Book Reviews and Book Notes

The purpose of this article is to empower those interested in teaching students powerful and engaging social studies. Through the lens of Supreme Court simulations, this article provides educators with a viable, classroom-tested lesson plan to bring Problem-Based Learning into their classrooms. The specific aim of the lesson is to provide students with an opportunity to engage in relevant and powerful civics education.     

Instructional Materials

History courses based on chronological narratives in textbooks often assume a linear format through which students accumulate substantial amounts of surface-level information, with the various pieces of that information being disconnected from each other and from larger historical contexts. In addition, such narratives are often dry and lifeless, a situation that prevents students from understanding that the study of history is an ongoing, dynamic process. Using a modern American history course as its prototype, this article proposes that student engagement and learning can be heightened if teachers incorporate the use of iconic photographs into historical studies. In addition, such images portray modern American culture, providing a lens through which students can examine the contemporary cultural mindset in which they live.     

Not the Israel of My Elementary School: An Exploration of Jewish-Canadian Secondary Students' Attempts to Process Morally Complex Israeli Narratives

The following article presents data from a mixed-methods practitioner research study that focuses on understanding how Jewish secondary students learned about controversial topics in Israel's history and how these topics impacted their connection to the country. The responses that were provided by the students showed that the material forced students to conceptualize Israel in new ways and that the material— learning from Palestinian and Israeli texts about events that happened in 1947 and 1948—was disruptive to their preconceived notions of Israel. With the passing of time, the students were able to reflect on the real difficulty they had with learning about the topics but were able to synthesize the disruption into their Israel narrative to arrive at a new understanding. The integration of this new material into existing schema is understood within the context of dangerous memories, and how learning about controversial moments in nationalist narratives can impact the way students learn and relate to a topic. A further finding was that some students expressed resentment at previous educational experiences for not being fully transparent about historical events.     

A fragmented picture: reflections on the photographic practices of young people

Research on children and youth increasingly features young people's photographs and/or young people as photographers. While this suggests that quite a lot is known about young people's relationships to photographs and camera technologies, this is not the case. Following an overview of studies that engage with young photographers, this article demonstrates why still very little is known about young people's photographic practices – that is, the range of ways and media through which young people take, feature in, and use photographs. The author argues that this gap in knowledge needs to be addressed. Important aspects of childhood, youth and growing up, including identity, belonging and memory, are often experienced and/or expressed in part through photographs and photography.     

Effective Enthusiasm of Danish Folk Education

Contextualization, the act of placing events in a proper context, allows teachers to weave a rich, dynamic portrait of a historical period for their students. As teachers strive to identify enduring themes and patterns, they must teach students to appreciate the particular policies, institutions, worldviews, and circumstances that shape a given moment in time. However, contextualized historical thinking runs counter to the narratives and frameworks that many students bring to class. Not only have many young people internalized timeless, psychologized notions of why people behaved as they did in the past, but they have also absorbed powerful stories through popular culture. Challenging long-standing historical frameworks takes time, and educators must give students multiple opportunities to practice and apply their new knowledge and skills. In this article, the authors describe three activities that help students think contextually as they read historical documents: (1) providing background knowledge, (2) asking guiding questions, and (3) explicitly modeling contextualized thinking.     

Training for Civic Leadership

In this article, the authors offer social studies educators a way to deepen students' understanding of civil disobedience as a democratic and nonviolent means of instigating social change. The authors explore the concept of civil disobedience from a historical perspective and examine the justifications and ramifications of each historical example. In addition, they provide several examples of events that are often mistakenly categorized as civil disobedience. Through these examples, the authors develop a sound definition of the concept, while explaining its application to contemporary society. In actualizing the significance of civil disobedience in the secondary social studies classroom, the authors use five components: the historical importance of civil disobedience, the concept of civil disobedience, the argument for civil disobedience, the argument against civil disobedience, and teaching about civil disobedience. They also incorporate civil disobedience into a lesson plan.     

