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The work in this article (re)traces the nuances embedded within the aesthetics of the Wu-Tang Clan to draw attention to two theoretical, Wu-based concepts: "Shaolin" and "swarming." This article leans into fugivity and critical race theory (CRT) to demonstrate how hip-hop music can be a capacious avenue for theorizing alternate ways to disrupt hegemonic, oppressive, and racist educational structures and master narratives. In particular, we use two Wu-Tang tracks (e.g. "Can it be all so simple," "Triumph") to demonstrate how static approaches to hip-hop--specifically the Wu-Tang--reduce and flatten engagements with hip-hop music in educational contexts. Central to our argument is that the aesthetics of the Wu-Tang Clan are more than economically damaged narratives that tether various culture entities together: Wu-Tang "is" theory.

Minerals and metals are part of everyday existence, including in the air people breathe. They are either in, or have a hand in creating, nearly all of consumer products. As essential as they are, minerals and metals are too often unseen, unappreciated, and unnoticed. In the teaching of preservice primary and secondary teachers as well as high school students, the authors have found that while students might understand the relationship between burning coal and air pollution and may have learned about gold and diamond mining in history courses, they have little understanding about the extraction of minerals and metals that fuel their lives. The authors believe that lessons framed around the motivations, harms, and consequences of mining, in particular metals and minerals, are critical in fostering a heightened attunement to the precarious state of the environment and the role product consumption plays in its ongoing deterioration. Upon completion of the lessons in this article, students will have a heightened awareness of the role mining and minerals play in the creation of everyday objects and will begin to theorize possible alternative framings to renewable energy.

This paper reports on the use of historically provocative artwork (i.e., artwork that challenges master narratives of history) created by Titus Kaphar and graduate students learning about leading with a socio-political consciousness about racism. The authors provided 17 students a series of prompts, based on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and critical art analysis, to instigate reflection, dialogue, and artistry in response to a painting by Kaphar. The authors organized participant-generated artwork into assemblages and crafted accompanying narratives which illustrated the inter/intra-changes among the components of the process and expressions: (1) compositionality, (2) aesthetics, (3) temporality, (4) historical injustice/oppressiveness, (5) manifestations of power. Thus, participants' artwork exposed how engaging with historically provocative can heighten socio-political complexities relating to the consciousness of race/ism and white(ness) supremacy.

This article engages with three commonly traversed social studies topics--depictions of violence and death from the French Revolution, during the Vietnam War, and regarding U.S. histories of racial segregation--through the lens of Achille Mbembe's "necropolitics" (i.e., political and social machinations of power that determine who lives and who dies). In particular, this article theorizes how specific necropolitical concepts (e.g., "necropower," "the living dead," and "slow death") can be a generative and powerful form of analysis for social studies educators and their students that exposes intersecting complexities between life, death, political alliance, and power. While this article argues that social studies curriculum is replete with undertheorized moments of death and underutilized opportunities to engage with death, this scholarship is guided by the questions: "What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?" The overall aim of a necropolitical engagement is to foster a deeper understanding of why/how death continues to disproportionately come into being again and again for specific, targeted peoples.

Artists have long addressed social injustices within popular music. As teachers consider how to deconstruct and teach the events of 2020 (and beyond) with an eye toward the future, we offer a novel pedagogical approach to incorporating music into the social studies classroom: the set-list. The set-list can be understood as containing temporal conditions insofar that all traditional demarcations of time (e.g., past, present, and future) are implicated in its construction. Extending the concept of the set-list into education holds excellent potential for teachers and students seeking to develop a more complex perspective about criticality and social in/justice. Our set-list example originates from years-long conversations around our experiences as former secondary social studies teachers, current teacher educators, fathers, spouses, and individuals living in the United States. Music encourages students to recognize how the past, present, and future are intertwined in learning history. While the official social studies curriculum does not include music as an approach to learning history in the social studies classroom, using a student-generated set-list starts transforming the world within the context of social justice.

This article engages in curriculum work regarding the theft of Black bodies and history/ies, the plundering of Black cemeteries, and sustained hegemonic efforts to use and reuse Black bodies for white/settler onto-epistemological advancements. In particular, this article draws from assemblages of violence and necropolitics to explore implications of postmortem racism on curriculum studies. By tracing the history of body snatching, we identify and discuss the problematic of snatching as a practice and connect it to the problematic of white/settler onto-epistemologies that remain (violently) connected to educational research. The implications of these problematics lead us to call for more "wake work" in embodying, decolonizing, and unsettling curriculum.

This article takes an arts-based approach to unmasking the (wounded) naming histories of public schools within a 20-miles radius of a university in central Florida. It applies an artistic methodology that was inspired by the abstract artwork of Mark Bradford. Through the application of this methodology (e.g. research, layer, excavate), the authors created two maps--counter-cartographies--to accentuate the problematic undertow of schooling through names couched in coloniality. Notwithstanding our findings into material articulations (i.e. counter-cartographies), this research suggests that (teacher) educators could benefit from reimagining the potentiality of mapping practices and how cartographies can be used to (spatially) express masked history/ies within the context of place-based naming practices.

July 28, 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of a police raid on the Stonewall Inn. During this raid, police verbally, and in some cases, physically accosted patrons of the Stonewall Inn. Events from this encounter eventually set off a series of protests by members and allies of the LGBT community. These protests came to be known as the Stonewall Riots. On June 24, 2016, the Stonewall Inn became the first U.S. National Monument dedicated to LGBT history. While this event served as a pivotal role in the gay rights movement, this article begins with an investigation into the geographical and spatial conditions surrounding the Stonewall Inn and its neighborhood. In asking, "Why New York City, why Stonewall?" we attempt to establish a cultural version of geography that uses a National Monument as a way for students to engage in the world around them through an examination of human/environment relationships. To explore this further and to celebrate Stonewall at 50, we present a pedagogical framework using articles, letters, photographs, podcasts, and Google Earth.

