Pre-service teachers may leave their graduate programs with strong social justice leanings, yet most begin teaching struggling to integrate their visions into a context constrained by accountability demands. Pressures and constraints, such as high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum, may...

Previous research on classroom uses for political cartoons identified two negative trends: creative stagnation (as teachers utilized them solely for interpretation) and age limitation (as researchers suggested they fit best with gifted and older students). Recent scholarship has addressed both...

As more social studies classrooms gain access to the Internet each year, teachers are frequently exploring ways to maximize the use of this technology in their respective learning environments. This paper discusses the need to generate – and the subsequent benefits of facilitating –...

Inquiry-based instruction in social studies began as a transformative movement whose proponents included Shirley Engle, Donald Oliver, and James Shaver in the middle of the twentieth-century. Inquiry-based instruction is relevant to twenty-first century social studies and is gaining even more...

This article analyzes a classroom project that integrated desktop documentary making with an educational foundations course in order to foster empathetic development in pre-service teachers toward unfamiliar cultural groups. The project required each tertiary student in the course to create a...

This article seeks to demonstrate how social studies has come to be an all-inclusive subject: it has become supersized. When supported by Web 2.0 technology, social studies enables students to address multifaceted problems that require the deep understanding necessary to arrive at both wise and...

The goal for social studies teachers is to offer an array of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that fulfill the ten National Council for the Social Studies standards. Powerful learning should be facilitated as specific social studies lessons, integrated across the curriculum, demonstrated...

Using Lawn Boy by Gary Paulson allows teachers to address numerous economic ideas and principals. This lesson introduces various economic concepts while concentrating on opportunity cost, allowing students to think critically as they examine their own economic decisions. Students keep a journal...