The decline in civic knowledge and judicial awareness among young learners is concerning for democratic citizenship and for the 21st-century U.S. democracy. In this article, we examined preservice teachers’ (PSTs) experiences and sense-making of a Supreme Court oral argument hearing to illuminate their understanding of the judicial branch and democratic citizenship mindset. The goal was to inform educators and researchers about PSTs’ perceptions and insights gained from the experience. Twenty-eight (28) elementary PSTs participated in the field trip on a Midwestern public university campus. The results show that PSTs had limited awareness and knowledge of the U.S. legal system. However, the field trip fostered their appreciation and respect for the legal system and legal experts and provided a continuous learning opportunity. We argue that elementary social studies PSTs have limited judicial awareness, and educating young learners about democratic citizenship depends on building PSTs’ awareness and understanding of the branches of government, particularly the judicial branch. The results highlight the importance of curriculum enhancements that integrate instruction on the judicial system into teacher preparation, thereby empowering educators to better prepare students for active civic participation. We believe these insights are important for advancing teacher education and democratic citizenship, encouraging teachers and teacher educators to reflect on their own practices.
In this article, the author employs Black storytelling to highlight the narratives of four Black teacher-coaches’ use sport to teach principles of democracy and global citizenship for Black youth at an International Baccalaureate high school. Using critical race theory and BlackCrit as theoretical frameworks for analysis, findings reveal that (1) sports offer culturally relevant pathways for teaching citizenship and civic values; (2) connecting sport to social struggle builds students’ critical consciousness; and (3) fostering critical consciousness through sport-based pedagogy cultivates informed, empowered citizens. These findings contribute to broader academic discussions on democracy, citizenship, and culturally responsive teaching by demonstrating how interdisciplinary approaches, grounded in the lived experiences of Black educators, can meaningfully center sport as a transformative pedagogical practice. Ultimately, this article argues that both the classroom and the playing field are arenas where democratic ideals are not only taught but embodied.
Amid increasing social diversity and political polarization, preparing teachers to support justice-oriented democratic citizenship is an urgent challenge for teacher education. This qualitative study examines how elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) conceptualize democratic citizenship and represent those commitments in instructional planning within a justice-oriented social studies methods course in the United States. Grounded in an expanded framework based on Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) citizenship typology and informed by decolonial perspectives, the study analyzes course assignments, discussions, reflections, and interviews from 17 PSTs. Findings show that all participants articulated justice-oriented civic commitments, emphasizing collective action, systemic critique, and multiple perspectives, yet these commitments were unevenly represented in instructional planning. While most planning artifacts referenced social movements, fewer positioned students as civic actors, engaged structural analysis, or planned for dialogic engagement across difference. Participatory civic knowledge and skills appeared infrequently in planning, and personally responsible citizenship was absent. Pedagogical knowledge and skills, course structure, teaching philosophy, and participants’ identities and backgrounds emerged as key factors shaping how civic commitments were translated into planned instruction. These influences operated within broader constraints, including political climate, limited instructional time, and the scarcity of field-based exemplars for justice-oriented civic teaching. By foregrounding instructional planning as a critical intermediary site of teacher learning, this study extends scholarship on democratic citizenship education and introduces a practice-oriented framework to support both research and teacher preparation. Although situated in the United States, the findings offer insights relevant to international efforts to prepare teachers for justice-oriented civic education under conditions of constraint and uncertainty.
On December 3, 2024, South Korean President Suk Yeol Yoon declared martial law for the first time in 45 years, suspending ordinary democratic norms and heightening civic uncertainty. This study examines how an elementary teacher and his second-grade students in a rural South Korean school engaged with this moment through a classroom simulation known as “Mr. Kim Law.” Using narrative inquiry, co-authored by the teacher and a researcher–teacher educator, we analyze how children experienced the sudden suspension of ordinary classroom rules, from compliance and fear to collective resistance and restoration of democratic voice. Guided by the dual frameworks of critical civic education and the state of exception, the study illuminates how even young children grappled with injustice, authority, and solidarity in meaningful ways. The findings reveal that children are not merely future citizens, but present civic actors who can recognize and contest arbitrary power when supported by relational trust and democratic school practices. At the same time, the case underscores the dilemmas of democratic education in politically sensitive contexts, where teachers must navigate legal mandates of neutrality while fostering civic agency. By situating the micro-politics of a single classroom within the broader national crisis, this study contributes to scholarship on democratic education under conditions of fragility and demonstrates the potential of narrative inquiry to capture the lived meanings of civic learning.
