The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards calls upon social studies teachers to enhance the rigor of civics, economics, geography, history and the other social studies disciplines while building the critical thinking, problem solving, and participatory skills of students to help them become actively…

NCSS Executive Director Susan Griffin was chair of the Task Force of Professional Organizations that worked with the Social Studies Assessment, Curriculum, and Instruction Collaborative (SSACI) of the Council of Chief State School Officers to initiate and guide the development of the "College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social…

On September 17, 2013 (Constitution Day), the C3 Framework was released under the title "The College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History." The C3 Project Director and lead writer was NCSS member Kathy Swan, who is…

Technological change has proven one of the few constants of the early 21st century, providing social studies educators with the challenge and opportunity of preparing digital citizens in a global setting. This requires rethinking the type of social studies learning necessary in the 21st century. As the National Academies concluded in the…

At every stage in the nation's history, the next generation must be deliberately educated to be active and responsible citizens. That is always a complex and challenging task, but the challenges differ as the context evolves. Today, students and teachers of civics face special barriers as well as unusual opportunities. For one thing, national…

Like many who entered the teaching profession in the 1970s, the author entered a profession that was in transition. Over the more than 30 years she spent in the classroom, the author has had a front row seat during this evolution. It has been a roller coaster ride at times, but she believes our schools will emerge stronger for it. Who we teach,…

Twenty-five years ago the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) held its conference in Chicago. The president of NCSS that year, and the last New Yorker to hold this office, was Donald Bragaw, who was the head of the Social Studies Bureau of the New York State Education Department. In this article, the author shares the salient points of…

Since education reform efforts have long focused on reading and mathematics, the social studies classroom has been a target of remedial services--with children being removed from social studies to gain additional support in reading and math. As a result, many children spend years in school with little to no exposure to the social studies, despite…

There is ample evidence that Confucianism is undergoing a multi-faceted revival in contemporary China. This can be seen in government slogans, in a runaway best seller on the "Analects" (the compendium of Confucius's teachings), in educational experiments, and in academic activities. The twentieth century was a bad century for Confucianism. In…

The world has changed rapidly since the end of the Cold War. Globalization demands a much higher intellectual standard of people in a country. At the same time, the trend toward pluralistic cultures in many countries has lessened confrontations among peoples of different ideologies. Compared with the twentieth century, in this new era, the peoples…

Recent research on civic learning shows that students' civic identity--the sense of who they are in relation to the nation--is shaped by their lived experiences. Yet, efforts to integrate civic learning into the social studies curriculum do not generally build on this notion. A high school U.S. history course was developed to test this very idea.…

National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) first published national curriculum standards in 1994. Since then, the social studies standards have been widely and successfully used as a framework for teachers, schools, districts, states, and other nations as a tool for curriculum alignment and development. However, much has changed in the world…

Feminist practices can provide firm theoretical grounding for the kind of social studies that scholars promote, especially in relation to efforts to include women in the curriculum. However, in P-12 social studies education, neither women nor feminism receive much attention. The study described in this article was a discourse analysis of 16…

Recent education literature and research has focused on identifying effective core teaching practices to inform and help shape teacher education and professional development. Although a rich literature on the teaching and learning of history has continued to develop over the past decade, core practice research has largely overlooked…

Amid the recent proliferation of teacher-led movements resisting high-stakes testing across the United States, the authors identify how a "failing" elementary school reclaimed local discourse by taking political action against top-down measures. Framed as competing modes of school reform, the authors offer the sociocultural framework of…