Brooke Blevins

Critical Historical Thinking: When Official Narratives Collide With Other Narratives

In this article the authors examine The Student as Historian project in highlighting how critical historical thinking can provide other and more complex renditions of history. The authors note that teachers’ understandings of educational ends, purposes, values, and critical content knowledge are entwined and inextricable from ideological stances and historical positionality.

Innovations in Civic Education: Developing Civic Agency Through Action Civics

Abstract It is imperative that schools and communities give students opportunities to participate in active citizenship and prepare them with the important skills and dispositions needed to become informed citizens. Action civics is a promising practice that puts students at the heart of civics learning by providing them with the opportunity to learn about civic and political action by engaging in a cycle of research, action, and reflection about problems they care about. As a response to move civics education toward a more action-oriented approach, the researchers planned and hosted two iterations of a summer civics institute for students entering 5th–9th grades. Using Jessica Gingold’s (2013) framework for action civics evaluation, this mixed-method research study explores the outcomes of the iEngage Summer Civics Institutes. Findings suggest that iEngage successfully incorporated four key competences from this framework, including producing 21st-century positive youth leaders, producing active and informed citizens, increasing youth civic participation, and encouraging youth civic creation. However, iEngage was not without its limitations and challenges.

Building Civic Bridges: Community-Centered Action Civics

Project-based learning is an example of powerful social studies learning in which student engage in active inquiry. Action civics is a relatively new educational practice in which students act as citizens through a cycle of research, action, and reflection about problems they care about in their community. Building Civic Bridges offers teachers a model for students to develop and enact inquiry-based projects that reflect positive, and active, civic dispositions.

Challenging Neoliberal Perspectives: A Framework for Humanizing Social Studies Teacher Education

Philosophically and operationally U.S. education institutions have shifted in focus from a democratically pluralist Transformational Based System to a neoliberal Information Based System of education. Influenced by Paulo Freire’s conception of humanizing education, this chapter offers a challenge to neoliberal education by operationalizing a framework for humanizing social studies education. The framework is comprised of four elements grounded in both theory and practice: (1) Fostering a dialogic relationship; (2) Focusing on student experience; (3) Facilitate a critique of official knowledge; and, (4) Framing critical questions and introducing subjugated knowledge. We also provide examples of how this framework might be actualized in a social studies teacher education program and subsequently in social studies classrooms. This chapter provides both a theoretical and practical approach for engaging in transformational based and humanizing social studies pedagogy.

Developing Students’ Historical Literacies in the Classroom

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, the notion of disciplinary literacy has once again become a focal point in conversations concerning social studies curriculum and pedagogy. In his book, Building Students’ Historical Literacies: Learning to Read and Reason with Historical Texts and Evidence, Jeffery Nokes makes a clear distinction between general literacy practices and those that are specific to the discipline of history. Focused on the notion of historical literacy, Nokes’s book provides an artful and insightful exploration into how teachers might engage in disciplinary literacy within the history classroom. At a time when social studies and history education are once again subsumed within English Language Arts standards in the name of integration, Nokes’s work represents an important caveat by providing a clear articulation of the rich and complex process involved in developing historical literacy. Nokes argues: