Historical and contemporary issues and events do not happen in isolation. Often, students miss the connections among historical and contemporary issues and events, and through this process, they struggle to see the relevance between the past and present. Helping students make thematic connections with civil rights issues during the century after the U.S. Civil War was the focus for the project at the I3 Academy in Birmingham, Alabama. We started with the sixth grade teacher’s first unit, Reconstruction, creating a one-week instructional sequence focusing on Jim Crow segregation laws designed…

1. Thank you for agreeing to this interview! Could you tell us about yourselves? Dr. Jeremiah Clabough is an Associate Professor of Social Science Education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he trains pre-service teachers to be middle and high school social studies teachers. He earned his PhD at The University of Tennessee in Spring 2012. Before this, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher. His research interests center on strengthening middle and high school students’ civic thinking skills as outlined by the indicators in the C3 Framework. Additionally, his…

How can K–12 teachers, administrators, and parents offer students the tools they need to become responsible citizens in a shrinking, increasingly interdependent world?  Drawing upon nearly forty years of teaching and developing curricula, Carl Hobert, author of "Raising Global IQ: Preparing Our Students for a Shrinking Planet" (Beacon Press), offers creative, well-tested, and understandable pedagogical ideas that help improve our children’s GIQ, or Global Intelligence Quotient. This presentation seeks to help educators to increase students’ understanding of the multicultural world in which…

Social Studies In Media Res  The spotlight on social studies learning is intense. For over two decades, we have been working as a community (often in partnership with related social studies organizations) to advocate for more social studies learning time, assessments, and professional learning support. We have documented the elimination of social studies instruction at the elementary level, and the reduction of course requirements and assessments at all levels. Historically, NCSS has issued formal position statements – many of which developed from approved resolutions of the annual NCSS…

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March 15, 2022 School districts, the most active battlefield in the American culture wars today, are facing an unprecedented number of calls to remove books from schools and libraries, false claims about “obscenity” invading classrooms, the elimination of teaching about evolution and climate change, challenges to the need for making sense of and critiquing our world in the mathematics classrooms, and legislation redlining teaching about racism in American history. These actions are putting excessive and undue pressure on teachers, who are caught in the crossfire of larger political conflict…

Using well-researched historical texts can be a very effective way to fill holes in our students’ understanding of U.S. History, as well as our own. This conversation with author Laurie Halse Anderson will explore diverse perspectives and untold stories of enslaved people during the Revolutionary war, drawing on her research for writing "Chains," and the "American Seeds Trilogy." We’ll also discuss why and how teachers should look for opportunities to incorporate historical fiction into their unit planning, focusing on strategies for teaching the American Revolution by including the stories…

National Council for the Social Studies was invited by the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), as a coalition member, to sign onto a statement regarding a recent legal action in Virginia that could affect future free speech rights nationwide if other states followed suit. NCSS and its state affiliate, Virginia Council for the Social Studies, have signed onto the statement alongside other coalition members in support and protection of First Amendment freedoms and education. Prohibiting the sale and distribution of books is an affront to our democratic values and threatens each…

A Current Event Response of National Council for the Social Studies May 26, 2022 Violence in any form has no place in our country. Yet, violence at a school is unconscionable. Children go to school ready to learn—sometimes to find safety and security from a turbulent world around them. Teachers go to school ready to teach and inspire the hearts and minds of our children with whom we share our communities, and to inspire a new generation of thinkers, leaders, and citizens. In 2019, National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) issued its first response to mass shootings. Since then, gun…

The House of Delegates (HOD) provides a forum for the general membership of NCSS, as represented by state councils, communities, and associated groups, to bring ideas, principles, beliefs, and actions regarding social studies education to the attention of the NCSS Board of Directors. Resolutions are the framework through which the NCSS membership at-large makes recommendations to the Board. Any NCSS member may submit a resolution following the guidelines established in the House of Delegates Manual. Resolutions are debated and voted on during HOD meeting at the NCSS Annual Conference.…