Critical data literacy is essential in our data-laden society and should be taught in social studies, where data visualizations are prevalent, and students are supposed to develop skills that will prepare them for engaged citizenship. However, research indicates that social studies teachers typically have little formal preparation and a low sense of efficacy related to teaching data literacy. This longitudinal study seeks to identify factors that influence beginning elementary and secondary teachers' sense of efficacy related to teaching critical data literacy in social studies. Through surveys and semi-structured interviews, we examined the beliefs and reported practices of teachers from a pre-service course designed to help them learn about teaching critical data literacy through fieldwork and their first year of teaching. We were interested in how their beliefs about critical data literacy and their self-efficacy changed, whether they ultimately reported teaching critical data literacy as first-year teachers, and what sources of efficacy information seemed to influence their beliefs and practices. Our findings suggest that pre-service coursework can have a positive influence on pre-service teachers' beliefs, but they are likely to encounter challenges coupled with inconsistent sources of efficacy information in the field that will undermine their commitments to teaching critical data literacy.
Guided by transnational citizenship, this interpretative phenomenological study draws on 26 interviews with 12 youths who migrated from China to the United States to examine how they negotiated civic identities in their social studies education and amid the U.S.-China geopolitical tension. Participants explained that social studies education supported their historical knowledge and source analysis skills. However, they also critiqued social studies education by applying source analysis skills to interpret social media posts while drawing on transnational knowledge to question curricular narratives. Across these in-school and out-of-school contexts, these youths navigated competing nationalisms through "critical neutrality," a situated form of strategic nonalignment through which they rejected demands to align uncritically with either nationalistic narrative while remaining attentive to the power, exclusions, distortions, and consequences associated with both. Some participants enacted critical neutrality through active civic engagement while others chose strategic disengagement. Participants also advanced people-centered narratives that challenged state-centered framings. This study argues that social studies educators and researchers should attend to competing nationalisms when interpreting migrant youths' civic identities, create opportunities for students to interrogate competing nationalisms, and recognize critically informed nonalignment as a legitimate civic stance under conditions of geopolitical polarization.
This qualitative case study explores how a cohort of eight immigrant 12th graders deepened transnational funds of identity through civic learning in a dialogic after-school space. This "second classroom" complemented instruction in the teacher-led "first classroom," which was thoughtfully designed by adult educators with the aim of empowering immigrants. However, in the second classroom, students referenced transnational frames of identity more overtly and dynamically, leveraging comparative peer learning from across national contexts. Students also constructed layered, intersectional understandings of social justice through dialogues about their transnational attachments and experiences. One implication is that asset-based projects aimed at immigrant codetermination in civics education depend on the establishment of dialogic spaces. Such spaces can render students' assets more legible to teachers. Findings suggest the impact of transnationalism as an educative resource is enhanced when it is approached as an active practice, in constant development and co-construction by students.