Young Children's Everyday Civics

Civic education for our youngest citizens faces two challenges if we want to imagine new possibilities. First, the field of social studies uses frames of analyzing citizenship education based on studies of older students. Second, predetermined adult ideas (and ideals) of what it means to act civically dominate our conceptions of civic education for young children. Drawing on data from a yearlong multivocal video-cued ethnography, this article argues that social studies needs to focus on the everyday, embodied ways that young children act civically. Using a vignette from a typical day, this article illustrates how young children's everyday relationships and interactions highlight a different vision of being civic—a more caring and relational idea of the common good. When we recognize young children's construction of a common good in their smaller, yet no less important, civic spaces of school, we can expand our notions of civic education.     

‘Oh they drink here harder I think’: young people and alcohol consumption at three New Zealand secondary school formals

The New Zealand media sensationalises the issue of teenage drinking. It also frames school formals (balls or proms) and associated after parties as problematic sites, since young people may drink to excess at such events. This article explores the alcohol consumption patterns of a group of year 13 students on the night of their school formal. Adults' permissive attitudes towards their own and young people's alcohol consumption on the night are discussed to highlight how drinking is almost necessary for socialisation in a New Zealand context. The majority of student participants reported that they drank in moderation on the night and some were intolerant of intoxicated peers. This poses a challenge to New Zealand media depictions of the school formal and after party as ‘drunken affairs’. Some international students did drink to excess at unofficial after parties organised by students and/or parents in two of three participating schools. Rather than this reflecting negatively on the students concerned, such behaviour can be read as a reflection on New Zealand's binge drinking culture. This article concludes with suggestions for how schools can create safer after parties which may reduce the chances of young people engaging in ‘risky’ drinking behaviours at such events.     

Developing inclusive educational practices for refugee children in the Czech Republic

All children in the Czech Republic have the legal right to primary education, regardless of nationality and legal status. This article is based on a study of refugee children and their educational situation. The study reveals that refugee students in the Czech Republic are not benefiting fully from this fundamental right and that their educational future is in jeopardy. The study identified six major barriers to full participation and educational benefits. Finally, a plan of action to overcome barriers is put forward. Key ingredients are effective information transfer among state agencies, non‐governmental organizations, parents, children and schools.     

Correspondence

How can teachers utilize video games in the classroom, harnessing a technology that is gaining “market share” in the lives of our students? This article will provide classroom teachers with a research-based rationale for using video games along with a viable, classroom-tested lesson to teach social studies content using a widely available commercial video game. Specifically, how to use the game Civilization IV in the classroom to allow world history high school students to explore the impact technology has on societal development and the human experience and their place in time. This correlates to NCSS Curriculum Standard II: time, continuity, and change and NCSS Curriculum Standard VIII: science, technology, and society.     

Silver Inflation and the Senate in 1933

Along with the ever-increasing racial/ethnic diversity in U.S. schools, researchers began to investigate the impact of racial/ethnic identity on young people's understanding of the nation's history. Compared to other racial minorities, Asian American students have received little academic and educational attention. This article seeks to address this gap through a qualitative study on Korean American youth. Drawing from in-depth interviews with twenty Korean American high school students, this article examines how Korean American youth make sense of U.S. history and how their sociocultural backgrounds affect their historical perspectives as well as their ideas and experiences of learning history historical perspectives.     

Ulstermen and Loyalist Ladies on Parade: Gendering Unionism in Northern Ireland

This article explores parades as central institutions in the construction and maintenance of unionist ethno-gender identities and a crucial part of politics in Northern Ireland. It presents a brief historical review of the origins of Protestant marches and the organizations which are key to sustaining this tradition. It then analyses the contemporary marches, including the highly contested Portadown parade and the tranquil all-Ireland demonstration,held in Rossnowlagh in the Republic. These overwhelmingly male events are important to the maintenance of the gender order of unionism. The parades reveal the subordinated feminity within unionism: women participate in small numbers by invitation only. At the same time, they reveal competing masculinities: traditional, 'respectable' unionist masculinity is challenged by the more virile loyalism of 'Billy boy' and 'kick the pope' bands and marchers. This analysis explains why these competing masculinities are central, not only to the maintenance of male hegemony, but also to the ethno-national politics of parading, helping to set the boundaries of accommodation with nationalists and the state.     

