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 this article, the authors highlight four children’s picture books that can be used to discuss gender diversity with young children in social studies.

Two early childhood researchers from a local public university, have been visiting Mrs. Ball’s kindergarten classroom in a small, rural elementary school in the Midwest to read books and discuss characters’ identities. In this article, the authors share stories of how they laid the foundation for these conversations and others like it through intentional pedagogical considerations starting at the beginning of the school year.

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.