“Algunas personas aquí han venido con coyote como Areli?”: Conceptualizing the Latine civic counternarrative through diverse children’s literature

At the center of a marginalizing curriculum are deliberate attempts to diminish narratives that reflect diverse communities and the intrinsic relationship between culture and citizenship. Diverse c...

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Child-focused civics: Seeing civic action in young children’s everyday interactions

Schools are tasked with preparing children to become engaged citizens, and yet children already act civically every day. To see how young children in preschool settings do civic action (i.e. acting...

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Critical historical inquiry: A meta-ethnography of researcher frameworks, 2000–2022

This article seeks to describe a critical historical inquiry (CHI) based on a systematic review of articles reporting on empirical field studies published between 2000 and 2022. During that period,...

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Representation matters, but so does data: A 15-year assessment of the assumed “demographic imperative” in the social studies teaching force

This study examines the demographic imperative in the field of K-12 social studies education, focusing on the composition of social studies teachers in the United States over 15 years (2007–2021). ...

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TRSE Doctoral Student Mentorship Program, 2025-2026

TRSE is committed to mentoring the next generation of social studies scholars by involving them in the manuscript review process. TRSE has a unique mentorship program, started by Dr. Wayne Journell, w...

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Journell Goodbye Editor Letter

Dear Colleagues, Today marks my last day as editor of Theory & Research in Social Education. It has been an honor to be able to serve the field in this role for the past nine years (plus two addition...

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Commemorating difficult history in schools: Affective strategies of Greek-Cypriot teachers on the 50th anniversary of the 1974 war

This study investigates the affective strategies employed by Greek-Cypriot teachers when engaging with the emotionally charged history of the 1974 war—commonly referred to in the Greek-Cypriot comm...

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Navigating “big feelings” in teaching and learning difficult histories: Pedagogical reasoning about students’ emotional potentialities

This qualitative study describes how seven middle-level and secondary social studies teachers engaged in pedagogical reasoning and decision-making in anticipation of students’ emotional potentialit...

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Deliberative dialogues with preservice teachers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and South Africa using a gradient of controversy approach

Classroom dialogue on controversial issues in post-conflict contexts is widely advocated but very difficult to achieve. This article examines a gradient of controversy approach to deliberative dial...

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Refining criteria for civic inquiry: An analysis of inquiry design model lessons

The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) is a lesson-planning framework designed to implement inquiry for social studies educators as conceived in the C3 Framework. For this study, we drew on scholarly liter...

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Toward a more empathic, connected, and humanizing democracy: A civics curriculum centering listening and storytelling

Drawing on surveys, classroom observations, student work, focus groups, and teacher interviews, this case study explores features and impacts of a novel civics curriculum centering empathic listeni...

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ToponomiCrit: A theory for decolonization and dewhitesupremacization

Drawing on a range of critical theories (e.g. Critical Toponomy, Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Spatial Analysis), this article serves to advance a theory of “ToponomiCrit,” which embodies res...

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“Discussions on another spectrum”: Q pedagogy and high-quality discussions

This study examines Q pedagogy—an innovative approach to discussion-based teaching—to promote discussion in a graduate-level social studies research course. The study explores how graduate-level te...

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The Nakba in Israeli history education: Ethical judgments in an ongoing conflict

The Nakba, which means “the catastrophe” in Arabic, is the most controversial historical topic in Israeli history education. Despite the Nakba’s significance to the history of Israel and the ongoin...

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(Un)critical geographies of race: A critical race discourse analysis of an online local history resource

Websites that provide accounts of local history represent powerful curricular possibilities for K-12 history teachers and those of all ages who engage with historical narratives centered on place. ...

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Relation and emotion in antiracist pedagogies: Social studies teachers encounter the legacy sites

This article charts the experiences that emerged as part of a two-day workshop in Montgomery, Alabama at the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Sites that took place in the spring of 2023. In ...

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“My thinking has changed but beliefs have not”: Motivated reasoning in learning to teach abortion

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, social studies education has remained startlingly silent on the topic of abortion. In this design-based research study, we present a qualitative analy...

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Theory & Research in Social Education

Volume 53, Issue 1 of Theory & Research in Social Education

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NCSS Exemplary Research Award

Award Purposes The Exemplary Research Award recognizes scholarship with the potential to significantly impact and/or transform social studies education research and practice.

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Whose historical thinking? Representation of women in the Digital Inquiry Group’s Reading Like a Historian world history curriculum

This study reports on a content and discourse analysis of the Digital Inquiry Group’s world history Reading Like a Historian educative curriculum. History curriculum has a powerful influence on how...

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Episode 211: Arts Integrated Historical Empathy with Jason Endacott

In episode 211, Dan and Michael chat with Jason Endacott about his article published in Theory & Research in Social Education, “Arts integrated historical empathy: Preservice teachers’ engageme…

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The social studies discourse instrument: Validating an observation tool for classroom discussions

This article introduces the Social Studies Discourse Instrument (SSDI), a novel observation tool for capturing whole-class discussions in social studies. This tool assesses three domains of classro...

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Learning to be fellow inquirers: Exploring students’ critical learning activity in an eighth-grade U.S. history classroom

In this article, we argue that social studies education research has yet to capture the practicality of social transformation as outlined by critical pedagogy. We use neo-Vygotskian scholarship to ...

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Black teachers in white spaces: Rupturing reproductions of Anti-Blackness in preservice social studies education

While states, educational agencies, and colleges of education across the United States seek to recruit more Black social studies teachers, the authors of this study—two former social studies teache...

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Black teachers in white spaces: Rupturing reproductions of Anti-Blackness in preservice social studies education

While states, educational agencies, and colleges of education across the United States seek to recruit more Black social studies teachers, the authors of this study—two former social studies teache...

doi.org

Baudrillard, hyperreality, and the ‘problematic’ of (mis/dis)information in social media

This conceptual article deconstructs (mis/dis)information via social media as a philosophical problematic: A matrix that consists of distinct but intertwined problems. Social media education is a p...

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