This study examines preservice teachers’ experiences with art museums, asking how teachers’ conceptualizations of art museums as spaces of counter-story knowledge impact their pedagogical and curricular practices when teaching social studies. After studying how one group of preservice history teachers engage and make sense of a particular exhibit and the collective museum, we found that personal and collective critical analysis of artworks within museum spaces can connect art pieces to counter-narrative teaching methods for the classroom. We also found, however, that both the history of Western art museums as spaces of whiteness and the social identities of the beholder of art pieces greatly influence to what degree such spaces are conceptualized into teaching goals for equitable, justice-oriented social studies instruction.
Schools are often considered a practice ground for citizenship, where students from diverse backgrounds can encounter and engage with different viewpoints. Yet, persistent patterns of socio-ethnic segregation in education raise concerns that classrooms risk turning into “bubbles of like-mindedness,” limiting students’ exposure to alternative perspectives. This study examined how demographic diversity and aspects of citizenship education relate to classroom diversity in democratic attitudes – defined as variation in how students position themselves with regard to competing democratic values. Classroom demographic diversity is operationalized in terms of students’ socioeconomic status, ethnic background, religious affiliation, and gender. Aspects of citizenship education include the openness of the classroom climate for discussion and the frequency of civic teacher-student interaction. Multilevel analyses of 154 classrooms in 40 Dutch secondary schools revealed that socioeconomic diversity was the strongest predictor: more socioeconomically diverse classrooms displayed greater diversity in democratic attitudes. Regarding the aspects of citizenship education, only perceived openness of the classroom climate showed an association with diversity in democratic attitudes, though this relationship was inconsistent and varied in direction. These findings build on earlier research into students’ encounters with different viewpoints and highlight implications for educational segregation and the role of schools as practice grounds for democratic citizenship.
This article investigated how white high school students learned about a historic act of racial violence through reading different genres of historical text. Six white adolescents who attended a diverse high school located in a large urban center in the Southeastern United States thought aloud while reading two historical texts about the Tulsa Race Massacre. They responded to an eyewitness narrative by B.C. Franklin, a Black lawyer living in Tulsa at the time of the Massacre, and a textbook-like account of the Massacre. Two themes emerged from analyses of the think-aloud data. First, where students pictured themselves while reading the text impacted what they took away from reading. Students imagined themselves close to the Massacre as they read Franklin’s narrative. Because of their proximity to the world of the text, they felt empathy for his, and other Black Tulsans’ experiences, and imagined what it might have been like to experience the Massacre. In contrast, students adopted a position of distance from the world of the text as they read the textbook-like account. From their position of remove, students judged white Tulsans and largely overlooked the Black Tulsan experience of the Massacre. Second, students’ imagined positioning while reading each text influenced their historical understanding of these events: while the eyewitness narrative gave students a detailed mental picture of the event itself, it was while reading the textbook-like account that students considered how the Tulsa Race Massacre fit into the broader arc of American history. Implications for selecting and teaching different genres of text about historic acts of racial violence are considered.
This study extends recent research on teachers’ use of YouTube in social studies by examining patterns within a single southeastern U.S. school district and piloting a disciplinary-literacy framework for multimedia texts. A districtwide survey of 74 social studies teachers documented frequency of use, preferred YouTube series, and instructional purposes. Descriptive analyses show YouTube, especially Crash Course , is widely accessed but primarily used as a lecture replacement or audiovisual “textbook,” with far fewer teachers positioning videos as sources for historical analysis. To address this gap, a SOURCES-based lesson structure integrating Crash Course and primary sources was designed and implemented with preservice teachers in a methods course. Thematic analysis of preservice reflections revealed growing recognition of videos as interpretive secondary texts and increased awareness of authorship, perspective, and corroboration, coupled with hesitancy about enacting such practices in their own classrooms. Findings indicate alignment with national trends, highlight an implementation gap between enthusiasm for multimedia and disciplinary use, and demonstrate the potential of structured frameworks to cultivate critical engagement with video. Implications include the need for intentional design in K–12 settings and for teacher-education experiences that rehearse video-based disciplinary literacy. Future research should incorporate observations and performance assessments of students’ reasoning.
