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In this study, preservice teachers viewed clips from three documentary films that presented multiple experiences of contemporary immigrants and refugees. Our focus in the study was how preservice teachers analyzed the three films. Specifically, we examined how elementary, middle grades, and secondary preservice teachers analyzed, both from a cognitive and affective stance, clips of documentary films about the difficult topic of contemporary immigration.

It has been well established that controversial issue discussions are an integral component to a high-quality civic education. However, as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, teachers have become more hesitant to engage students in discussions of controversial political issues. Two decades worth of literature on teaching controversial issues has shown that a primary factor in determining whether teachers will engage students in controversial issue discussions is whether they feel supported by their school administrators. Yet, school leaders have rarely been the focus of civic education efforts. This article seeks to bridge that divide by first providing a review of the research showing the importance of engaging with controversy in K-12 education and the influence of school leadership on that process and then ending with implications for school administrators who wish to support teachers who broach controversy in their classrooms.

There is a demographic and democratic imperative for social studies teachers to broach the issue of contemporary immigration in their classrooms. In this study, preservice social studies teachers (...

The literature on teaching controversial issues offers a framework to help teachers make appropriate judgments about which topics are worthy of deliberation and what information is reasonable to consider in a classroom. Wayne Journell describes four criteria for evaluating the openness of issues, explains why the behavioral criterion is neither feasible or desirable, unpacks the three criteria that the literature has identified as reasonable (the epistemic criterion, the political criterion, and the politically authentic criterion), and then discusses how teachers can make decisions when the criteria disagree.

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The plight of refugees has recently received considerable media coverage. Yet, little attention is given to groups who are internally displaced. The purpose of this article is to model one way to t...

Using tenets of political psychology, this article analyzes educational implications of contemporary Hollywood partisan political film through two critically acclaimed films released in 2018, Vice ...

Although K–12 online education is becoming more common in the United States, there is still much we do not know about how K–12 online teachers are being prepared. Given that few teacher education programs include online pedagogy in their teacher training efforts, it becomes incumbent on states to find alternative ways to prepare teachers for virtual instruction. This chapter analyzes a nine-week orientation session that is part of an established, state-run induction program for prospective K–12 online instructors. Although the findings are specific to the program being studied, the authors believe they can serve as a model for educators in other states wishing to develop similar types of induction programs to meet the rising demand for K–12 online instruction in the United States.

A particularly contentious event, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election presented distinct challenges to identity politics in the classroom. This article examines a case study of a White fifth-grade elementary teacher, working with primarily youth of color, who did not shy away from teaching this contentious topic. This case illustrates the possibilities for teaching contentious political issues by drawing on the relational aspects of teaching and students’ politicized funds of knowledge. Additionally, we examine the teaching of contentious political issues in an elementary setting with students who often are positioned as “too young” to engage with issues that affect their daily lives.

While the use of inquiry-based instruction has been encouraged for many years, it continues to be the exception rather than the norm. The publication of the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework, as well as the Inquiry Design Model that provides structure for its implementation, offer support for teachers to use inquiry in their social studies classrooms. This phenomenological study used semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and document analyses to explore three secondary social studies teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge as they planned and implemented inquiries. Findings indicate that teachers found a structured method of designing inquiries useful and that their approaches to planning and implementing those inquiries varied with individual context and personal pedagogical stances. There is no one-size-fits-all inquiry, even when teachers used the same support tool.

Background Having students engage with controversial issues is considered a hallmark of a quality civic education, in part because it requires students to interact with perspectives that contradict their existing worldviews, evaluate the legitimacy of positions based on evidence, and develop the skills and dispositions necessary for participation in an increasingly pluralistic democratic society. Most of the research on the teaching of controversial issues, however, has focused on how teachers and students respond to controversy as opposed to how controversy is framed. Teachers must determine whether an issue should be considered “open,” or controversial, or “settled,” or noncontroversial, in their classrooms, a decision that is both pedagogically important and often controversial. For issues that have been settled for some time, such as slavery or woman suffrage, the decision whether to frame them as open or settled is typically easy for teachers; however, issues that are in the process of tipping from open to settled, or vice versa, are more challenging and require that teachers make instructional decisions based on evidence and logical reasoning. Purpose The purpose of this article is to critically analyze whether the issue of marriage equality should be framed as controversial in the aftermath of the 2015 landmark Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. In doing so, this article also offers several implications for the teaching of controversial issues broadly, particularly those that intersect with the identities of students and teachers. Research Design This article makes an analytical/theoretical argument using three commonly cited criteria for determining the openness of controversial issues: the epistemic criterion, the political criterion, and the politically authentic criterion. Conclusions/Recommendations After evaluating marriage equality using each criterion, I conclude that no rational reason exists for treating marriage quality as an open issue post-Obergefell. I also argue that the issue of marriage equality illustrates the need for teachers to be cognizant of how discussions of controversial issues that implicate students’ identities may impact students who may be marginalized by those issues. I recommend that when such issues have reached the point where subjective decisions must be made in determining whether they are framed as open or settled, deference should be made to framing those issues in a way that promotes public values as opposed to legitimizing private views.

