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This study aims to explore how teachers in a large, diverse district could use a complex adolescent literacy curriculum, and it coincided with the start of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, also a time of great upheaval for this nation. The authors and district partners collaboratively designed document sets that could help students explore socially complex historical topics with discipline-specific reading and writing support. These challenges led to fully virtual PD and redesigned cognitive tools and lesson materials that could be used in a fully distanced learning environment.

PD and data collection were ongoing and iterative, as the authors' goals were to understand variability in teachers' understanding and how the social unrest in the nation and the need for distance learning would influence their application of our curriculum. Data sources included teacher artifacts, interviews and implementation surveys and anonymized student work samples. The third author wrote memos during webinars and district meetings. The authors employed a grounded theory approach to analyze teachers’ evolving understandings of how to teach students to make judgments, their lesson differentiation and their attention to social justice issues.

Teachers who attended the authors' online PD increased their knowledge of the authors' cognitive apprenticeship (CA) approach to instruction, demonstrating more sophisticated understandings of important historical thinking skills and the need to provide students with explicit instruction and appropriate cognitive scaffolds. By the end of the year, teachers also showed ease in using new technological platforms and a more flexible use of disciplinary thinking scaffolds in ways the authors hoped. Finally, teachers in the authors' sample (and their students) frequently made connections between topics and sources in the authors' curriculum and ongoing societal problems (such as systemic racism) in this nation.

The authors' original sample of teachers was over 70; however, this number eventually fell to nine teachers (about 12.5% of the eligible participants) due to many ongoing challenges (e.g. teaching while parenting) during this time period. The authors note that teachers who remained engaged with the authors had over 10 years of experience and all but one had at some point been in a leadership position such as a team lead or department head. It is possible that experience teachers found on the authors' curriculum intervention to be too challenging to implement during the pandemic.

Online PD can be successful when sessions focus on content that teachers will use with students. We provided video models showing teachers how to teach historical reading and writing using the authors' tools and supports authors' platform. Although brief, the authors gave teachers opportunities for collaborative practice during webinars, and time to share challenges related to virtual teaching. In return, teachers shared what was working for them and allowed the authors to use anonymized student materials as the basis for subsequent materials for teaching students to make historical judgments.

All students, including those with learning or attentional disabilities/difficulties, emergent bilingual students, underrepresented students or marginalized students, must learn to grapple with complex historical and political information. Doing so will support their ability to make sense of conflicting and/or politicized information that pervades the media today and to judge for themselves what counts as evidence and truth.

Although there are a small number of teachers, this study shows that a strong research partnership between a university and district office can support the successful implementation of a complex historical literacy curriculum that allows students to explore social justice issues while learning important disciplinary literacy skills. Future work will share student learning outcomes.

The purpose of this article is to explain and demonstrate a critical disciplinary read aloud strategy that has both an equity goal and a social studies goal.

The authors begin by explaining background information on read alouds and critical disciplinary literacy. Then, the authors explain the four steps in the critical disciplinary literacy read aloud strategy. As the authors do so, they share important research that supports each of the four steps. Next, the authors offer a sample lesson plan using the informational picture book, Carter Reads the Newspaper.

The lesson plan uses a 5E template to promote critical disciplinary literacy before, during and after reading in such a way that teachers can foster inquiry through the use of social studies read alouds. After reading this article, teachers will understand more about what critical disciplinary literacy means, what it looks like a lesson plan and how to create their own similar plans using the template and resources provided.

The critical disciplinary literacy strategy offers teachers a way to engage elementary students in work that highlights social justice topics and inquiry.

Middle level teachers, at times, link historical content with relevant English literature in interdisciplinary units. Elementary teachers periodically employ history-themed literature during reading time. Interconnections between language arts and history are formed with developmentally appropriate literature for students. Historical misrepresentations, however, proliferate in children’s literature and are concealed behind engaging narratives. Since literacy and historical thinking are essential skills, children’s literature should be balanced within, not banished from, the classroom. Using America’s peculiar institution of slavery as a reference point, this article examines children’s literature, identifies almost a dozen areas of historical misrepresentation, and proffers rich primary source material to balance the various misrepresentations. We provide teachers with reason for caution when including such literature; but also model how to locate, use, and, at times, abridge primary source material within an elementary or middle level classroom. Such curricular supplements provide balance to engaging but historically-blemished children’s literature and enable educators to attain the rigorous prescriptions of Common Core.

Education initiatives have increased expectations of students’ non-fiction reading and text-based writing within history, social studies and other curricula. Teachers must locate age-appropriate curricular materials and implement discipline-specific pedagogy to guide students’ history literacy, historical thinking and historical argumentation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Students are guided on an inquiry into an underemphasized element of a historically significant figure’s life. Eleanor Roosevelt’s labor and poverty advocacies generate comparably less attention by historians and trade book authors than her work with civil rights, human rights and international diplomacy.

Students are positioned to scrutinize primary and secondary sources using differentiated optics relevant to each source type. History literacy and historical thinking strategies ground students’ analyses. After extracting meaningful content from diverse sources, students are prompted to engage in text-based writing to articulate their newly developed understandings. Diverse elements of revision bolster students’ historical argumentation.

Close reading, critical thinking and text-based writing are joined throughout the guided inquiry.

