Amid concerns of increased populist right-wing movements in Europe and the US, this dissertation research uncovers a core contradiction at the heart of modern nation-states: the ethnic underpinnings of the “civic nation.” In recent years, nativist and ultra-nationalist movements opposing immigration have gained popularity in Western democracies. These movements draw on “hard” boundaries such as race or religion to exclude “others” from the “nation.” However, sociological research on the nation has consistently found that most people in Western countries publicly oppose these ideas and embrace civic conceptions of the nation. At the same time, research on immigrants' experiences in these same countries suggests that “civic” conceptions of the nation may be much more exclusionary than what survey research has shown. To reconcile this tension in the nationalism and immigration integration literature, I label the mismatch between people’s stated preferences and their actual behaviors as “colorblind ethnocentrism.” By analyzing the extent to which nations are imagined to be racially restrictive by their inhabitants, my research offers a new understanding of national identity that has consequences for the integration of non-white groups into Western societies. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I analyze the way that the category of “nation” is socially constructed, and in what ways this social construction overlaps with the socially constructed category of “race,” particularly in countries where “race” does not exist as a state-sanctioned classificatory system (unlike the US). Finally, I use these theoretical insights to reframe a classic debate in political economy and show that natives' normative understandings about national belonging moderate the way that non-White populations are perceived as an outside group and a threat to economic redistribution. This dissertation combines novel methodology from political science with advanced statistical analysis as well as qualitative content analysis research to investigate (1) the role of ancestry, and race in defining the imagined community, (2) the ways that race and nation are empirically related, and (3) to what extent different ideas of the “nation” mediate the relationship between increased racial diversity and decreased support for redistribution. Building on previous work, in chapter 1, I consider the “nation” as a cognitive category used to create social distinctions between those who “belong” in the nation-state and those who do not. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in representative samples across France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, I challenge the long-standing assumption in the literature that the dominant conception of the “nation” in the West is based on inclusive and civic symbolic boundaries. I show that the most important characteristic across all country contexts for natives when making decisions about who is and is not a member of the nation is their ancestry: whether a given profile's parents and grandparents were all born in the country or not. I also find that people who answer in surveys that ancestry is important to be truly national in fact are espousing a racial and religious preference for White and Christian nationals. Then, I show how this colorblind ethnocentrism affects symbolic integration of non-white profiles with immigrant backgrounds. Finally, I find that racial preferences in who belongs in the nation are the most pronounced in continental Europe, where “race” is not an institutionalized categorization system (i.e. countrieswhere racial statistics and “race” is taboo). This provides some evidence in favor of my theory that countries that do not have an available discourse around race tend to use “nation” as a proxy for it. I further investigate the origins of this discrepancy in the next chapter. In chapter 2, I leverage a drastic change in curriculum in the mid-1990s in Spain that led to the sudden and (almost) complete removal of racial vocabulary from social-science textbooks to explore what happens to the construct of race once racial language has been removed. Through my analysis of 82 textbooks from 1975 to 2017, I find that a racial classification system was replaced by one based on cultural categories. Yet, far from moving away from essentialist beliefs about human nature, culture continues to reproduce the social hierarchies previously associated with phenotype. Because the books present culture as a scientifically valid classification system, the use of culture legitimizes and entrenches those same beliefs in racial differences, while creating a new double meaning for cultural categories (often “national cultures” or “nation”), i.e. its purported meaning and a short-hand for “race”. In chapter 3, I follow up on a question that emerged from my textbookstudy: to what degree do Europeans believe (or not) in biological racial differences? I find that people in Europe hold racist beliefs at similar rates to the United States. I also show that an under-studied source of variation across countries is the differences within a country between the proportion of people who believe in one racial belief but not another. In my final chapter, I investigate the consequences of this racialized “imagined community” for support for welfare in contexts of increased immigration. In this chapter, I shift the focus of attention from “immigrants” to “natives.” I argue that the well-documented reduction of native support for redistribution in the presence of immigrants is moderated by how strongly the natives imagine the “nation” as racially white. Using survey and census data from 30 European countries and 270 regions, I show that the negative association between the share of immigration and support for welfare is driven by those who imagine the nation in racial terms. Moreover, I show that ethnic nationalists’ support for welfare policies is only sensitive to non-European foreign-born immigration, not European foreign-born immigration. This suggests that racism, more than xenophobia, is the mechanism behind the withdrawal of solidarity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of implications and directions for future research.