Numerous studies have pointed to the benefits of discussing controversial political issues (CPI) with students in a school setting. Because teachers play a significant role in facilitating discussions on CPI, including determining how they are conducted and influencing their outcomes, it is essential to measure the discussion practices teachers employ when addressing CPI. However, existing tools inadequately measure teachers’ discussion practices in teaching CPI. Thus, our aim was to develop and validate a scale for this purpose. An exploratory factor analysis on a pilot sample of Israeli school teachers ( N = 113) identified five factors, and a confirmatory factor analysis on a larger sample ( N = 205) demonstrated an adequate fit for this five-factor structure. Methodological benefits of measuring specific discussion practices in teaching CPI and the educational implications for teacher training are discussed.
History survey courses, often required in teacher preparation programs, potentially provide prospective teachers a place to learn historical content, epistemology, and pedagogy. This study examines one history survey course as a site of teacher preparation. Through analysis of instruction, student writing, and semi-structured interviews, it reports how the historian taught, the development of students’ disciplinary knowledge, and what prospective teachers noticed of the historian’s pedagogy. The study analyses how the historian’s pedagogical practices, including weekly written interpretations of primary sources, scaffolded writing prompts, and in-class modeling sessions, reinforced the epistemology of history. Over the course of the semester, focal students demonstrated improved understanding of historical content and epistemology through descriptions of history and evidence-based interpretive writing. However, prospective teachers did not fully notice the course’s pedagogical practices as appropriate for their own teaching practice. This study highlights the support prospective teachers need to learn historical pedagogy within history survey courses.
This qualitative case study investigates how three rural secondary social studies teachers conceptualize and enact global citizenship education (GCE) through curricular–instructional gatekeeping. Grounded in Thornton’s framework of teacher autonomy and constraint and informed by Pashby et al.’s typology of neoliberal, liberal, and critical GCE outlooks, the study draws on two rounds of semi-structured interviews in one southeastern U.S. district. Findings reveal that teachers favored pragmatic, community-compatible forms of GCE emphasizing empathy, perspective taking, geographic awareness, and workforce preparation. Political polarization and local conservatism created climates of constraint that encouraged moderation and avoidance of advocacy. State standards simultaneously limited time for deeper inquiry and offered protection when teaching controversial issues. Participants largely reflected neoliberal and liberal orientations, with critical outlooks absent. The study extends gatekeeping theory to rural contexts and highlights the need for teacher preparation that supports globally minded yet context-responsive instruction.
This study centers the experiences of Asian American and migrant high school youth who participated in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)-informed summer camp, attending to how young people drew on and extended their lived experiences and transnational funds of knowledge through their own inquiries. Findings show that youth engaged as creators of expansive transnational knowledge, researchers across borders, and, at times, teachers of teachers as they shared their work with pre-service educators. Through investigating histories connected to their families and communities and presenting their research, youth created opportunities to surface histories long absent from formal schooling. In doing so, they opened up spaces for future teachers to grapple with curricular silences and reimagine social studies learning in ways grounded in students’ familial, communal, diasporic, and cross-border knowledge. This work extends scholarship in social studies teacher education by foregrounding Asian and Asian American youth as knowledge creators and intellectual partners, challenging white-centric, Eurocentric, monolingual, and assimilationist paradigms. Ultimately, it calls on teacher education to recognize youth as co-constructors of knowledge and as teachers of teachers, flipping the script on who is positioned to teach and learn, and to build more just, equitable, and transformative educational futures with and alongside them.
This paper introduces the Historical Empathy Measure (HEM), a researcher-developed assessment designed to evaluate the development of historical empathy in Grade 8–10 students in U.S. history classrooms. Grounded in Endacott and Brooks’ framework, the HEM captures the three dimensions of historical empathy: historical contextualization, perspective-taking, and affective connection. Developed during a randomized controlled trial of Mission US , a digital history game, the assessment includes 2 forms, each with 15 closed-ended items, which assess students’ reasoning about historical decision-making. This study describes the multi-stage development process—including adaptation from existing instruments, cognitive interviews, and item refinement—and reports psychometric findings from an analytic sample of 596 students. Item Response Theory (IRT) analyses support the unidimensional structure of the HEM and reveal moderate reliability, with limited evidence of item bias across grade levels. Although further refinement is needed, the HEM offers a promising, classroom-friendly tool for evaluating historical empathy. Implications for instruction, research, and future development of social studies assessments are discussed.
