Emergency Remote Learning: Seeing, Understanding and Disrupting Racism

COVID-19 shut down our university and sent us into remote learning. My elementary social studies methods’ teacher candidates and I sought to make sense of the ensuing chaos. Fueled by the threat of COVID-19 and growing issues of racism, I designed a focused, inquiry-based lesson using the Inquiry Design Generator of the C3 Framework (NCSS, 2013) to revisit our work in Takaki’s (2012) A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America. The inquiry invited the teacher candidates to grasp the significance of the past in shaping the present, and to engage in informed action using children’s literature.

Global Education in Neoliberal Times: A Comparative Case Study of Two Schools in New York

Preparing students to live in an interconnected world is of central importance in 21st century education. Neoliberal educational contexts, however, thwart efforts to implement more humanistic and critical versions of global education (GE). This comparative case study examines how teachers and administrators enact GE at two schools—one public, the other private—in the New York City metropolitan area. Findings demonstrate the constraints and possibilities of engaging GE in neoliberal educational contexts. Implications for GE scholars and practitioners include study of how wider contextual factors shape GE’s enactment in a neoliberal era

Lights, Camera, Student Voice: Using technology to address and explore economics within the C3 Framework

Instructional technology has been found to have a positive impact on many aspects of the academic experiences including: student engagement, interest, student voice, and achievement. The aim of this study was to explore an elementary teacher’s perceptions of the use of Flipgrid when teaching economics concepts using the C3 Framework.  A qualitative methods approach was used to interview an elementary teacher to answer the following research questions on teaching economics in the elementary setting: 1) How does Flipgrid promote student voice? 2) How does Flipgrid assist teachers instructionally? 3) How does Flipgrid impact student engagement and student learning? The findings indicate when teaching economics in an elementary setting Flipgrid promotes student voice and positively impacts student engagement and learning. Second, Flipgrid’s intuitive platform was easy for both students and teachers to use

School Social Studies as a Vehicle for Human Rights Education: Caveats

The social studies curriculum is the obvious “home” of school-level human rights education. As such, social studies as a school subject has the potential to contribute significantly to the empowering function of formal education. A right to human rights education is, however, dependent on the right to education as such. With Universal Primary Education (UPE) yet to be achieved, social science educators seeking to use the subject as a means of extending human rights education to children in the most underdeveloped countries need to focus their attention on the primary school curriculum

With Love: Attempting to Instill the Lasting Value of Humanity While Teaching During a Global Pandemic

Given the onslaught of COVID-19, the University of Minnesota suspended in-person instruction, forcing instructors to engage multiple forms of distance learning. This essay describes how two graduate instructors in social studies teacher education shifted their pedagogical focus from one course’s content to the ways in which their students would experience their online instruction. The instructors’ overarching goal was to model for their pre-service teachers what they hoped would be the pedagogical imperatives in those pre-service teachers’ future classrooms: the centering of humanity, the ability to balance grace with high expectations, and the willingness to reflect and learn on their own

From the Editor: Social Studies Classroom in the Time of Pandemic

The special issue of JISS Social Studies Classroom in the Time of Pandemic: Experience, Practice, and Advice aims to help social studies professional to b etter prepare for the challenges of COVID-19. Eleven essays in this special issue involve helpful advice on how to design an online class, develop electronic social studies content materials, establish relations with students in online classrooms, and use the pandemic as a way to educate responsible citizens. The authors of the essays are classroom teachers and university instructors

Teachers’ Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education in Central Appalachia

This paper reports on a sequential mixed-methods (quan à QUAL) study that explored rural Appalachian teachers' perspectives and pedagogical decisions about Global Citizenship Education (GCE). In phase one, a questionnaire was completed by social studies teachers (n=19) from remote and distant rural high schools located in Central Appalachia across two states. Closed-ended items were analyzed through descriptive statistics. Open-ended items were coded to elicit themes that helped to answer the research questions. In phase two, two participants from the original sample were interviewed to uncover their experiences navigating GCE in their unique community contexts. Findings suggest social studies teachers in rural Appalachia, while not using the exact terminology of global citizenship, support multiple types of global citizenship aims. They tend to perceive their communities as homogenous, isolated, and conservative, which presented both challenges to and stimuli for teaching global curricula. Participants tend to perceive much of their global curricula as contrarian in their communities and, therefore, relied on professional tact and community-based knowledge as rural natives to inform their pedagogical decisions

Awakening the Sleeping Giant: A Commentary on Social Studies During the Coronavirus Pandemic

In this essay, I highlight two ways the coronavirus pandemic to-date has influenced the teaching and learning of social studies. First, despite its marginalization and under-investment nationally, the crisis highlighted the significance of social studies by serving as a refuge for youth and families to navigate and better understand this disaster. This includes serving as a cathartic space for learners grappling with current events as they unfold. Second, curricular innovations emerged that guided informative practices. Such innovations included “Maslow Before Bloom” in this disaster, and noting the ways in which youth took informed action at home and in the community to make a difference. While in no way is the list below comprehensive or mutually exclusive (or meant to be), it does present one picture of social studies in classrooms and communities during this challenging period in our history.

Framing the pandemic within global citizenship education

The coronavirus pandemic has presented an opportunity to rethink how social studies education is framed. Using global citizenship education to teach about the pandemic properly places global health within the purview of all people and builds an onramp for teachers and students to make this kind of theoretical framing a mainstream part of social studies instruction. Drawing on the practice of one experienced secondary social studies teacher, this paper discusses the potential of issues-centered dialogue about the pandemic to narrow the gap between what people know about global health issues and what they do about them

What If People Judge Me Unfairly: The Mediating Role of Fear of Negative Evaluation on the Relationship between Perceived Autonomy Support and Academic Risk-Taking Behaviour in Social Studies Courses

This paper aims to investigate the mediation role of fear of negative evaluation (FNE) in the relationship between perceived autonomy support (PAS) and academic risk-taking (ART) in the context of social studies course. A total of 339 middle school students from Turkey participated in the study. Data were collected through the Learning Climate Scale, Fear of Negative Evaluation in Academic Environments Scale, and Social Studies-Oriented Academic Risk-Taking Scale. Correlation results showed that PAS was negatively correlated with FNE and positively with ART. There was a negative correlation between FNE and ART. Structural equation model analyses showed that PAS predicted FNE negatively and ART positively. In addition, FNE predicted ART negatively. The partial mediation effect of FNE on the relationship between PAS and ART was significant. These results provide empirical evidence for the effect of self-determination theory (SDT) on affective characteristics such as ART and FNE.Keywords: self-determination theory, perceived autonomy support, academic risk-taking, fear of negative evaluation, social studies, mediatio