The previously unused texts and original tasks are intended for middle school classrooms. These sources and strategies integrate different elements of history literacy, historical thinking and historical argumentation throughout the inquiry.

Elementary classroom teachers can infuse social studies into the curriculum by integrating history, civics and English/language arts. Elementary teachers can bundle close reading, critical thinking and text-based writing within historical inquiries using accessible primary sources with engaging secondary sources.

This article reports the successes and struggles of one fourth-grade teacher's theory-into-practice interdisciplinary unit. The month-long, history-based inquiry integrated close readings of primary and secondary sources to scaffold and refine students' text-based writing about the oft-ignored interconnections between two Civil Rights icons who never met.

Findings included the import of historical inquiries within the elementary grades, students' abilities to scrutinize and extract meaning from dozens of sources and the value of revision for text-based writing, particularly its impact on the clarity, criticality and complexity of students' writing.

The inquiry's length, use of repeated readings, bulk of curricular resources and integration of revision are each comparably unique within the elementary social studies research literature.

Students in all content areas are almost exclusively presented with text-based instruction that starkly contrasts their experiences outside a classroom. With the advent of sophisticated technologies unknown to earlier generations, modern students are evermore immersed in visual data such as photographs, videos, games, apps. Visual media comprise many of the resources that adolescents use to negotiate understandings of the world. Many teachers and teacher-educators suggest that civic competence requires meeting powerful media with equally powerful analysis tools. In this, the first of two coupled articles — the second to be published in the July issue of Social Studies Research and Practice — I describe the educative potential of employing visual documents, especially historical photographs, in social studies instruction and refer to implications drawn from recent research studies. I also introduce an original lesson demonstrating wise practice teaching strategies for implementing historical photographs in classroom instruction to promote students’ civic competence. The second coupled article will extend the wise practice teaching strategies and feature all of the resources needed to enact the lesson and provide closure to the ideas posited throughout both articles.

This article outlines theoretical and pedagogical approaches to investigating racial violence with learners in grades 3–12 and K-12 teacher candidates. Throughout, the authors use the 1898 Wilmington Race Massacre as a central example of racial violence. Using a blended framework of Muhammad’s historically responsive literacy, King’s Black historical consciousness and place-based learning, the authors describe two different inquiries that build content knowledge around the Wilmington Race Massacre and context knowledge around place as it relates to Black agency, resistance and perseverance.

The first inquiry, aimed at 3–12 learners, explores the Black historical consciousness themes of Black agency and resistance. It uses the inquiry design model (IDM) template but expands the template to include a historically responsive literacy lens. The second inquiry describes how to incorporate historical sites into the study of racial violence. This inquiry explains how local cemeteries can be used as interdisciplinary classrooms and also artifacts.

Throughout, the authors also reflect on how this work has changed and improved over time as well as thoughts moving forward with examining the 1898 Wilmington Race Massacre through an interdisciplinary lens.

This article is the first to explore the 1898 Massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina from an interdisciplinary practice and cross-grades lens. It offers multiple step by step approaches for classroom teachers and teacher educators to enact interdisciplinary work with both 1898 and other acts of racial violence in their own places and across the United States.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to understand adolescent literacy instruction and learning in diverse classrooms.

Approach: A historical account of the evolution of adolescent literacy instruction to what it is today is discussed. The authors then ask the questions, “Who are adolescents today?” and use worked examples of illustrate how to optimally reach their instructional needs.

Findings: The authors believe that knowing what’s hot in adolescent literacy is paramount to effective adolescent literacy instruction. Expanding traditional notions of adolescent literacy instruction can provide a catalyst to academic achievement and engagement.

Practical implications: Designing effective literacy practices for today’s adolescents requires following a basic set of guidelines that considers such factors as student’s backgrounds, experiences, and prior knowledge. These factors are particularly important in determining where to begin instruction with each student, and how to proceed.

Contemporary education initiatives require English language arts educators spend half their time on non-fiction and history and social studies teachers to include diverse sources. Beginning in the early grades within the aforementioned curricula, students are to scrutinize multiple texts of the same historical event, era, or figure. Whereas trade books are a logical curricular resource for English language arts and history and social studies curricula, the education mandates do not provide suggestions. Research indicates trade books are rife with historical misrepresentations, yet few empirical studies have been completed so more research is needed. Our research examined the historical representation of Eleanor Roosevelt within trade books for early and middle-grades students. Identified historical misrepresentations included minimized or omitted accounts of the societal contexts and social relationships that shaped Mrs. Roosevelt’s social conscience and civic involvement. Effective content spiraling, in which complexity and nuance increase with grade level, between early and middle-grades trade books did not appear. Pedagogical suggestions included ways to position students to identify the varying degrees of historical representation within different trade books and integrate supplementary primary sources to balance the historical gaps.

In this space I complement an article published earlier in Social Studies Research and Practice 8(1), 2012 by providing a wise practice lesson and its ancillary materials. As sophisticated technologies continue to immerse modern students in potent visual data, teachers should help students develop equally potent visual literacy skills. Students who are more visually literate are better prepared to evaluate the visual messages surrounding them and act, not in rote-response visual stimuli, but rather according to their well-informed conscience. The lesson shared here demonstrates the educative potential of employing visual documents, historical photographs, in an inquiry-based approach to social studies instruction. Together, the coupled articles present a pragmatic example of academic research informing classroom practice in meaningful ways to promote students’ civic competence.