This study examines how the legal arguments in United States v. South Carolina (1978) established a "rational relationship" between teaching and validated teacher licensure exams. Findings reveal that these arguments promoted racial objectivity, masked arbitrary decisions as rigorous, and reframed teacher education programs as workforce development. These precedents have perpetuated the commonsense that licensure exams are essential for ensuring teacher quality, despite ongoing concerns about their predictive validity and disparate impact on teachers of color.

This article describes a qualitative content analysis of 37 elementary examples of social studies Inquiry Design Models (C3 Teachers, 2023a), conducted with the purpose of identifying the core student skills necessary to successfully engage in these inquiries. Prior research identifies core inquiry teaching skills for teachers across content areas and grade bands, but there has been little research on the demands placed on elementary students in social studies inquiry. In this study, we identify 33 broad skills, each of which are observable and teachable. Four of these skills occurred in high frequency: generation of new ideas ( n = 152), writing process ( n = 110), linking evidence with claims ( n = 65), and discussion ( n = 63). These most frequently occurring skills all required higher-level and/or critical thinking. Implications for preservice and in-service teacher education are discussed.

This article describes a content analysis of 37 Inquiry Design Modules (https://c3teachers.org), conducted with the purpose of identifying the core teaching practices (CTP) necessary to successfully enact them. Although there has been research identifying CTP in other content areas, research on social studies inquiry at the elementary level is an area that has received little attention. In this study, we identify 16 CTP, each of which is observable, teachable, and replicable. Six of these CTP (facilitating discussion; guiding, reinforcing, or directing thinking; asking questions; introducing and defining vocabulary; curating resources; and using graphic organizers or specific tools) occurred with high frequency in the data set and are discussed in depth. Implications for preservice teacher education are discussed.

In this chapter, we explore a doctoral-level course at Indiana University dedicated to developing the pedagogy of teacher educators. Our chapter highlights the challenges of preparing prospective teacher educators for the various specialized roles that teacher educators occupy in an educator preparation program. We provide an overview of the seminar, followed by vignettes highlighting three doctoral students' experience with the course. Finally, we conclude with a series of questions that trouble how the conception of "pedagogy" in teacher education fails to account for the specialized work that exists in teacher education.

Social studies education and research can and must play a central role in sustaining democratic societies. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of this vital journal that aims to strengthen social studies education, democratic societies face numerous serious challenges. Although today's circumstances are unique, many of our current challenges have existed (and will continue to exist) in some form throughout the history of democracy. In this article, scholars from various sub-fields of social studies education explore how research, scholarship, and practice in the field can address seven of these persistent civic challenges: ecological sustainability, media literacy, equity and inclusion, civic engagement, political pluralism, civic competency, and sociohistorical change. Essays on each of these topics analyze relevant prior research and offer suggestions for how future research and scholarship can explore how educators can help to address these persistent civic challenges, with the goal of supporting robust participatory democracy.

This article examines the adoption and abandonment of the Missouri Pre-Service Teacher Assessment (MoPTA). Our analysis draws on policy network theory to argue that the divergent rationales of Missouri’s primary teacher education policy network actors led to confusion, conflict, and disagreement, which contributed to the abandonment of the MoPTA as a policy prescription. Charting the rise and fall of Missouri’s high-stakes performance assessment provides important lessons for state education agencies, local school districts, and teacher education programs.

In this chapter, we examine the professional development structures at Indiana University that prepare university supervisors to support student teachers during a performance assessment (edTPA). Although professional development is a goal for advocates of university supervisors, we question whether professional development to support the completion of a performance assessment helps or hinders the complex work associated with supervising student teachers. We examine performance assessment-based professional development activities by contrasting them with the traditional challenges associated with supervising student teachers: ambiguous roles and responsibilities; navigating triad dynamics; logistical barriers to forming positive pedagogical relationships. Because performance assessment-based professional development for university supervisor frames teaching as instrumental problem-solving, we conclude that performance assessments have exacerbated the traditional challenges associated with supervising student teachers.

As states, school districts, and teachers continue to adopt the inquiry-based principles of the College, Career, and Civic (C3) Framework, social studies teacher education must engage in a concomitant instructional shift to focus its efforts on preparing inquiry-based educators. One possible approach is to organize social studies teacher education around core practices. In this study, I attempt to surface the core practices found in social studies classrooms through a qualitative content analysis of the lessons using the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), an instructional design process based on the elements of the C3 Framework. Seven core practices to organize social studies teacher education are proposed: (a) establishing social studies academic language, (b) helping students recognize the interdisciplinary nature of social studies phenomena, (c) using interpretive questions, (d) helping students organize inquiries, (e) connecting inquiries to students’ lives, (f) structuring opportunities for discussion, and (g) extending inquiry into the civic lives of students.

