Journal of Curriculum Studies Research
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145 research outputs found
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Teaching the Climate Crisis: Existential Considerations
Full text linkIt is urgent that educators in social studies and science (among other disciplines) consider the ethical imperative of teaching the climate crisis—the future is at stake. This article considers a barrier to teaching this contentious topic effectively: existential threat. Through the lens of terror management theory, it becomes clear that climate catastrophe is an understandably fraught topic as it can serve as a reminder of death in two ways. As will be explained in this article, simultaneously such discussions can elicit not only mortality salience from considering the necrocene produced by climate catastrophe, but also existential anxiety arising from worldview threat. This threat can occur when Western assumptions are called into question as well as when there is disagreement between those with any worldviews that differ. After summarizing relevant aspects of terror management theory and analyzing the teaching of the climate crisis as an existential affair, specific strategies to help manage this situation (in and out of the classroom) are explored: providing conceptual tools, narrating cascading emotions, carefully using humor to diffuse anxiety, employing language and phrasing that does not overgeneralize divergent groups, and priming ideas of tolerance and even nurturance of difference
Think outside the book: Transformative justice using children’s literature in educational settings
Full text linkUsing Alexis Jemal’s conceptualization of transformative potential, founded on Paulo Freire’s idea of Critical Consciousness, a guiding transformative justice approach and accompanying questionnaire are provided here that can be adapted into any existing early childhood or elementary curriculum for children. The approach provides teachers with a methodology to search for new books and resources and use existing ones to foster their own and their students’ critical social consciousness. The transformative justice approach has two objectives: one, to enable teachers to help understand, guide, and mediate differences in the context of equity and social justice; and two, to equip children with social awareness and critical consciousness to identify stereotypes and biases, and to build solidarities between and among themselves. The transformative justice approach does not actively avoid books or resources with stereotypes or biases, but seeks to build skill sets in children and teachers to recognize and counter biases and stereotypes using texts as learning tools. It synthesizes and builds on anti-bias and culturally-sensitive pedagogies to intentionally center structural and systemic inequities, as well as fosters social awareness and critical thinking in both teachers and students by reimagining the classroom as a collaborative learning space
Gendering Social Studies: Teachers’ Intended and Enacted Curriculum and Student Diffraction
Full text linkDue to intransigence of social studies curriculum-makers to broaden the scope of who and what is studied, women (especially non-white women) are lacking representation. However, some teachers go beyond the textbook to select alternative curriculum lenses. Utilizing curricular-instructional gatekeeping, complementary curriculum, and queer theory, this article examines how two secondary teachers who incorporate issues of gender and/or women’s experiences into their social studies curriculum describe their reasoning and intentions, how their expressed aims are manifested within their classrooms, and student reaction to the incorporation of gender and women’s experience in the social studies curriculum. Findings indicate participants value multiple perspectives and parity in social studies curriculum and map these ideas onto the explicit curriculum. However, student responses tend to resist teacher intentions and enactment of challenges to normative gender roles. This diffracted curriculum interferes with teacher aims, creating a curricular space where traditional assumptions of the gender binary play out in teacher-student and student-student interactions. These findings indicate a more relational approach to social studies curriculum may be needed to encourage students to engage constructively with nonnormative social ideas
Experience with Diversity is Not Enough: A Pedagogical Framework for Teacher Candidates that Centers Critical Race Consciousness
Full text linkGiven the overwhelming whiteness of teacher education, we offer a pedagogical approach rooted in critical race theory, and draw on Carter’s (2008) notions of critical race consciousness to: 1) center a critical race perspective in methods-based coursework; and 2) employ critical race theory to analyze the function and role of clinical fieldwork. In this article, we provide examples of how we engage white teacher candidates to preemptively take stock of their own racial journey and biases prior to being responsible for educating students of color. We also focus on the process of selecting clinical placements and assignments. We explicate how current selection criteria for clinical sites and cooperating teachers are undergirded by systems of white supremacy, and problematize the reality of majority white clinical placements. We further provide suggestions for teacher education programs that pay particular attention to the roles and responsibilities of white teacher educators and predominantly white teacher education programs
The Social Justice Teaching Collaborative: A Collective Turn Towards Critical Teacher Education
Full text linkIn this article, we share the collaborative curricular work of an interdisciplinary Social Justice Teaching Collaborative (SJTC) from a PWI university. Members of the SJTC worked strategically to center social justice across required courses pre-service teachers are required to take: Introduction to Education, Sociocultural Studies in Education, and Inclusive Education. We share our conceptualization of social justice and guiding theoretical frameworks that have shaped our pedagogy and curriculum. These frameworks include democratic education, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical disability studies, and feminist and intersectionality theory. We then detail changes made across courses including examples of readings and assignments. Finally, we conclude by offering reflections, challenges, and lessons learned for collaborative work within teacher education and educational leadership. 
Civility and Shared Fate: Social Studies Teaching as Teaching for Belonging
No full textIn response to the violence of our era and the vast movement of people around the globe, the author argues that effective social studies education should include an understanding ourselves within communities of shared fate collectively building strategies of civility. Through conceptual analysis, the paper supports arguments that citizenship education should be grounded in communities of fate, rather than a sense of shared identity as a member of a particular country. Shared fate is the idea that our lives are intertwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. Civility is elaborated as concrete strategies that support or make possible broad participation in the demos. Looking at citizenship through the lens of communities of shared fate changes how we think about belonging and our responsibilities to one another in our shared world. The author provides examples of early career educators’ moral commitment to teaching from a perspective of shared fate and as well as their concerns to link the conceptual work to concrete practices within elementary school classrooms
Critical teaching in classrooms of healing: Struggles and testimonios
Full text linkUsing testimonio methodology, this article describes the testimonio and struggle of two Chicanx activist social studies teachers teaching in a large urban high school serving socio-economically poor Latinx students. Both teach critically working to develop their students’ understanding of how their ethnic and community histories contrast with larger historical narratives. Both teach the racism, misogyny, and homophobia rampant in American history by connecting it to the present. They also engage a culturally sustaining pedagogy to give students strength from their cultural inheritance. Each approached this differently, one developing an ethnic studies course, and the second developing a circulo de hombres, and embedding a youth participation action research. Each teacher tackled critical teaching and healing simultaneously from different perspectives yielding a variety of accompanying struggles
Second language learning and cultural identity
Full text linkThe importance of the teaching of Louisiana Regional French language and culture as an academic subject has been debated by many scholars for decades. While some see it as a necessary dimension of a French course offered in the state of Louisiana, others see the dialect and culture as unreal, non-existent, and less prestigious than Parisian French. This article presents a rationale for offering Louisiana Regional French courses as equivalents to Parisian French in the post-secondary core curriculum in Louisiana colleges and universities
Towards a Knowledge-rich Curriculum
Full text linkThis action research is to develop a framework of knowledge-rich curriculum from the knowledge-based curriculum. Rather than to replace current approaches to knowledge-based learning, this article enriches the knowledge mining orientations with additional criteria for organizing and assessing knowledge to ensure the quality of educational experience through which those orientations are developed. The proposed curriculum is characterized by principles for specific components: content, teacher roles, teaching sequence, and assessment. It presents one typical class session and teacher reflections that actualized the framework put into practice with Secondary education for English as a Foreign Language in Vietnam during 2016-2017 academic year