The author presents findings from the first phase of a longitudinal, comparative case study that investigates what teachers learn about intellectually demanding social studies teaching at the middle school level from two distinctive teacher education pathways: a specialized middle school teacher education program and a secondary social studies program. The results indicate that these two groups of teachers graduated from their respective teacher education programs having had very different opportunities to learn about teaching social studies at the middle school level; they developed both some strikingly similar conceptions about young adolescents' capabilities in the context of social studies learning as well as some notably different conceptions about what social studies teaching might look like at the middle school level. (Contains 8 tables and 3 notes.)