The value of Black students knowing about their history has been well-established within the scholarly literature on the teaching and learning of African American history. There is a paucity of empirical studies, however, that examine how exposure to this knowledge informs students’ historical and contemporary understandings. Framed by the theory of collective memory, the purpose of this study was to investigate how two teachers’ contrasting representations of African American history shaped student’ understanding of the Black past and its relationship to the experiences of Black Americans today. To examine this, I conducted an ethnographic study at two school sites that each required students to complete a year-long course on African American history. The participants in this study were two groups of Black high school students and their respective African American history teacher. Analysis of data derived from classroom observations, student and teacher interviews and curricular artifacts (e.g., reading materials, handouts, assessments and writing samples) indicate that teachers’ representations of African American history shaped students’ understandings in distinctive ways. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining students’ interpretations of the Black experience in relation to two teachers’ competing narratives on the meaning and significance of African American history. Findings from this study suggest that we must go beyond advocating for inclusion of African American history curricula and work toward ensuring this is being taught in a way that is relevant and meaningful for students. / Urban Education

We live in an increasingly globalized and digitized world where young people spend significant time on social media. This brings both opportunities and challenges. This paper explores, through a scoping review, how social media literacy can be used as a strategy to address these challenges. Research on social media literacy is synthesized and analyzed from a didactic perspective to better understand how social media literacy relates to various dimensions of social studies education. The result highlights several reasons why teachers should integrate social media literacy into their teaching and identifies specific skills that young people need to navigate and interact on social media platforms safely and responsibly. Additionally, the literature´s perspectives on methods for teaching social media literacy and evaluating learning and teaching are presented. Based on this, a number of practical suggestions are discussed for how social media literacy can be integrated into social studies education.

The aim of this study is to examine how teachers can utilize chatbots in education to continue using writing assignments as assessment tools. Through a Scoping review, various strategies are presented by analyzing empirical material based on a SWOT analysis. The study seeks to address the following research questions: How can chatbots be used to enhance teaching and learning in social studies? And What measures are emphasized to prevent potential challenges regarding the relationship between writing assignments and chatbots? The results section of the paper is structured as a categorical overview based on the didactic questions: what, how, and why? Based on the results, eight strategies are identified: Chatbots as co-creators, Student-active exercises, Teacher assistant, Formality tool, Note-taking, Individualized lesson planning, Critical thinking, Reverse search. Overall, all strategies aimed to optimize both students' and teachers' work. From a student perspective, chatbots could serve as a support to individualize the learning process based on the student's own conditions. From a teacher perspective, chatbots could optimize teachers' work and reduce workload. The results indicates that teachers can view chatbots as an additional resource during class time, a brainstorming tool during the planning phase, and an aid through feedback and professional development during the evaluation phase. The results also highlight several potential challenges to consider. The conclusion of this study is that writing assignments can still serve important functions in schools, though in a somewhat different manner than how we typically have employed them historically. Chatbots can serve as a tool to meet the guidelines issued by the Swedish National Agency for Education in the national curriculum for social studies at the high school level. Based on the internal factors presented, there is a need for a willingness to develop and change traditional work methods, and the perception of what writing assignments should generate needs to change. All the strategies presented can either be seen as support during the writing process itself or as a supplementary assessment method for writing assignments. Based on the external factors, it is evident that the entire school as an organization needs to be involved for a successful integration of chatbots into education.

The purpose of this study was to examine how government teachers make decisions regarding the type of technological tools they incorporate in their instruction. As a case study of two teachers, this work was oriented by the question: How are U.S. Government teachers' beliefs and perspectives about learning and teaching reflected in their pedagogical practice and use of technological tools. There is little work about how teachers prepare students for the 21st century. Teaching U.S. Government or about the U.S. government has been ignored in much of the research of social studies classes. Additionally, most studies that examine the use of technological tools in the social studies classroom have either investigated the use of non-digital tools specifically or the use of digital tools specifically. Few studies combine how social studies teachers use both non-digital and digital tools in their instruction. My goal was to shift the gaze and include the swirl of influences shaping U.S. Government teachers' decision-making process as when both types of technological tools are used with their classes. This study has its antecedents in my desire to examine Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, TPCK. TPCK is a theoretical framework that posits that technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge are the key elements to understand teachers' instructional choices. The findings in this study indicate that while TPCK can offer teachers a framework to help begin to understand knowledge bases one could consider when planning class instruction, it falls short of providing the complete picture necessary to describe teacher decisions. / Ph. D.

This study sought to understand how high school social studies teachers identify and evaluate uses of digital technologies to implement in their classrooms. The research was a case study of three teachers guided by the question: What factors and relations shape social studies teachers' uses of digital technologies within a unit of instruction? The research question was intentionally broad to help grasp the factors and relations perceived by the teachers and not ones predetermined by the researcher. For more than thirty years the literature on digital technology use in social studies classrooms has been filled with promises of potential, calls for change in instructional practices with technology, and expressions of frustration when that change does not come. It is still fairly unclear how teachers experience uses of digital technologies and internalize their experiences to form perceptions of best practice with technology. This dissertation looked at how three high school social studies teachers experienced and defined effective technology use and the factors impacting their perceptions. The findings indicate the teachers' pedagogical approach to social studies instruction, their perceptions of their students engagement, technical knowledge, and behavior, and their experiences with the reliability and accessibility of the technology tools available to them were the biggest factors and relations impacting digital technology use in a unit of instruction. Teachers acted as gatekeepers of technology integration through a reliance on defensive teaching tactics limiting student access to digital technology beyond watching presentations and videos. These actions were, in part, due to actions that aligned with implicit racial biases found in other research around how teachers perceive students of color uses of technology. Despite stated beliefs about the desire to engage students with technology, each teacher knowingly chose to focus on using technology for knowledge transmission to meet their ultimate goal of higher SOL test scores. / Doctor of Philosophy / This study sought to understand how high school social studies teachers identify and evaluate uses of digital technologies to implement in their classrooms. The research was a case study of three teachers guided by the question: What factors and relations shape social studies teachers' uses of digital technologies within a unit of instruction? This dissertation looked at how three high school social studies teachers experienced and defined effective technology use and the factors impacting them. The findings indicate the teachers' instructional approach to social studies, their perceptions of their students engagement, technical knowledge, and behavior, and their experiences with the reliability and accessibility of the technology tools available to them were the biggest factors and relations impacting digital technology use in a unit of instruction. Teachers acted as gatekeepers of technology integration through a reliance on limiting student access to digital technology beyond watching presentations and videos. These actions were, in part, due to what aligns with an implicit racial biases found by research around how teachers perceive students of color's uses of technology. Despite stated beliefs about the desire to engage students with technology, each teacher knowingly chose to focus on using technology for knowledge transmission to meet their ultimate goal of higher SOL test scores.

