In this paper I call for an emotional confrontation with our traumatic, racist, and often unacknowledged history. I share ideas, experiences, and pedagogical strategies with which to engage difficult dialogue about difficult knowledge, in such a way as to disarm defense and, potentially inspire anti-racist activism in education and beyond. The…

"Luminous Literacies" shares examples of teachers and educators using local knowledge to illustrate literacy engagement and curriculum-making through scholarly accounts of experiences in teacher preparation courses, classrooms, and other community spaces in New Mexico. This edited collection includes chapters focusing on the teaching of…

This study was designed to explore preservice elementary teacher understanding of The First Amendment and religious freedom in public schools in the Southeastern United States. Participants of the study were 160 preservice elementary teachers enrolled in the teacher preparation programs of 3 universities across 2 states located in a region…

Examining the connections among teacher characteristics, instructional decision-making, and student learning in social studies education are both complicated and contentious. In the current study, we shed light on middle grades social studies teaching and learning--a black hole of research in the subject area. Using data from the National…

In this article, the authors focus on a one-week research project examining Frederick Douglass's civic actions to challenge racial discrimination African Americans faced before and after the U.S. Civil War. Our one-week research project was implemented at a free public charter school in amid-sized Southern city. Our project connects to the…

In this article, we advocate for integrating select graphic novels into curricula for English language learners and emergent bilinguals to push against the dominant and harmful narratives that tend to be found in traditional history texts and curricula. We use "Vietnamerica" by Tran and "Escape from Syria" by Kullab et al. as…

In schools similar to the one in this study, where over 75 percent of the students were non-White, students come to their classrooms having lived experiences with racism, and yet, in many classrooms, racism is never discussed or it is relegated to the past. This means, in many classrooms, there are White teachers who are unwilling or unable to…

In the Bible, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are said to usher in the end of the world. That is why, in 1964, Judge Ben Cameron gave four of his fellow judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit the derisive nickname "the Fifth Circuit Four"--because they were ending the segregationist world of the Deep…

Background/Context: This study deals with an intersection of educational history, queer history, and labor history involving the activities of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) teachers. The history of LGBT teachers, particularly before the 1990s, has been addressed by only a handful of historians. The prior research most relevant to this study is…

This article explores Alexander von Humboldt's influence on the education of young women in early nineteenth-century America. In the past decade, the English-speaking world has seen a resurgence of interest in Alexander von Humboldt. To date however, scholars have devoted relatively little attention to Humboldt's influence on American education,…

This article explores the ways in which social studies classrooms can explore the history and status of U.S. territories as "unincorporated." We focus on the "Insular Cases" and in particular "Downes v. Bidwell" (1901), examine the construct of colonies as anathema to democracy, and explore the precedents court case…

This article examines the life and work of Mary J. Serrano (1840-1923), a successful translator and popularizer of Spanish literature in late nineteenth-century United States. It provides a short biography of Serrano and focuses on her work for the Spanish Legation in in Washington D.C. during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98), a period of…

Because of a long tradition of children's literature depicting enslavement, elementary teachers have an expansive assortment of books from which to choose. These books, however, can be filled with inaccuracies, troubling illustrations, and dubious interpretations of the "peculiar institution." The recent controversy over "A Birthday…

The "New York Times" Magazine published its "1619 Project" in August 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the landing of the first Africans in the English colony of Virginia. The project is a collection of essays and artwork that argue that the legacy of American slavery can be seen today in areas as disparate as…

In March 1958, a tense six months after the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik I sent a shockwave of fear and purpose through the United States, an essay published in the Franklin Institute (TFI) monthly member newsletter, "The Institute News," opened with an oddly defiant, even dismissive tone ("Sputnik, Teachers &…