Social studies continues to be marginalized in elementary grades, yet the C3 Framework and its Inquiry Arc offer possibilities for high-quality elementary social studies instruction. However, the C...

In this article we highlight elements of culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy that prepare teachers to work with English Learners (ELs) from a variety of backgrounds. Specifically, we focus on the learning experiences and practices of one secondary social studies teacher to explore promising practices with ELs and effective teacher preparation strategies. This article highlights two specific strategies used by the teacher: the intentional integration of academic language instruction through sheltered instructional observation protocol (SIOP) and community-engaged service learning. The findings suggest that the teacher improved his EL instruction, specifically within the context of his social studies curricula, and his experiences and reflections offer insights for teacher educators who seek to better prepare in-service and preservice teachers to serve ELs and their families.

This article explores how teachers might address controversial identity issues in their classrooms, using the 2016 North Carolina House Bill 2 that raised the issue of transgender bathroom rights t...

Science education has become a valuable market tool, serving the knowledge economy and technocratic workforce that celebrates individualism, meritocracy, entrepreneurship, rational thought, and abstract knowledge. Field ecology, however, could be a modest, but imaginable contestation of market-driven neoliberal ideology. We explored diverse high school youths’ meaning making of a summer field ecology research experience. Youths’ narratives, elicited with a modified card sort and qualitative interviews, highlight the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical aspects of learning demonstrating considerably broader views of knowledge, meanings of the natural world and their place within it, and access to scientific practices than implied by neoliberalism.

Background/ContextThe traditional stance on teacher political disclosure within K–12 education is that neutrality is the only morally appropriate approach for teachers to take when broaching political or social issues in their classes due to their role as state employees who serve a particular community. A number of recent high-profile cases of teachers intolerantly disclosing their political beliefs in their classrooms have only served to reinforce the belief among the general public that teachers too often use their positions of authority to proselytize to their students. However, both theoretical arguments made by scholars and empirical data from K–12 classrooms suggest that disclosure may be beneficial to students’ learning experiences and civic development.PurposeThis article seeks to better understand the benefits and limitations of teacher political disclosure by framing disclosure around Foucault's conceptualization of parrhēsia, which can loosely be defined as the ability to speak the truth in spite of danger or fear.Research DesignThis is an analytic essay/theoretical argument. As a way of scaffolding the discussion, I incorporate vignettes of data collected from my research in high school civics classrooms. Of particular interest to this argument is Mr. Monroe, a teacher I studied during the 2012 Presidential Election.Conclusions/RecommendationsAn analysis of teacher political disclosure using a parrhēsia framework suggests that educators should rethink the conventional wisdom that supports non-disclosure. Although disclosure carries inherent risk, it also offers democratic and interpersonal benefits for students. Both in-service and pre-service professional development, then, should present teachers with a complete picture of the risks and benefits of disclosure, and teachers should determine whether to engage in parrhēsiastic acts by strategically balancing those risks against the potential of disclosure to support their pedagogical goals.

Online learning is part of the future of K-12 education. However, few online K-12 instructors have been formally trained in online pedagogy. This chapter describes best practices in creating online courses for K-12 students. Many aspects of online learning are the same regardless of the age of the students taking the courses, but adolescents often experience online instruction differently than university students or adult learners. Although far from comprehensive, this chapter describes basic guidelines and offers recommendations for K-12 educators wishing to create engaging online learning opportunities for their students.