Reforming the idea of social studies teacher education often stands in sharp contrast to reforming the complex landscape where it takes place. Approaching social studies teacher education reform as...

In this chapter, I approach the ethics of self-study from the perspective of a legitimate methodological tradition that has a historically situated dialogue with common understandings and practices. From this standpoint, I examine three recursive ethical issues in self-study research: (1) struggles with our multiple identities as researchers; (2) tensions among and between collaborators; and (3) the vulnerability of a public-facing methodology. The stable dialogue within self-study literature of these three ethical issues both inspires confidence in the legitimacy of self-study research and also serves as a reminder to continue to expand the theoretical and methodological contours of self-study. In the final section of this chapter, I explore what ethical questions might emerge as the self-study community begins to navigate more critical theoretical and methodological approaches.

The practice of teacher education is inextricably linked to the policy environment in which it occurs. Calls by policymakers and politicians for accountability measures, standardization and performance assessments are efforts to influence the direction of the preparation of educators. In this self-study, I examine my participation in a state-level teacher education policy decision-making body in the United States in order to illuminate how policy decisions are made about teacher education. More specifically, I discuss the kinds of warrants about teacher education practice that I deployed as I navigated the political and practical consequences of policy decisions. This study serves not only to illuminate the nature of policy discussions in teacher education, but also to encourage teacher educators to engage directly the policy-making arenas that implicitly and explicitly influence their work.

For social studies education to embrace its full potential as the curricular subject that prepares students for citizenship, it must engage in pedagogies that cultivate students' social, civic, and cultural fluency. In order to bridge the culturally and diverse lives of English Language Learners with the promise of social studies education, teachers must be able to surface their contextualized civic realities. In this chapter, the authors suggest a biography-driven instructional approach provides an opportunity to learn about students' civic lives. More specifically, we share how the construction of a visual biography through photography can be used to personalize the rights, responsibilities, and spaces of citizenship.

The importance of the early field experience in the curriculum of teacher education is often underappreciated. Ostensibly, the early field experience provides teacher candidates with the first opportunity to look closely at teaching and learning from the perspective of a classroom educator. Yet, little is know about what kinds of early field experiences facilitate teacher learning. In this study, the authors examined the use of video representations during an early field experience to advance preservice social studies teachers’ skills as careful observers of classroom practice. Findings suggest that video representations helped preservice teachers in an early field experience isolate elements of teaching and learning; contrast classroom practices with existing beliefs about classroom practice; and prime their situational and pedagogical imaginations.

The construction of content standards has become one of the most politicized processes in K-12 public education as those who determine the value of knowledge(s) also shape who retains or gains political power (Placier, Walker, & Foster, 2002; Sleeter, 2002; Heilig, Brown, & Brown, 2012). In this study, authors examine the process of crafting secondary social studies standards in the state of Missouri. Findings indicate that common sense was deployed in three areas: committee selection, standards writing, and committee decorum. As a result, the standards generated through this process served to reify the neoconservative/neoliberal status quo and failed to include reference to content beyond the scope of traditional knowledge, values, and intentions of conservative social studies. Authors also call for the adoption of a critical common sense which insists that the status quo of old-fashioned common sense is challenged.

•This study explores a museum internship program as a non-school context for learning to teach.•For the participants featured in this study, the internship was a positive developmental learning experience.•The internship influenced pre-service teachers' identities, perspectives, and pedagogies.•The internship also helped catalyze, crystallize, and diversify the experience of learning to teach.•Internships with museum educators can serve as important analogous learning spaces for teacher education.

Despite university supervisors’ critical role in the success of PK-12 teacher candidates, research is limited on how to best prepare supervisors to mentor their supervisees and interact with cooperating teachers and school administrators. By using two surveys and a focus group meeting, this qualitative study explores supervisors’ experiences to surface dilemmas of supervisory practice. Results indicate supervisors suffer overwhelming workloads, feel marginalized by their institutions, lack ongoing training, and are often unclear as to what their role is. The success of the cadres of clinical supervisors ultimately depends on training, but more crucially on full engagement by their home institutions.