Historical Thinking and Sports History: A Case Study Using the Brooklyn Dodgers

Abstract

This article discusses how the history of sports can serve as way to understand abstract concepts associated with local history and social studies education. An introductory discussion outlines how sports can engage and interest students, focusing especially on ideas related to history thinking (such as change and continuity). A case study using the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles is used to illustrate these ideas, focusing on themes associated with suburbanization and urban renewal. A lesson plan is also provided.     

Books and Citizenship

This article takes up the question of world history teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge by reporting on two separate but related projects. In the first, we briefly discuss an empirical investigation one of the authors conducted into the ways that pre- and in-service world history teachers think about, organize, and make meaning of separate and discrete world historical events, first for themselves and then for their students. It demonstrates the value of world history teachers making multiple connections among world historical events from the biggest to the smallest ones to construct dynamic and coherent pictures of the past for themselves and their students. In the second project, we discuss our innovative history lab, a course designed to help undergraduates enrolled in a world history course “see” the pedagogical moves their world history instructors make. We designed this pedagogical history lab to foster future teachers’ understandings of the content knowledge needed to teach world history while they are learning world history as students.     

A Challenge to Teachers of the Social Studies

When teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms portray history as an immutable sequence of certain facts, dates, and events, young learners tend to view the past, and by extension the future, as something fixed and inevitable. Learning about the past through investigating biographies can help counter this tendency by teaching students to recognize that individuals and groups have the agency to make history and shape the future. In this article, the author presents three instructional strategies in which learners make use of graphic organizers to investigate the historical contexts and chronologies of individuals' lives. Students learn how people have effected historical change and worked together to preserve continuity with the past. They also learn that the values and attitudes that motivated individuals and groups to act as they did were in large measure the result of historically specific social structures and institutional arrangements.     

Spaces of Pride: A Visual Ethnography of Gay Pride Parades in Italy and the United Kingdom

Gay pride parades represent an active site of production of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), intersexual and queer identities, featuring a spatial and social articulation of political and human rights claims. While the multiplication of these events in different countries suggests the existence of a coherent and cohesive community which shares the same collective identity beyond national borders, different patterns in the organisation, part-taking and social and political connotations given to these events can be observed in different contexts. By means of a comparative visual ethnography of Italian and British Gay Pride Parades, this article investigates how the creation, mobilisation and challenge of quasi-normative LGBT identities occur within the spatial context of gay pride marches. It is argued, in particular, that while gay pride parades are sites in which the socio-political status quo can be successfully challenged, participants are also faced with the possibility of falling prey to dynamics of identity commodification and homonationalism which may ultimately deprive their claims of their subversive potential.     

After the March: Using Instagram to Perform and Sustain the Women's March

The January 2017 Women's March was an example of the paradigmatic March on Washington, part of the repertoire of collective action used by social movements in the United States for decades. Similar marches were held on its first and second anniversary, in January 2018 and January 2019, respectively. One did not need to travel to the nation's capital to participate in these marches, however; activists also organized hundreds of “sister marches” across the United States and internationally. Yet, a sole focus on these one‐day, physical events misses a great deal of activity. In this article, we examine social media activity related to the Women's March on the platform Instagram that was posted well after the 2017 march was over but before the 2018 march was fully planned. We do so to gain purchase on how individuals and organizations use social media to maintain movements between large events. We analyze a systematic sample of Instagram posts from two sources: (1) individual Instagram users’ public posts with the hashtag #womensmarch and (2) posts from the official Instagram account of the Women's March. Conceptualizing these posts as political performances, we use our findings to draw implications for the study of contemporary protest.     

‘It’s all bollocks!’ and other critical standpoints on the UK Government’s vision of global citizenship

The UK Government’s International Citizen Service (ICS) sends volunteers abroad to ‘fight global poverty’ as ‘global citizens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction of development on the ICS programme forecloses important political and historical contexts, resulting in a model of global citizenship we might term ‘soft’. This article presents data from interviews with ICS volunteers with a specific methodological concern of recognizing the agency of young people and allowing their responses to lead discussion. The outcome is a range of themes across the data that critique the Government’s model of citizenship and, I argue, shows the volunteers to be ‘critical’ global citizens. I then ask whether we can consider this a mode of resistance. I conclude with a final data set that – the case is made – presents an imperative to allow these volunteers to have their perspectives on historical and contemporary North–South relations recognized as a critical mode of global citizenship.