Although social justice advocacy is a core competency of counseling psychology training, a lack of formalized training prohibits trainees from engaging in advocacy efforts, specifically at the community and systems-level (Alexander & Allo, 2021). Moreover, prior research has suggested that counseling psychology trainees are feeling ill-equipped to integrate advocacy and macrolevel interventions into their professional roles. Given the limited research on how psychologist educators integrate social justice advocacy into the counseling psychology curriculum and the effectiveness of these teaching strategies (Koch & Juntunen, 2014; Pieterse et al., 2009), this study aimed to explore the pedagogical strategies that prepare trainees to engage in social justice efforts--particularly at the meso- and macro-level. This exploratory consensual qualitative research (CQR) investigation analyzed interview data from 13 counseling psychology faculty members. The study found that the faculty members emphasized community-based and relational learning approaches, which allowed students to critically reflect on their own identities and biases and become more aware of the systemic nature of social injustices. Additionally, the study found that the faculty members utilized a variety of pedagogical tools, including case studies, role-playing, and group discussions, to facilitate students' learning of community and systemic level interventions. The results also examined the challenges that faculty members faced in effectively integrating social justice-oriented content into their courses. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for training and education, professional practice, theory, and policy.

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.

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.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Today's K-12 classrooms are increasingly comprised of students who accomplish much of their informal learning through digital media and technology. In response, a growing number of educators are considering how they might draw upon these informal learning experiences to support student engagement and learning in the classroom through technology. The purpose of this study is for social studies educators, school administrators, teacher educators and curriculum developers to understand more about the potentials and limitations of integrating technology such as a digital text. This research focuses on the differences in experiences using a digital text and a printed text from the perspective of four high school social studies classes. The curriculum for the printed and digital texts was developed in collaboration with the Choices Program for the Twenty-First Century at Brown University. This research was based on the assumption that the thoughtful integration of a digital text in the classroom can support student engagement and differentiation while facilitating learning that students can readily transfer to multiple political, economic and social contexts beyond the classroom. Critically, students of poverty and students of color have the most to gain from increased access to digital technology in the public education system. People of color and people of poverty in the United States have significantly less access to technology at home than their white and middle class counterparts. Therefore, the classroom presents an opportunity for students who lack access to digital learning opportunities in their home environments to develop the technological fluency and digital literacy that are increasingly necessary to engage in multiple political and economic spheres in the United States. The current literature on digital technology in education lacks sufficient empirical evidence of the potential benefits and challenges that digital technologies may offer secondary social studies education from the perspective of the classroom. Therefore, the classroom field test that was undertaken for this research offers a more empirical understanding of digital texts from the important perspectives of students and teachers in the classroom learning community. This research was conducted in a large, suburban high school in the Portland Metropolitan area and compared the experiences of tenth-grade World History classes working with a print text to the experiences of tenth-grade World History classes working digitally. The mixed-methods multiple-case study design addresses the following research questions: a) In what ways, if at all, does a digital text provide high school social studies' students different affordances and academic skills than a printed text? and b) How, if at all, do high school social studies students interact differently with a digital text from a printed text? The analysis of data offered evidence that the use of the digital text supported technological fluency, the creation of more sophisticated learning products, differentiation for multiple learning styles and a more supportive reading experience due to its multimodal features. These unique academic affordances were not equivalently supported by the use of the print text. However, the type of text did not demonstrably influence students' ability to communicate their thinking in analytical writing. The analysis of data also suggested that students were somewhat more cognitively and behaviorally engaged in the digital case studies. Importantly, the digital text did not create a negatively discrepant learning experience for students of color but, rather, supported increased student engagement for both white students and students of color. The data also suggested that the digital text posed significant challenges for both students and teachers. The digital experience required students to learn new and challenging technology skills. The digital text also required more class time and created more classroom management challenges for teachers than the print experience. Despite these additional challenges, both students and teachers expressed a preference for the digital experience. Thus, the digital text seemed to provide both a more challenging and a more rewarding experience for students. This study has implications for educators that are interested in thoughtfully integrating a digital text or, a similar digital technology, in comparable classroom contexts.

Critical examinations of cultural groups and the ways in which they are presented in schools are missing from current elementary and middle school curricula. Issues of this nature often fall under the umbrella of “multicultural education” or “cultural pedagogy,” but this rhetoric is dismissive in nature. Constructing the non-Western child as “culturally deprived,” “culturally disadvantaged,” or “at-risk” perpetuates an “us/colonizer” versus “them/colonized” mentality. The purpose of this study was to examine critically how the Middle East and its people are represented in U.S. social studies textbooks. Through the use of qualitative content analysis, 10 elementary and middle school social studies books from Florida, Texas, and Virginia were analyzed. Drawing largely from the postcolonial Orientalist work of Edward Said (1978/2003), this study unveiled the ways in which American public schools other children, specifically children of Middle Eastern or Arab descent. Othering occurs anytime an institution in power constructs a certain reality for a marginalized group of people.

The general purpose of this project was to enhance the retention of social studies curriculum via internet technology. Specifically, this project involved a webquest about the three branches of government.

In response to the federal legislation No Child Left Behind, schools across the country implemented required reading programs for classroom instruction. Open Court's Reading program meets this criterion for many schools. The text in Open Court Reading for grades two and three was evaluated for science and social science content standards that would be supportive of environmental education. Supplemental lessons from Project Learning Tree, Project WILD, and Project WET were identified.