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.

This study assesses the status of the teaching of contemporary issues in secondary social studies classrooms in four southwest Virginia school divisions. One hundred and sixteen secondary teachers in these school divisions were surveyed concerning their attitudes toward contemporary issues and the instruction of these issues in their social studies classrooms. Mean score results show that the issues that teachers perceived to be most significant to humankind were generally those issues that were given more extensive coverage in the curriculum. Teachers were divided when asked what issues would best be covered in each of the four major secondary subject areas. Each subject area was clearly noted for specific coverage of particular issues, with government classes providing the greatest amount of coverage and world history classes the least amount. A variety of teaching strategies, sources of information, and evaluation strategies were implemented in this instruction. Teachers also detailed what they considered to be major sources of support for the teaching of these issues. Finally, while teachers noted that contemporary issues were detailed in their curricula, they perceived limited coordination among teachers in this instruction. They also reported that more coordination among teachers of different secondary social studies courses should exist. / Doctor of Education

The purpose of this study was to answer an overall question: What is being recommended or required by states regarding social studies skills in actual curricula? The researcher examined curriculum guides to see how the states defined, classified, and organized the skills - determining whether patterns of agreement existed. Materials for the analysis were received from 39 states via letters sent to states' social studies supervisors. The states' materials were content-analyzed using the researcher's "Basic Analysis Process" which included a coding instrument based on the Essentials Of The Social Studies (1980) - a statement by NCSS to enumerate basic learning expectations for exemplary social studies programs. The method of research, the findings of the study, the literature search, and generalizations regarding curriculum guides should interest education professionals, curriculum designers, and researchers in general. The researcher's "Comparative Content Analysis System," which is based on ideas gained from research theory on qualitative study, includes a pretesting component, a "Basic Analysis Process" for the actual content analysis of the states' documents, and a system for collecting and summarizing the findings. Three special appendices illustrate the study's findings: a state by state summary of content analysis information and tables of quantitative data revealing, for example, the most dominant skills cited at specific grade levels. The literature search, which evolved into a history of the social studies skills spanning some 100 years, documented a continued situation of confusion and chaos relative to the skills. The content analysis indicated, in varying degrees, confusion extends into states' curriculum materials as well. An open-ended aspect of the study's design allowed for the emergence of the unexpected --- such as the researcher's findings regarding desirable characteristics of "ideal" curriculum guides. / Ed. D.

The purpose of this study is to develop and to evaluate a community social science program for the seventh grade. The control group was taught in the traditional method, while the experimental group was taught with the community as the basis of all activities.

The purpose of this study is to determine as accurately as possible the needs of adolescents in the junior high school and the extent to which these needs are being met by certain social-studies programs.

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.