In their article, Beau Dickerson and Emma Thacker provide counternarratives to traditional Civil Rights Movement instruction. Their IDM and classroom examples highlight young people’s agency, resilience, and dreams for the future.

An inquiry approach to studying the 1940s Mendez racial segregation case can counter a narrative that centers the triumph of heroes and instead prompt students to explore larger issues related to colorism, racism, and language segregation.

Reading A Song for the Unsung with elementary students can provide an excellent entry point into an engaging lesson on the civil rights movement.

In “Teaching beyond Curricular Certainty: Telling Bayard Rustin’s Story to Kindergarteners” and the associated pullout “Documents for Telling Bayard Rustin’s Story to Kindergarteners,” Corey R. Sell, Dorothy Shapland, Caroline Klein-Callea, and Melanie Ernst look beyond focusing primarily on Martin Luther King Jr. and other celebrated Black Americans. 

In this piece, the authors unpack a heuristic developed by the Great First Eight curriculum for helping young children to recognize and act on injustice.

In this article, the authors share how a third-grade teacher supported students in crafting and researching their own inquiry questions using a process known as the Question Formulation Technique to scaffold students’ development of supporting questions. Hughes and Heckart provide the reader with suggestions and resources for supporting student-initiated inquiry. 

The authors highlight two first-grade teachers who teach in New York City. Using a read-aloud, they explore differences between equity and equality and then engage children in a real-world scenario that engages concepts of fairness when allocating resources to disparate groups of people. 

In this article, the author examines how the New York State Social Studies Resource Toolkit  supports argument discourse in social studies and then explores a primary teacher’s curricular and instructional decisions regarding the development of children’s argumentation skills. The study provides insights into how teachers can involve some of our youngest students in authentic, inquiry-based social studies learning that fosters argument discourse.

Resources from NCSS Journals to help you teach about Hispanic heritage during Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15 to October 15. */

The authors provide an overview of teaching war and explore ways to situate these notions in the elementary classroom. As part of this discussion, they offer a guide for selecting appropriate texts for a thematic text set for children involving issues of war and peace.