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference in the enjoyment, interest, perceived learning, and achievement levels of third grade students when social studies and science units were presented as interrelated subject units versus separate subject units. Eight units in social studies and science were chosen. Four of these units were selected at random to be presented as interrelated subject units and four to be presented as separate subject units. Interrelated units used the social studies or science topic as a core, and lessons in other subjects such as language arts, math, music, and art were related to this basic topic. Separate subject units focused on the particular topic of the unit and were not intentionally related to other subjects in curriculum. An attitude questionnaire and achievement test were administered as posttests after each unit. The results of the tests for matched pairs indicated a significant difference in the levels of enjoyment, interest, perceived learning, and achievement for the two types of units. It was concluded that the 28 third grade students taught using interrelated subject units showed a significantly higher level of enjoyment, interest, perceived learning, and achievement than the same group when taught using separate subject units.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of three different types of in-service or preservice training on the attitudes of sixth-grade teachers in selected Texas school districts toward the "new" social studies. The types of preparation compared are the following: completion of a social studies methods course within the last two years, attendance at a social studies in-service training session at least three hours in length within the past year, a major or minor in one of the social science disciplines, or combinations of these. Additional variables such as age, teaching experience, classroom organization, degrees held, and textbooks being used are also considered. Three hundred twenty-four respondents from thirteen school districts completed a two-part questionnaire. Part A seeks biographical, educational, and experiential information. Part B contains thirty-nine statements about social studies education to which the participants respond on a six-point Likert-type scale. Data are treated with a one-way analysis of variance, and hypotheses are retained or rejected at the .05 level of significance. When a significant F-ratio is found on data having more than two groups, the Fisher's t for multi-type comparisons is applied to determine where the significant differences occur.

This dissertation study examined how teachers in four newcomer schools conceptualized and implemented social studies education for newcomer Latino/a youth. I designed this multi-site, collective case study to examine the perspectives and decision making of four social studies teachers' enacted pedagogy for Latino/a newcomer students. I documented how social studies teachers (U.S. History and Global History) were teaching Latino/a newcomer youth within urban newcomer high schools through the research question: how do four secondary teachers conceptualize and implement social studies education for newcomer Latino/a youth? As evidenced in their culturally and linguistically relevant pedagogy, teachers in this study provided constant support, encouragement, and opportunity for Latino/a newcomer students to succeed academically, and encouraged active civic engagement by using students' cultural, linguistic, and civic knowledge and experiences as central to their pedagogy. I analyzed the findings within and across four case studies to develop an emerging grounded theory of culturally and linguistically relevant citizenship education. This developing grounded theory analyzed the intersections of culturally relevant pedagogy, linguistically responsive teaching, and active and engaged citizenship. These intersections and cross-case analysis of the four teachers' social studies pedagogy for newcomer Latino/a students developed five principles of culturally and linguistically relevant citizenship education. These principles included: pedagogy of community, pedagogy of success, pedagogy of making cross-cultural connections, pedagogy of building a language of social studies, and pedagogy of community-based, participatory citizenship. This study has the potential to add to and expand on the discourse regarding social studies pedagogy for culturally and linguistically diverse students (Ladson-Billings, 1995b; Lucas and Villegas, 2011), newcomer schools (Short and Boyson, 2000), English Language Learners (Cruz and Thornton, 2009), and citizenship education for newcomer youth (Salinas, 2006). Possibilities for future research might include examining how Latino/a immigrant students' cultural and linguistic experiences influence their perceptions of social studies and how they conceptualize citizenship. Furthermore, additional research might also explore how the findings in this study may be used to develop a more culturally and linguistically responsive teacher education program, create professional development opportunities for in-service teachers, and examine how elementary teachers and teachers in rural/suburban contexts conceptualize their social studies pedagogy for immigrant youth.

