Suchergebnisse

This paper describes three social studies teachers' participation in an approximately 50-h, 13-month, Lesson Study-type professional development program called Beyond Words. The program centered around promoting teachers' understanding of historical domain knowledge through experiences with innovative visual curriculum materials and sustained collaboration. This qualitative investigation answers: To what degree can Beyond Words help in-service geography teachers design and implement powerful instruction centered around historical photographs? Throughout Beyond Words the teachers demonstrated a spirit of open-mindedness and a willingness to experiment with unfamiliar ideas; they planned and implemented a lesson that featured engaging historical photographs, thinking critically about the past, and making claims about a public issue. At the end of the program, however, they demonstrated conventional approaches toward social studies instruction, especially regarding curriculum and assessment. The work shared here suggests that helping teachers craft high-quality questions to anchor student-inquiry and scaffolding teachers' sensemaking of student-outcome data should be high priorities for professional development providers.

This paper describes a thirteen-month, Lesson Study-type professional development project that sought to form and support a community of in-service social studies teachers who could design and implement lessons informed by second-order historical domain knowledge. Here, the researcher reports on the experiences of a subgroup of participants, three secondary history teachers, as they planned, taught, revised, and re-taught a collaborative research lesson. The teachers increasingly incorporated second-order historical domain knowledge into their respective practice: facilitating students' use of historical photographs as evidence to begin to answer a compelling question. Findings also suggest the teachers began to effectively support students' abilities to make claims about the past. Implications include: the foregrounding of compelling questions during planning, and the need for explicit guidance to help teachers analyze student work products.

In this space I complement an article published earlier in Social Studies Research and Practice 8(1), 2012 by providing a wise practice lesson and its ancillary materials. As sophisticated technologies continue to immerse modern students in potent visual data, teachers should help students develop equally potent visual literacy skills. Students who are more visually literate are better prepared to evaluate the visual messages surrounding them and act, not in rote-response visual stimuli, but rather according to their well-informed conscience. The lesson shared here demonstrates the educative potential of employing visual documents, historical photographs, in an inquiry-based approach to social studies instruction. Together, the coupled articles present a pragmatic example of academic research informing classroom practice in meaningful ways to promote students' civic competence.

Students in all content areas are almost exclusively presented with text-based instruction that starkly contrasts their experiences outside a classroom. With the advent of sophisticated technologies unknown to earlier generations, modern students are evermore immersed in visual data such as photographs, videos, games, apps. Visual media comprise many of the resources that adolescents use to negotiate understandings of the world. Many teachers and teacher-educators suggest that civic competence requires meeting powerful media with equally powerful analysis tools. In this, the first of two coupled articles — the second to be published in the July issue of Social Studies Research and Practice — I describe the educative potential of employing visual documents, especially historical photographs, in social studies instruction and refer to implications drawn from recent research studies. I also introduce an original lesson demonstrating wise practice teaching strategies for implementing historical photographs in classroom instruction to promote students' civic competence. The second coupled article will extend the wise practice teaching strategies and feature all of the resources needed to enact the lesson and provide closure to the ideas posited throughout both articles.

PurposeThe recent motion picture Selma infused fresh interest – and controversy – into the political and emotional peak of America's modern Civil Rights Movement. Ava DuVernay, the film's director, faced criticism for her exclusion of the Jewish presence from the movie's portrayal of the March 21, 1965 Voting Rights March. The recent attention presents a teachable moment and new energy for thinking deeply about this pivotal event in America's past. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe authors provide valuable historical domain knowledge surrounding the 1965 Voting Rights March, present the requisite plans and curriculum resources for implementing wise-practice instructional strategies, and explore the rationale underpinning the inquiry-based activities.FindingsThe authors share innovative approaches, at the secondary and elementary levels, integrating historical domain knowledge with renewed interest in the 1965 Voting Rights March to create powerful teaching-and-learning experiences. The approaches are innovative because they contain dynamic curriculum materials and reflect wise-practice use of historical photographs within the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards.Practical implicationsThe approaches shared here are centered around questioning, a key to student learning. The lessons feature the development of questions, both from teachers and students, as classes work collaboratively to interpret a potentially powerful historical photograph and use historical events to practice thinking deeply about important topics.Originality/valueSocial studies classrooms are ideal educational spaces to develop and practice the analytical skills and dispositions students need to meet the challenge of critiquing visual information that concerns complex public issues, such as the role of religion in society.

