can critically evaluate data—and use it to promote social justice—this book outlines principles and practices for teaching data literacy as part of social studies education. The author shows how social studies content and skills can enhance data literacy, and its importance in supporting students’ historical thinking and civic engagement. Shreiner also provides a rationale for including data literacy in the social studies curriculum and highlights the special knowledge and skills social studies teachers offer in promoting a critical, humanistic form of data literacy. Recognizing that many social studies teachers feel poorly equipped to teach data literacy, this book offers practical advice, summaries of the benefits and challenges to students, guidance for incorporating data literacy across elementary and secondary grades, and strategies to help students analyze, use, and create data visualizations. “This important book provides many practical suggestions and powerful visual examples built on sound research that will support educators as they continue to find new ways to integrate data literacy in their history, civics, geography, economics, and other social science classrooms and beyond.” —Christopher C. Martell, associate professor, University of Massachusetts Boston “Shreiner demonstrates how we use data visualizations to understand and construct arguments about the world around us and provides concrete ideas for how to approach teaching it in social studies classrooms. This book makes teaching data literacy feel relevant, urgent, and—most importantly—doable.” —Sarah McGrew, assistant professor, University of Maryland

"In recent years, social studies scholars have pushed to consider critical ways of thinking about curriculum, particularly challenging what we teach and how we teach. Authors in this book, however, speak specifically about culturally and linguistically accessing and engaging with social studies and citizenship education curricula and instruction. Through this project, the notion of inclusiveness and relevance centers on culture and language that emphasize the civic identity, agency, and membership of communities most often marginalized by social studies and civic instruction, public schools, and U.S. democratic society. We hope this collection of chapters acts as a resource to address pedagogical, sociocultural, and civic wonderings by highlighting ways of using language as an asset and means in the social studies classroom. This book presents new pedagogical ideas, theoretical frameworks, and research methodologies on teaching culturally and linguistically relevant social studies with and for emergent bilingual and multilingual (EBML) youth. The compilation of chapters seeks to forefront scholarship and teaching that centers the needs, interests, and experiences of EBML youth in social studies education. Chapter authors draw from multiple, intersecting critical and interdisciplinary frameworks that center culture and language to inform and write about social studies taking place inside, outside, and beyond the classroom that engages youth in varying disciplinary and non-disciplinary spaces across social studies education: (e.g., community, geography, family, civics, history). The chapters also challenge oppressive structures, policies, and practices that marginalize EBML youth. The book is intended for Pre-K-12 teachers and administrators, social studies teacher educators and researchers, and pre-service social studies teachers to actively read, reflect on, and strive to enact the work shared by chapter authors"--

"Whitlock scrutinizes the Flint water crisis to drive critical inquiry in the classroom, and to show how the curriculum can propel social change. It offers key "takeaways" to help educators apply place-based education in Pre-K-16 classrooms"--

Theory holds the capacity to help educators see the world differently, challenge problematic assumptions and practices that cultivate harm, and illuminate pathways towards access, equity, justice, joy, and love. While it is easy to underestimate the role of theory in such pursuits throughout social studies education, this book shows that theory is always-already present in all productions of teaching and learning. In this collection, well-established scholars highlight a broad range of theories that are currently being used to alter the landscape of social studies instruction. Important to these efforts is the position that theory does not exist in a vacuum but rather is the reflection of a certain set of concepts and the relationship that one holds to those ideas. Taking this further, each chapter author employs storytelling as a means to share their personal history and unpack how they came to understand their selected theoretical topic. They address a breadth of concepts, such as Black feminism, psychoanalysis, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, sustainability, and technoskepticism. Book Features: The only resource of its kind that pairs storying with a far-reaching range of theories actively being used by scholars in the field of social studies education and research.Brief chapters, arranged alphabetically by concept, provide structure while also staying true to the book’s framing of theory as being curious, fragmented, nomadic, and discursive.Embedded connections within each chapter meant to help readers understand the relational and entangled nature of theory. Contributors include Sohyun An, Kristen Duncan, Jillian Ford, Jim Garrett, Wayne Journell, Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, Muna Saleh, Sandra Schmidt, Sarah Shear, Cathryn van Kessel, and Amanda Vickery.