Review of: Democratic Discord in Schools: Cases and Commentaries in Educational Ethics, Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay (eds) (2019)Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 342 pp.,ISBN 978-1-68253-302-4, p/bk, USD 34.00

Although K-12 online education is becoming more common in the United States, the research base is still lagging behind. The field's understanding of how K-12 online teachers are being prepared is especially sparse. Given that few teacher education programs include online pedagogy in their teacher training efforts, it becomes incumbent on states to find alternative ways to prepare teachers for virtual instruction. This chapter analyzes a 9-week orientation session that is part of an established, state-run induction program for prospective K-12 online instructors. Although the findings are specific to the program being studied, the authors believe they can serve as a model for educators in other states wishing to develop similar types of induction programs and for teacher education programs that will eventually have to incorporate online pedagogy into their existing programs in order to meet the rising demand for K-12 online instruction in the United States.

In this content analysis of state U.S. History and Civics standards, we compared the treatment of immigration across three types of states with differing immigration demographics. Analyzing standards from 18 states from a critical race methodology perspective, our findings indicated three sets of tensions: a unified American story versus local specificity, immigration as a historical versus civic issue, and favorable versus unfavorable tenor of the standards. Through this project, we were able to draw some initial conclusions about the relationship between states’ immigration demographics and social studies standards. Thus, this study builds on the small but growing new gateway state literature and on the content analysis literature related to immigration and the formal social studies curriculum.

In 2001, Richard Niemi and Julia Smith published an article inPS: Political Science and Politicson enrollments in high school civics and government courses. They framed their study on the premise that political scientists were ignoring an important aspect of American civic and political life, and they concluded by issuing a call for political scientists to become more involved in K-12 civics education. This article provides an update on the state of K-12 civics education and renews Niemi and Smith’s call for political science engagement in K-12 education.

Political instruction is considered a hallmark of a quality K-12 civic education; however, most of the research in this area has focused on how students receive such instruction or how external pressures exacerbate teachers’ fears associated with broaching controversial issues in their classes. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between teacher identity and political instruction. My purpose is not to explicitly define how teachers’ identities influence their political instruction; rather, this chapter serves as a call for increased attention to the role teacher identity may play in K-12 political instruction.

Research on self-regulated learning in the social studies curriculum is under-represented relative to other secondary disciplines such as reading and science. Yet examination of three social studies lessons reveals multiple instances of teachers implementing the phases, levels, and processes of self-regulated learning. Social studies lessons and narratives on world history, civics, and U.S. history are presented. The ensuing commentary discusses how these social studies teachers incorporate the phases, levels, and processes of self-regulated learning into their instruction. Recommendations are made for further research on self-regulated learning in social studies and on ways to enhance self-regulation in the social studies classroom.

Secondary civics and government courses are often framed as a content area in which students learn about processes of government and ways of participating in a democratic society, as opposed to a discipline in which students use specific tools and ways of thinking that mimic those used by professionals within that discipline. In this article, we call for an increased emphasis on disciplinary knowledge in civics and government courses, specifically knowledge that utilizes the tools and methodologies of political scientists. Through a study of an exemplary civics teacher during the 2012 Presidential Election, we illustrate the benefits of a disciplinary approach to civics instruction. Our findings suggest that such an approach allows students to better understand tools of social inquiry and provides them with the skills to think critically about politics and political behavior.

In this multiple case study, the authors compare the instruction of two high school civics teachers during the 2012 Presidential Election. Both were highly-qualified practitioners who worked in schools with one-to-one laptop initiatives, creating an environment in which access to digital technology ceased to be an issue. Although both teachers regularly used technology in their classrooms, the authors describe stark differences in the complexity and authenticity of their instruction, which the authors attribute to the teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK). The authors conclude by discussing implications for better understanding TPCK within civics instruction, specifically in classrooms with one-to-one laptop access.

This article describes a research study on the appropriateness for social studies classrooms of CNN Student News, a free online news program specifically aimed at middle and high school students. The author conducted a content analysis of CNN Student News during October 2012 and evaluated the program's content for substance, bias, and appropriateness for secondary social studies instruction. Although the analysis is specific to CNN Student News, the same approach could be taken with any student-oriented news program available to teachers on the Internet.

Twitter can be a smart instructional tool that links students with real-time information and connects them to authentic discussions beyond school walls.