PurposeHere the authors thoroughly explore a field-tested exchange of ideas, a discussion. The authors share a robust discussion script that models a wise-practice pedagogical approach for promoting civic competence [problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI)] and then describe precisely how the discussion is an exemplar of that approach.Design/methodology/approachScores of teachers and teacher educators have participated in this discussion in real-world classroom settings. This was first experienced during a professional development seminar at the University of Prishtina in Kosovo when the first author, working with Kosovar colleagues including the second author, led this seemingly impromptu discussion of major values in conflict over the issue of whether Kosovo's government should make tobacco use illegal. This has since been implemented in several undergraduate and graduate education courses in the United States of America.FindingsThe discussion script contains two types of text: (1) traditional text – default formatting – which constitutes the semi-structured wording a discussion leader would say aloud and (2) supplementary text – italicized formatting – that provides educative suggestions for professional development.Originality/valueFinally, the authors share suggestions for revising this discussion for future iterations and ways teachers and teacher educators can further develop the skills for facilitating discussions.

Arguments surrounding public issues are not always expressed in writing; they often take visual and auditory forms. In recent years, scholarship encouraging teachers and students to think deeply about songs—music and lyrics—has increased. Historical analysis of songs from the past can help students develop critical listening habits useful for interpreting contemporary songs. We share an inquiry-based, research-into-practice lesson centered around the following question: Was the US justified in pursuing nuclear weapons following the conclusion of World War II? We highlight a public issues approach where students use historical content and analysis as evidence to defend a chosen public policy.

This paper advances a continuing line of research investigating the potential of web-based educative curriculum materials (ECMs) to facilitate teachers' development of professional teaching knowledge (PTK). Our ECMs consisted of online lesson plans scaffolded with embedded digital resources to promote teacher understanding of a particular wise-practice pedagogy: problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI). Our research question was: Can a 2nd generation of web-based ECMs encourage social studies teachers' development of PTK for PBHI? Participants reacted positively to several educative scaffolds, especially videocases of experts modeling historical thinking. Evidence suggested that multiple experiences with planning and implementing instruction with our ECMs helped teachers recognize value in some of the materials' underpinning concepts (e.g., scaffolding and inquiry-based instruction). However, planning instruction individually, the novelty of planning resources enhanced with digital resources, and certain contextual features of schooling such as inadequate focused time for planning seemed to frustrate the ECMs potential to promote teacher-learning. Here we suggest that ECMs function less effectively as stand-alone supports; however, employed in more formal contexts that feature collaboration, they may be able to provide valuable support for teachers' professional development.

PurposeVisual documents (e.g. maps, editorial cartoons, historical photographs, portraits, documentary films, historically-based movies, etc.) are common curriculum resources within social studies classrooms; however, only recently scholars have begun to systematically research ways to more authentically and powerfully center instruction around visual documents. Here, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize relevant lines of inquiry into research-based, wise-practices for selecting and designing visual curriculum materials to help social studies students and teachers think about social phenomenon deeply and in more disciplinary-specific ways.Design/methodology/approachThe authors share recent scholarship that has posited explanations for why visual data tend to afford learners especially powerful opportunities to think critically about the world around them. Throughout the discussion, the authors integrate applicable research-based principles that can guide the selection and design of visual curriculum materials.FindingsScholars have suggested that visual documents are rarely introduced in educational settings as a means to develop the thinking skills of decoding, interpreting and evaluating pictorial information. The authors argue that these skills are vital civic competencies because the creation and critique of non-written information often mediates modern public issues and social identities.Research limitations/implicationsInformed by strong, consistent research into multimodal learning, visual literacy and the cognitive sciences, the wise-practice scaffolding suggestions the authors provide may help professionals with an interest in social studies education to synthesize theory-based suggestions with practice-based implementations as it concerns visual documents. The authors hope the guidance shared here helps teachers, teacher educators and curriculum designers produce high-quality resources that will engage contemporary students and help them develop civic competence.Originality/valueFirst, the authors posit a research-based template, or planning checklist, of wise-practice suggestions to help social studies teachers, teacher educators and curriculum designers select visual documents. The authors then share several digital collection archives that teachers can visit to locate powerful visuals and describe research-based suggestions for designing them for dynamic implementation. Finally, the authors argue for more deliberative space in the social studies curriculum and classroom time for teachers to explore the educative power of centering inquiry-based instruction around visual information.

This book utilizes various frameworks to explore race, language, gender, discrimination, identity, immigration, poverty, social justice, and pedagogy. The contributors highlight the importance of using critical perspectives in contemporary discussions about education in the Southern United States.