In this article, the authors consider the use of a “Playlist of My Life Assignment” in helping social studies (SS) and English language arts (ELA) teacher candidates (TCs) conceptualize multimodal and humanizing SS and ELA curricula. The Playlist Assignment asked teacher candidates to center the music, texts, land, spaces, and places that are most important to them, and potentially relate these back to their own pedagogies as SS and ELA teachers. Taken from two qualitative studies of two teacher education courses (...) at two separate, large research universities in the U.S. Southwest, this article examines teacher candidates’ understandings of their disciplines as humanizing and multimodal, and as centered in their and their students’ communities, through the Playlist Assignment. Data included the Playlist Assignment, curated by TCs in each methods course, and TCs’ class response journals. TCs offered profound texts they carried within them throughout their lives, demonstrating (1) their multimodal disruptions of the definition of a “text” and (2) the empowering and limiting effect of life texts for humanizing curricula. This work has implications for SS and ELA teacher educators interested in supporting teacher candidates as they conceptualize multimodal and humanizing curricula with and for their future students. (shrink)

Social studies scholars consider the role that schools, and in particular teachers, play in preparing young students to be active participatory citizens in a democracy. Yet, the research on teachers learning to be democratic teachers overwhelmingly focuses on the social studies methods course rather than field experiences. This study examines how teacher candidates experienced, conceptualized, and enacted democratic education while immersed in a semester-long elementary field experience in a democratic classroom. In particular, this paper focuses on two case studies which (...) represent the most clear, as well as disparate, conceptions and enactments of democratic education; one engaged in a critical examination of society through curriculum, while the other focused on the inculcation of particular discussion and deliberation skills necessary to be an engaged democrat. While each classroom afforded the teacher candidates a thick conception of democratic education that drew on critical curriculum and pedagogy, as well as democratic skills, the teacher candidates' lived experiences and prior conceptions of democracy shaded their learning and created missed learning opportunities. Classrooms as sites of knowledge about democratic education provide robust learning opportunities for teacher candidates; however, like any transformative learning experience, those opportunities need mediation to realize their full potential. (shrink)

Scholars have argued elementary social studies is uniquely suited to build a foundation of critical knowledge of race and racism with young children (e.g. Bolgatz, 2005, 2007; Wills, 2005 ). To build this foundation, we must more deeply examine the materials, such as picture books, that are used in early classrooms. This research is a qualitative content analysis of one set of picture books: the neighborhood books of Caldecott award winner Ezra Jack Keats. Drawing on Goldberg's (1993) theory of racialized (...) discourse and Neely and Sumatra's (2011) theory on racialized space, this research analyzes the racialized fictional space of Keats's neighborhood, and contextualizes the texts within broader socio-historical racial discourse. The author argues Keats's texts racialize neighborhood space through the characters’ relationships with each other, their interaction with the space, and the physical depiction of the setting. This research contributes to a growing movement toward addressing race and racism in elementary social studies by demonstrating how scholars, teachers, and students may interrogate picture books as transmitters of racial knowledge and history. (shrink)

Based on a national social studies survey that included over 10,000 respondents from 44 states, this study examined the emphasis on diversity of religious view (EDRV) in public school P-12 social s...