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A team of five researchers set out to document pre-service teachers’ experiences interviewing elementary-aged children about social studies topics. Nearly 200 pre-service teachers across three universities participated in this longitudinal study. Collected data include: course readings, syllabi, and pre-service teachers’ History Through a Child’s Eye essays. Themes from the data include: pre-service teachers’ understanding of multiple perspectives, integration of digital primary sources, and development of historical evidences based upon evidences.

This article highlights some of the experiences of elementary students learning to use primary sources to engage in historical inquiry. Two teacher educators developed and taught social studies lessons in collaboration with 5^th and 6^th grade teachers. The elementary students had little previous experience evaluating primary sources and artifacts. Using both digital and non-digital sources, the students began to understand historical perspective and use historical evidence as the basis of their conclusions. However, difficulties were encountered during lessons using artifacts to understand historical events. The article presents descriptive evidence and the lessons we learned as educators.

We share developing understandings from a self-study in which two university-based teacher educators worked with Indigenous Pueblo community members, teachers, and educational assistants to integrate Indigenous culture, heritage, and language into PK-12 Pueblo classrooms. We found that our collaborative endeavors (between Pueblo educators and the two of us) are resulting in culturally relevant and culturally responsive curriculum being developed and implemented. By our stepping aside from our traditional and Western positions as teacher educators to positions of supporters, the cultural experts (the Pueblo language teachers) took the lead and grew in their capacities as educators. This work has had a transcendent impact on both of us. The significance of this self-study is framed within working with diverse educators who teach PK-12 Indigenous students and within our development as teacher educators working in an institution that places more value on Western knowledge and less value, in practice, on Indigenous knowledge.

In this chapter, we introduce readers to the volume, a collection of 13 inquiries that employ the methodology of self-study in teacher education practices (S-STEP) in culturally and linguistically diverse settings across the globe. After sharing the purpose and origins of the project, we provide an overview of the volume’s organization and brief summaries for each study. As a whole, the collection addresses two pressing yet interrelated challenges in teacher education research: understanding teacher educator development over the career span and how these scholar-practitioners prepare teachers for an increasingly diverse, mobile, and plurilingual world.

High school student achievement in economics has been predominantly characterized by low test scores, while secondary social studies preservice teachers have less formal training in economics than most other social studies disciplines. In this self-study, the instructional affordances and constraints of an experimental economics methods course are analyzed in terms of developing secondary social studies preservice and inservice teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in economics from both the instructor and pre and inservice teachers’ perspectives. Two course assignments appeared to most notably develop PCK in economics, the Analysis of Economic Events and the Active-Learning, Interdisciplinary Economic Lesson. Findings suggest interrelationships exist among common content knowledge, specialized content knowledge, and horizon content knowledge for teaching economics. Implications and instructional suggestions for social studies teacher education and professional development are discussed.

Teacher education reform in the United States has been an ongoing theme over the past 100 years, particularly since A Nation at Risk in the 1980s, when education became increasingly politicized and less of a public good with which the American public did not tinker. These reforms have four different themes: (1) strengthening the clinical component of teacher education, (2) preparing educators with the tools needed for equity and social justice, (3) participating in heightened accountability demands, and (4) expanding alternative certification. This chapter explores these four strands of reform and concludes they are colliding forces in which the country pours time, resources, and energy. Ongoing collisions on the reform landscape produce increasingly negative consequences for teacher education, teacher recruitment, and retention and America's public schools.