Discerning the intent of the author of a historical document is critical as we seek to interpret it. Disciplinary literacy uses specialized skills that seek to maximize student engagement and achievement within specified subject areas. In social studies, one of these critical skills is "sourcing." Sourcing involves exploring who produced a document to better understand that person's motivations for choosing an event to focus on and how to represent it. This article explores a free set of digital interactives that introduces a unique and exciting way for elementary age students to engage with history through primary source inquiry.

Social studies education (SSE) commonly uses copying pedagogies (e.g., simulations) to help students develop a deeper understanding of self, others, curriculum, and society. This article argues that simulations are eminently mimetic (i.e., a theoretical orientation concerned with understanding the entangled relationships between originals and copies) and abound with overlooked opportunities to engage with double logics that traverse academic disciplines. Primarily, we theorize how mimetic concepts (e.g., protean, pharmakon/Janus-faced) can be capacious in providing needed nuance and texture to simulatory approaches to SSE through the demarcation of two specific mimetic registers within simulation(s): mimicry and imitation. Through these two mimetic gestures, this article calls for a more intra-disciplinary framing of SSE, thus offering an alternative corridor for SSE educators, students, and researchers to consider how simulations are used to make sense of the more-than-human world in both historical and contemporary contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper leans into alterlife (Murphy, 2017) and connectivity ontologies (Harrison, 2015) to consider the implications of more-than-witness(es/ing) (our term) on social studies education. Taking a narrative approach, we engage with three more-than-human bodies (e.g., Boulder, Forest, Document(s)) in an effort to expand how act(or/ion)s of coloniality are registered, conceptualized, and disrupted. By opening our learning to the agency of more-than-humans and what they have witnessed, we ask: What might social studies be(come) if we (e.g., educators, students, researchers) affirmed the voices of more-than-human bodies in teaching and learning? And, what, if we quieted ourselves and listened, can we learn from more-than-human bodies who bear witness to the actions of humans across time and space? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manifestation of Campbell's Law is examined in light of the current era in American public schools of high stakes testing inclusive of narrowed curriculums and teaching to the test. The decades-long practice of reducing instructional time of non-tested subjects, which includes social studies fundamentals, has resulted in a less informed citizenry. Social studies instruction promotes citizens who are able to make informed decisions that are inclusive of differentiating between facts, generalizations, and opinions without bias. The construction of individual viewpoints through a narrow lens without discrimination between opinions and historical facts is of concern today as Americans form opinions regarding controversial social issues and engage in social activism.

This article draws on data collected from a secondary school in Florida to explore how temporally disjointed aesthetics (e.g. (re)photographs) impact constructions of historical knowledge. Using posthuman concepts (e.g. assemblage, rhizome, spacetimematter(ing), hauntology), this study relied on visual methodologies—specifically photo-elicitation—to attend to the question: How do engagements with (re)photographs contribute to the development secondary students' historical consciousness/thinking? Data consisted of artifacts reflecting engagements with three collections of (re)photographs featuring ghosts/hauntings and semi-structured focus group interviews. Rhizomatic assemblages re-presenting entanglements with what was produced during this study suggest that (re)photographs not only fostered historical consciousness/thinking by exposing the in-between/ness of temporality and materiality, but that (re)photography extends the boundaries historical consciousness/thinking through students' emerging relationships to the pastpresentfuture(ing). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we first (re)trace the presence and absence of mining, metals and extractionary practices, what we call MMEs, from environmental and sustainability curricular frameworks United Nations' Act Now Framework. Then, we critique the swelling markets, mentalities, and mastermindings used to develop and produce "clean" and "renewable" energy sources/solutions. As one of many examples, there is increasing skepticism among Indigenous communities that history may repeat itself as the quest for "clean" results in further displacement and violations of tribal sovereignty (Healy & Baker, 2021; Holzman & Waldman, 2022; Shah & Bloomer, 2018). Notwithstanding our (e.g., authors) academic positionalities in social studies education, one of our conclusions considers the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration between science and social studies on the issue of sustainability through MMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After returning to Chapter 2's discussions about shame, Wozolek describes how shaming and dehumanization occurs across four forms of curriculum (formal/official, null, hidden, and enacted) as a curriculum of violence. Wozolek's book can help social studies teachers and teacher educators begin to see the ordinary components of assemblages of violence, including the part that they play. This framing connects to Wozolek's work and encompasses social studies education(al research) insofar that we believe nimbleness is required to engage with the myriad of layers of affect that are (re)produced in educational contexts and beyond. [Extracted from the article]

This article engages with both terror management theory (TMT) and Carl Jung's notion of the shadow to explore why and how students and teachers can exhibit rigid thinking in social studies classrooms when perspectives divergent from their own are presented. Emerging from research interested in exploring preservice teachers' implementation of TMT in their classrooms, this work offers one approach for a radical contextualization of the emotionality of learning to understand opportunities, challenges, and experiences of affectively difficult moments within social studies' classrooms. After offering a theoretical framework through which to approach the data from our research, we use this lens to understand how and why defensive compensatory reactions might emerge within the classroom. We then explore how these reactions potentially relate to hostility, before investigating how educators might help students illuminate such threat and defense cycles and therefore disrupt potential rigid polarization. The paper concludes by offering implications towards further thought surrounding the mitigating of defensive reactions in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]