Instructional time for social studies in elementary classrooms has decreased since the passage of Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind, with content contracted to align with reading goals. Consequently, opportunities for preservice teachers to observe and teach social studies lessons have diminished. This qualitative multiple case study examines the practices that preservice teachers develop and apply in making decisions concerning social studies curriculum. Three elementary level preservice teachers who had, or were earning, another degree in addition to their degree in education were participants in the study. The study offers insights into three research questions: 1) How do preservice elementary teachers construct an understanding of the teachings of social studies? 2) What knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes do preservice teachers draw upon as they make decisions about social studies teaching? and 3) How do preservice teachers reflect upon and revise their own teaching of social studies? Data from student-produced texts, interviews, classroom observations, a focus group, and researcher memos were analyzed using an inductive approach drawing on Charmaz's Constructing Grounded Theory (2010) and situational analysis (Clarke,2005). Five factors intersected for each participant in constructing their understandings of social studies instruction: academic background, learning preferences, beliefs and attitudes regarding education, a conception of the teacher's role, and aspects of college coursework in education. The participants' academic background, knowledge of students' prior learning, content standards, curriculum emphasis at school sites, and beliefs about purposes for social studies shaped their decisions about social studies instruction. Each participant reflected on technical aspects of lessons primarily using descriptive language. Reflection considering multiple perspectives and the social and historical contexts for lessons occurred when the participants had academic backgrounds related to social studies fields, or when there were multiple lessons related around a topic. In these cases, reflections demonstrated greater depth and complexity. Participants' opportunities to revise lessons varied. In general, the findings suggest that when background knowledge was related to social studies fields, preservice teachers found alternative ways to approach subject matter and multiple occasions to integrate social studies. This study has implications for the coursework and practicum components of preservice teacher education. / Graduation date: 2012

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published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, there have been several turning points in South African education. One of the key changes has been the conception of Social Sciences (SS) – a learning area under the National Curriculum Statement of 2002. The structure of SS has undergone a significant change with regard to evolving from Human and Social Sciences (HSS) to its current state – SS. The DoE claims that the SS curriculum is the result of integration – a concept which has been widely accepted in the international community. The aim of this study was to investigate the views and pedagogy of SS teachers with reference to the concept of integration. I engaged in qualitative research and employed the interpretivist paradigm when analysing my data. Research instruments included semi-structured interviews, a picture identification session and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of key SS policy documents which inform SS pedagogy. Data were analysed through the method of open-coding. The study concluded that integration has a multitude of meanings, and the conceptualisation and implementation of it differs from teacher to teacher. Integration has now become a generic concept which can be applied to socio-political, economic, educational and environmental spheres of the SS curriculum. For this reason I argue that the SS curriculum may not be foregrounded by the concept of integration, but rather an alternate disciplinary collaboration/s such as interdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity. The different disciplinary collaborations has been investigated and applied to the SS curriculum within the South African educational context. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Edgewood, 2011.

The Texas high school class of 2005 faced a defining test that had no precedent in Texas and little nationally. Social studies testing is a relatively new addition to the world of high stakes testing currently impacting United States high schools. Although other diploma dependent areas of mandated testing have some testing history and, therefore, related paradigms for curriculum and instructional assistance, the area of social studies largely lacks that perspective. Texas Education agency provided specific school grant monies and training for the purpose of preparation for the social studies exams. This quasi-experimental study examines the scores to learn whether or not any statistically significant differences in social studies scores would exist between the schools that participated in the TEKS/Tools Training Program and the schools that did not participate in the TEKS/Tools Training Program. The two primary at-risk groups in Texas, Hispanic and low SES, were analyzed for statistically significant differences in scores. Independent t tests and ANCOVA were used to analyze the score differences between program schools and non-program schools. Results relate to individual school staffing and implementation. The at-risk groups remained flat in score gains whether they were part of the program schools or not. Results relate to differences in learning and teaching for at risk groups. A separate trend analysis was used on the program target school which was the only school with three years of scores to determine improvement from grade 9 to 10 to 11 on the social studies TAKS test scores. Results from the repeated measures analysis indicated a statistically significant linear trend in the program target school's TAKS social studies mean gain scores across the 9th, 10th, and 11th grade levels.