<p dir="ltr">American society’s increase in ethnic textures, interracial tension, immigrants, religion, gender, disability, ability, and students who speak languages other than English as their first language prolongs the pedagogical challenges teachers encounter in the classroom due to diversity. This study explored the experiences of secondary social studies teachers as curricular-instructional gatekeepers implementing culturally responsive pedagogy in times of socio-political tensions in the United States. The teacher as curricular-instructional gatekeeper framework guided this research. By adopting a qualitative multiple-case study, I utilized interviews with four teachers, two hundred hours of classroom observation, and document analysis as data sources. The findings revealed that the social studies gatekeepers’ culturally responsive practices amidst the present socio-political tensions included exposing diverse perspectives to diverse students, leveraging culturally diverse learners’ lived experiences, diversifying instructional methodologies for diverse learners, and confronting stereotypes in a culturally diverse classroom. Moreover, I discovered that present happenings influence culturally responsive practices by presenting difficulty in exposing specific topics to diverse learners, limiting classroom participation for responsive teaching, increasing workload in planning responsive lessons, and becoming a better teacher in a culturally diverse classroom. I recommend that further research should be conducted to explore the role of teacher education programs in preparing pre-service or in-service teachers to implement culturally responsive practices, how the multiple identities of in-service social studies teachers interplay to influence their implementation of culturally responsive practices, and how professional development training offered to in-service social studies teachers prepare them to implement culturally responsive practices amidst the growing legislation in the United States.</p>

Tear gas is a chemical weapon used by the police to put a stop to protests, riots, and other large-scale political actions. It has been employed for over one hundred years, yet our historical and political understanding of the technology is relatively limited. The historical framings of tear gas are dominated by deference to state and military claims and the biomedical literature furthers this one-sided approach to the security technology. At the same time, many groups have fought against tear gas and fought through tear gas as part of the struggle against state politics. The history of tear gas is deeply intertwined with that of policing and questions of state violence against protest movements. A deeper knowledge of tear gas enables us to better understand how and when it is used against protestors as well as how protestors challenge dominant narratives of security. As a scholar of Science, Technology, and Society, I am interested in understanding the sociotechnical elements of tear gas and how it operates within racial capitalism. This dissertation asks, in what ways has tear gas been used as a security technology mobilized to protect the State from political dissidents and what lessons can be learned from how social movement activists challenged the sociotechnical narratives surrounding tear gas? This is a social study of a particular security technology that is used in moments of contestation between State forces (military, police, and weapons industry) and radical social movements. I look at two specific kinds of contestation. The first are historical examples of contestations. That is, the interwar historical context in which tear gas emerges and examples from the 1960s through our contemporary political moment where it is used against social movements. The second is the contested space of biomedical knowledge, which has two major narratives associated with it. On the one hand, mainstream medical literature has examined tear gas using military research labs and military test subjects. This selective research has facilitated claims that tear gas is a "less-lethal" weapon that is practically harmless to those it is used on. On the other hand, social movement activists and street medics who are exposed to it on a regular basis have identified some real concerns surrounding its deployment, thereby challenging claims to its harmlessness. / Doctor of Philosophy / Tear gas is a chemical weapon used by the police to put a stop to protests, riots, and other large-scale political actions. It has been used for over one hundred years, yet our historical and political understanding of the technology is relatively limited. It is a highly controlled weapon, and so the public's access to it is mostly limited to when it's used against crowds of political activists. Our understanding of tear gas' effects on the human body is likewise limited. Most of our understanding comes from a small medical literature that studies military cadets, which does not match the population who often gets tear gassed. This dissertation attempts to intervene in that limited understanding and uses the fact that tear gas is predominantly seen in city streets during protests to explore the back and forth dynamic between activists and the police in the United States. Specifically, I'm interested in how the technology of tear gas and its use by the police tell a story about security in the United States and how activists threaten that security. The first two chapters discuss how the history of tear gas developed the political story of the weapon and the second two chapters look at how medical science has supported this story. Chapter one looks at tear gas' emergence after World War One and tells the story of how it started to be used against political activists in prisons, jails, and against labor unions. Chapter 2 moves to the radical 1960s up through 2020 to look at how tear gas is used today. What's interesting here is how tear gas interacts with media technologies to structure police public relations programs as well as how activists developed new tactics to fight back. Chapter 3 changes directions and examines the small, but influential, medical literature on tear gas to evaluate what mainstream science says about the technology's potential health harms. Chapter 4 looks at what strategies and resources activists have developed to ameliorate tear gas and contrasts it with some of the informational gaps in the mainstream medical literature. The introduction and conclusion of the dissertation look at the big picture story of tear gas and its relationship to the political milieu of the United States.

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.