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Research

The Social Studies Network is engaged in research that supports inquiry-based and justice-centered pedagogical and curricular practices in P-20 social studies. Have a research need? Contact us.



Returning to the Source: Black Teachers Centering Justice with Black Students in Chicago Public Schools


 

Read Returning to the Source: Black Teachers Centering Justice with Black Students in Chicago Public Schools. This study drew analyses of interview transcripts collected by Dr. Timuel Black in the 1990s and other primary source data to piece together narratives detailing the socio-political forces that influenced the educational praxes of three Black teachers at DuSable and Phillips High Schools in Chicago. By understanding the consciousness of Black teachers of the past—returning to the source—contemporary Black teachers may be better equipped to navigate the complexities of their roles in schools today.



Curricularizing Social Movements: The Election of Chicago’s First Black Mayor as Content, Pedagogy, and Futurities


 

Social movements could play an important role in inquiry-based and justice-centered social studies. Read Curricularizing Social Movements: The Election of Chicago’s First Black Mayor as Content, Pedagogy, and FuturitiesUsing surveillance data collected by the Chicago Police Department and other historical artifacts, the author called for the curricularization of social movements from the past. Social movements of the past could offer curricular insight through content and pedagogy, reconceptualizing the ways in which educational spaces might be better bound to the communities and legacies of resistance that contextualize them.  


The Six Pillars of Teaching and Learning: Towards Pedagogies of Risk in P-20 Classrooms


This case study, The Six Pillars of Teaching and Learning: Towards Pedagogies of Risk in P-20 Classrooms, explored a pedagogical reinvention and extension of Paulo Freire’s popular education approach. To do so, the author drew on interview data with program participants and reflections of his own experiences as one of two adult educators in a yearlong Fellowship program for high school graduates. Relationships, relevance, revolution, recognition, responsiveness, and reflection all emerged as characteristics of teaching and learning within the setting. These emergent themes were presented as a six-pillar framework for liberatory teaching and learning, coined a Pedagogy of Risk.


Prison Abolition Literacies as Pro-Black Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education


Read Prison abolition literacies as Pro-Black pedagogy in early childhood education. The prison abolition movement brought attention to the American carceral crisis, or better yet, the mass incarceration and disproportionate criminalization of Black people in America. It also led to and fomented recent calls to defund prison systems, the police, and to remove police from schools. While discussions of prison abolition were addressed in the carceral studies literature, they were seldom addressed in the education literature, and particularly in early childhood education.


A Pathway to Liberation: A History of the Freedom Schools and the Long Struggle for Justice Since 1865



Read A Pathway to Liberation: A History of the Freedom Schools and the Long Struggle for Justice Since 1865. The Freedom School Movement originated at the nexus of the struggles for liberation and full citizenship. Beginning with the articulation of education as a means to freedom during the era of enslavement, the ideology behind Freedom Schools was an integral aspect of the long Black freedom struggle in the United States.


Toward A Black PlayCrit in Educational Leadership: What School Leaders Need to Know About Black Boyhood Play


Read Toward A Black PlayCrit in Educational Leadership: What School Leaders Need to Know About Black Boyhood Play. This conceptual paper highlighted the ways in which school administrators reinforced the anti-Black misandric violence Black boys experienced during play through disciplinary decision-making. The authors also explored how such reinforcement led to Black boys’ entry into the preschool-to-prison pipeline.

 


Doing The Work to Do the Work: Black Teacher Educators Learning to Heal and Healing to Teach

 

 


Read Doing The Work to Do the Work: Black Teacher Educators Learning to Heal and Healing to TeachIn this study, co-authors and Black teacher educators explored their experiences imagining and practicing Black liberatory pedagogical praxes through the contours of anti-Black violence. The authors framed the research through engaged and healing-centered pedagogical conceptualizations. 



Tippin the Tightrope: Forces That Push and Pull Social Studies Teachers’ Justice-Centered Praxes



Read Tippin the Tightrope: Forces That Push and Pull Social Studies Teachers’ Justice-Centered PraxesIn this study, the authors drew on conceptualizations of justice-centered praxes and case study methodologies to analyze open-ended questionnaire data from 192 K-12 social studies teachers in Illinois to understand the influential factors that supported their inquiry-based and justice-centered pedagogical praxes. 


Living in the Along: A Portrait of Educational Possibilities in the Dual Pandemic




 

Read Living in the Along: A Portrait of Educational Possibilities in the Dual PandemicWhile there had been much educational scholarship on the schooling experiences of Black children and their so-called “learning loss”, the struggles of Black families to support the schooling experiences of their children, and the mass exodus of Black teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic; such scholarship perpetuated deficit-based research on Black children, families, educators, and communities. Fortunately, Black educational historians illuminated far more complex narratives of Black people as architects of Black education. Therefore, this article further advanced these narratives by illuminating the fascinating possibilities of Black education even during crises.