This article addresses the need for researchers to move beyond discipline-specific approaches to research and practice and offers an example of how interdisciplinary understandings can increase knowledge in respective disciplines. The specific focus of the article is the shared challenges of broaching controversy in science and social studies classrooms. Although there is much that social studies teachers can learn about the teaching of controversial public issues from the challenges science educators face in teaching evolutionary theory, and vice versa, the two literature bases have little overlap. Through this example of broaching curricular controversy in the classroom, the author argues that content instruction can be improved by increasing awareness of research and practice in other disciplines.

This article describes possibilities afforded by using social media, specifically Twitter, as a way to encourage students to join political conversations across the United States and around the world. In this study, we describe a project in which students used Twitter to share commentary about the state of the 2012 presidential election. The experiences of these students illustrate both the potential strengths and limitations of using social media as a tool for political engagement.

Within the literature on teacher education in the United States, relatively little research has been conducted on how preservice teachers conceptualize popular depictions of the profession or issues related to the “extended professionality” of teaching. In this study, the authors explore the reactions of elementary, middle, and secondary preservice teachers to Waiting for Superman, a controversial 2010 documentary about the American public education system, as an example of focused and deliberate engagement with aspects of teacher professionalism. Using surveys and focus group discussions, the authors sought to determine the effectiveness of Waiting for Superman in fostering student interest and engagement with issues related to the extended professionality of teaching. The findings from this study illuminate a need for broaching issues of extended professionality within teacher education programs as well as offer implications for the use of documentary films as a catalyst for discussions of issues relate...

This article reports findings from a 3-year study on preservice middle and secondary social studies teachers' common content knowledge of politics and current events. Surveys showed that both groups were generally uninformed about these issues, and on almost all measures, the middle-grades preservice teachers performed worse than those in the secondary program. Interviews were conducted with preservice teachers in both groups, and although they articulated a vision of teaching social studies that included relating content to politics and current events, most of the preservice teachers admitted that their habits related to acquiring this type of content knowledge were not sufficient to enact that vision in their classrooms. The author argues that these preservice teachers' lack of political and social awareness is a product of their intellectual dispositions as opposed to a deficiency in their content preparation.

This study describes one high school civics teacher's use of film as a way to improve his students’ understanding of politics. Using episodes of The West Wing, an award-winning political drama, over the course of a semester, the teacher was able to create an authentic context for political instruction that allowed his students to practice thinking politically, better understand real-life political events, and make connections across the formal curriculum. The findings from this study offer several implications for both the teaching of politics in secondary education as well as the use of film in secondary social studies courses.

Online learning is the future of K-12 education. However, few online K-12 instructors have been formally trained in online pedagogy. This chapter describes best practices in creating online courses for K-12 students. Many aspects of online learning are the same regardless of the age of the students taking the courses, but adolescents often experience online instruction differently than university students or adult learners. Although far from comprehensive, this chapter describes basic guidelines and offers recommendations for K-12 educators wishing to create engaging online learning opportunities for their students.

This study reports findings from a qualitative case study of three high schools during the 2008 presidential election. The schools appeared to promote the political ideologies of their corresponding populations, and in the two predominately ideologically homogenous schools, political intolerance often appeared to affect teachers’ instruction and students’ perceptions of safety. The findings from this study offer implications for school leaders who wish to create safe and ideologically tolerant schools even when their schools may be located within ideologically homogeneous communities.

The financial lure of lower-cost online learning during a period of tight budgets shouldn't prompt schools to proceed before giving serious consideration to a multitude of factors.In 2003, my first year of teaching high school, the district technology representative approached me about creating an online U.S. Government course that would become one of the first courses offered in the district's new e-learning program. My district had prided itself on being on the cutting edge of technological advancements. At the time, it was one of the few districts in Virginia to maintain a one-to-one laptop initiative, and all courses had been equipped with Blackboard course management software. An e-learning program was the next step in this evolution. I agreed to create the course that summer and taught it about 12 times over the next four years. My class sizes ranged from one student who needed to take the class to satisfy a graduation requirement to more than 20 students in summer sessions.

Economics has traditionally been taught in a way that emphasizes the “science” side of social science. This article suggests ways to cover the concepts introduced in high school economics using discussions, simulations, and discovery-based techniques that bring the “social” back into social science. Through descriptions of five authentic economic scenarios, the authors provide examples of ways in which teachers can help their students become engaged with economic concepts without using traditional methods that students often find dull or difficult to understand.