The purpose of this study is to better understand the history elementary students ( n = 27) learn as they read historical fiction. We have three key findings. (1) Students gained accurate historical knowledge. (2) Students discern fact from fiction in most instances. (3) Students expressed empathy noting human actions and implications. Implications from this study include critical literacy practices in elementary classrooms and recommendations to be attentive to pedagogical content knowledge in teacher preparation and development.
In this manuscript, we discuss a research study where our approach to thematic social studies teaching was implemented in a seventh-grade civics classroom. Our study was done within a large metropolitan area in the Southeast. Over the course of the Fall 2024 semester, the civics teacher completed five units to thematically teach the public issue of voting rights issues for Black Americans from Reconstruction to the present. The activities and assessments were shaped by Dr. King’s scholarship on racial literacy and Dr. Journell’s scholarship on political thinking. Drs. King and Journell’s scholarship were utilized to see how students articulate, if at all, how the branches of U.S. government at the local, state, and federal levels have been employed to interfere with and in some cases protect Black Americans’ voting rights.
This research draws on the sociological theory of edgework to investigate the affective motivations/rewards and prepared skills of social studies teachers who take extreme risks in their teaching. Although most theoretical explanations of teacher decision-making emphasize professional motivations and risk reduction, edgework highlights the salience of affective rewards in choosing to take extreme risks, as seen previously by other studies of edgeworkers who participate in extreme sports, crime, drug use, and other high-risk activities. Interviews were conducted with foreign social studies teachers at Chinese international schools. As edgeworkers, three teachers in this study took extreme risks of their own volition. They felt self-actualized from their perception that they retained the ability to think for themselves in an authoritarian state, and they felt valued as providers of a critical and global orientation of social studies for Chinese students. To take risks successfully and not cross “the edge” of safety/unsafety, teachers developed an expert set of skills but also chose restraint when conditions appeared uncertain or uncontrollable. This study is significant for introducing educational scholarship to edgework and demonstrating its utility in analyzing the affective motivations/rewards and skill preparation of social studies teachers who take extreme risks.
This study examines how family history interviews reveal achievement within families, while highlighting Black accomplishments often excluded from social studies education. Grounded in curricular and pedagogical resuscitation (CPR) and building on critical family history (CFH), this research explores how personal narratives can better inform historical curiosity and questions. Employing autoethnography and photo/artifact elicitation, this study centers a family history interview with Charles Thomas—a former student-athlete, HBCU graduate, ex-NFL professional football player turned educator, and uncle—revealing how Black education, institutions, and achievement intersect with broader social, political, and historical contexts. Findings demonstrate that CPR’s tenets of body, spirit, and mind serve as a vital framework for embedding Black experiences into social studies instruction, challenging historical omissions, and cultivating a more accurate and engaging curriculum. This study offers both theoretical and practical applications for classroom instruction.
Providing elementary-aged students with opportunities to engage in authentic historical analysis is crucial to building their historical thinking skills. Teaching with primary and secondary sources allows students opportunities to engage in authentic, disciplined inquiry-based learning experiences where the acquisition of a historical concept is in their hands. Developing social studies instruction utilizing the SOURCES Framework for Teaching with Primary and Secondary Sources is an effective way to scaffold authentic historical inquiry at the upper elementary level. In this study, the researchers sought to explore student levels of acquisition of four historical Habits of Mind when taught using student-centered inquiry-based approaches to instruction. The researchers concluded that each student exhibited the use of Habits of Mind when taught using a student-centered approach to historical inquiry; however, the levels at which the students acquired the Habits varied.
This paper describes elementary teachers’ self-reported instructional practices regarding their familiarity with and implementation of inquiry-based instruction, including the C3 Framework. This mixed-methods analysis of a survey administered to 765 elementary teachers in Michigan captures what is happening in elementary social studies a decade after the C3 Framework introduced the “inquiry arc” to the field. Teachers reported a wide range of familiarity with inquiry, from not knowing what it is, to equating inquiry with projects and/or questions. Very few respondents knew of the C3 Framework, indicating a gap in understanding of the field as to the reach of the C3.
