Handouts for lesson described in "Teaching Difficult Knowledge of World War II in the Philippines with Children’s Literature and Inquiry" by Sohyun An

A number of education theorists propose that promoting civic engagement in classrooms is essential to supporting children in learning how to participate in shaping decisions that affect their lives. Müge Olğun Baytaş and Stephanie Schroeder examine civic education with younger students and note that early childhood and elementary educators can take a leading role in fostering civic engagement and agency with even the youngest of children. The authors share an approach where children’s literature can be used to introduce young children to the concept of citizenship as active civic and…

Since the mainstream U.S. history curriculum often excludes Asian Americans’ struggles and resilience, many educators in the United States struggle to teach this subject. In particular, few studies explore how elementary social studies teachers use culturally relevant pedagogy to help Asian American students analyze and critique anti-Asian violence. This article addresses the gap.

Melanie McCormick and Alycia West implore educators to engage in thoughtful conversations about transnational adoption in “Seen but not Seen: Supporting Transracial and Transnational Adoptees in the Classroom.” The authors draw on their stories of growing up as transracial and transnational adoptees as well as their research on children’s literature on adoption to provide instructional guidelines and resources for teachers to teach about transnational adoption.

The one-page blueprint known as the Inquiry Design Model helps teachers outline essential elements of inquiry-based instruction and enables them to plan inquiry experiences for students.

In this article, the authors share how children’s literature can be used to center the contributions of Asian Americans to the ongoing work of civil rights activism while disrupting harmful/racist stereotypes about Asian 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. 

On a blustery day in March 2021, a line of bundled-up, masked first graders walked from school to a house on the National Register of Historic Places in their south Minneapolis neighborhood. For these 23 young learners, it wasn’t just a walk. This Covid-era field trip was a culminating activity in a series of lessons, “Unearthing Histories,” that empowered the students to be historians, dig into their complex local history, and then take action to help create a more just future.

This article and accompanying pullout describes a process for developing inquiry projects, based on the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), for students in grades K-2. In this article, he provides examples from preservice teachers that show that the process can lead to high-quality social studies teaching in primary grades.