Young people tend to witness and experience the ubiquitous nature of conflicts that emanate from dominant socio-political, economic, and cultural forces and often tend to shape school practices. In this study, I listened to the voices of students who attend schools that aspire to resist this socialization for conflict through their focus on peace education. The research questions that guided my study are, ‘In this world of conflict, how are young people imagining, engaging, and enacting a peaceful world?’ which is complemented with a question on, ‘How are middle school students interacting with notions of peace and conflict as they make meaning of their social worlds?’ Inspired by a methodological approach of youth participatory action research (YPAR), 12 students across two schools in New Delhi, India, participated in a YPAR process across 13 virtual sessions, which were held twice weekly. Guided by a critical peace education and critical hope framework, I found that despite living in a world that is embedded in conflict, these young people move beyond despair and offer hope and possibilities for imagining, engaging with, and enacting a peaceful world. With an orientation to peace, these young people illuminate their imaginations of peace, which help us to think about ways in which we can live as peaceful beings characterized by harmonious co/existence with the self, one another, and the environment. Living in this world of conflict, these young people do demonstrate an awareness of existing conflict, and their engagement with conflict also tends to take them back to a place of peace. Starting from and returning to a place of peace could contribute towards building a peaceful world.

Overlapping and entangled crises that comprise and propel society require near constant (re)orientation in order to understand, explain, and address the workings of a multiplicitous world. For those invested in education, this means confronting complexity through the prism of teaching and learning. Educational scholars across fields and disciplines have sought to name, describe, and make sense of this complexity. Many do so in ways that recognize the difference between recent events and cycles of change that have come before. In other words, they engage in inquiry with a recognition that a convergence of factors produces this moment as different, and thus requires difference in approach to understanding. Building on recent scholarship in posthumanism and social studies education, this dissertation draws upon foundational texts in posthumanism, poststructuralism, and new materialism to re-orient understanding of how social studies teachers learn in the posthuman convergence. In particular, this inquiry explores what happens when social studies teachers are confronted by potentially destabilizing content during professional learning experiences located in a university setting. Considering how learning unfolds in and through complexity, this study examines how the intersecting, overlapping, and nested contexts of the inquiry, within the broader context of the posthuman convergence, intervene in professional learning experiences and shape the ways in which collective and individual learning (un)/(re)fold. Employing transqualitative methods, this dissertation explores the material-discursive entanglements that constitute social studies teacher professional learning. Transqualitative research is a hybrid of traditional qualitative research design and critical qualitative methods that seeks to disrupt the traditional qualitative focus on the human experience and embrace a posthuman perspective in research design and methodology. Data includes ethnographic participant observation field notes, photographs, artifacts, individual and group interviews, spatial maps, and analytic memos. Resisting settled findings, this project (re)orients understanding through disclosing provocations meant to support thinking differently about how social studies teachers learn in highly complex contexts. As such, this dissertation strives to help map the complicated terrain that teachers are currently navigating, while informing those invested in supporting teacher learning in the current challenging environment.

The purpose of the present investigation is to make a study of the growth and trends of the social studies curriculum in the schools of Texas from pioneer days up to the present time, 1948.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of two methods of teaching the social studies to junior high school pupils. An attempt has been made to ascertain the relative progress in the studying efficiency of a group of children in social studies taught by the basic-study-skills plan, as compared to that of a group of children taught by the assign-study-recite-test plan so commonly employed.

The problem undertaken in this survey was to determine the value of motion pictures in the social-studies program of the elementary school, with special emphasis upon the learning and retention of facts and general information related to the social studies at the sixth-grade level.

The problem of this study is to determine, if possible, whether any significant difference in achievement existed when the eighth-grade social studies were taught by two methods; namely, the textual method and the textual method supplemented by audio-visual aids.

The major purpose of this study was to compare the progress made by a group of children taught by the experience method of teaching with a group taught by the old textbook method, to determine whether the experimental group would show as much gain in academic knowledge as the control group, and in turn gain the other desired traits of the present-day personal and social needs.

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to read and analyze professional literature to determine criteria for an adequate social-studies program in an elementary grade, and (2) to evaluate a selected number of courses of study of large-city school systems and state departments of education to determine the extent to which they meet criteria.

The purpose of this study is to examine courses of study for social studies in the fourth grade, and after analyzing the objectives, methods, and the materials of each, to decide whether they meet the criteria prescribed in educational literature.

The problem is to determine how a philosophy of democracy can be translated into democratic action in teaching social studies in the senior high school.