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This study explores how the ideology of racial individualism—which prioritizes an understanding of racism as individual wrongdoing—becomes embedded in the curriculum and discourse of the middle school social studies classroom and becomes embedded in the curriculum and discourse of the middle school social studies classroom to shape the racial socialization of students shapes the racial socialization of students. I provide a case study of one teacher's combined English and U.S. History class, drawing on data from classroom observations, teacher interviews, student work, and classroom artifacts. The analysis shows how racial individualism was the dominant narrative to frame racism from the colonial period to the present day. I argue that this racial ideology reproduces white racial innocence, including the innocence of individual white people in creating and participating in racist systems and the innocence of the United States as a white nation. Moreover, I show how racial individualism allows white students to appear as anti-racists while creating unsafe conditions for Students of Color to engage in honest dialogue about race. The study thus advances existing scholarship on color evasion in education by illuminating how young adolescents negotiate racial individualism in their everyday classroom interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern United States folk music is rich in not only sound, but in voices of the past. Folk songs were created by working class individuals who described aspects of their life in connection with societal issues and events. Folk songs, now digitally archived, can serve as primary historical sources that can be used to enhance the secondary social studies U.S. history curriculum. The vast offerings of folk songs can allow students to listen, read, and analyze the lyrics to gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. South, shed the hillbilly stereotype that Southerners have been historically subjected to, understand why and how Southerners spoke out against injustices through song, and analyze the lyrics that portray the history of southern folklife. Based on the National Council for the Social Studies' Themes of Social Studies and integrating folk songs from such online sites as the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute, curriculum implications are presented for students to reflect on the Southerners' settings, perspectives of events and issues, and methods of protest. Modern technology's preservation of folk songs that would otherwise be absent from history not only has the power to educate, but also to keep southern folk music alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is an exploration of how U.S. middle school students interacted with different topics in world history, and how their specific understandings of topics were connected to both sociocultural and instructional contexts. I observed two world history classrooms in a Midwestern Catholic school for 10 months and conducted task-based group interviews on 6 topics with 66 students. Findings indicate that students interacted differently with different topics, and their understandings of the given topics aligned with prior conceptions, situated in their sociocultural contexts, and teacher instruction in a complicated process. At times, the teachers' instruction accommodated students' prior conceptions, strengthening their misunderstandings. Certain instructional strategies also evoked students' awareness of their current contextual values, such as democracy, human rights, and nonviolence, hindering them from rationally understanding different contexts in history. There were times, however, when the teachers' intentional instruction overshadowed prevailing discourses, allowing students to successfully construct new understandings. From these findings, I argue that to be prepared for the world of their future, U.S. students need to go beyond the parameters of their sociocultural contexts and develop a comprehensive understanding, both nationally and globally, of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging historiography and interpreting secondary sources represent essential elements of historians' work that have been largely ignored in favor of primary source reading in high school history classrooms in the United States. To understand whether and how students apply their historical reasoning skills to secondary sources, we asked twenty-four high school sophomores to think aloud about a historiographic problem. Students were divided into three conditions receiving either the historiographical documents without scaffolding, the documents with explicit written framing, or the documents with explicit written framing and oral instruction. We found that all students sourced, corroborated, and contextualized, but students who received explicit framing with dialogic instruction were significantly more likely to engage in complex evidence evaluation than students in the other two conditions. The results suggest that fuller models of historians' disciplinary practices may be needed in history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]