Category Archives: Social Studies

Towards an Ideal Model of Education for Critical Citizenship (now open access)

The article “Towards an Ideal Model of Education for Critical Citizenship. An Analysis of the Spanish Curricular Change in Social Sciences” published in January 2025 in the European Journal of Education is now available under Open Access license.

The article examines the integration of citizenship education in Spain’s new social sciences curriculum, focusing on primary and secondary education. It highlights the importance of fostering critical citizenship, which involves questioning societal norms, challenging injustices, and engaging in transformative social action. The study uses the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) framework to analyze the curriculum, revealing a stronger emphasis on cognitive skills and content knowledge compared to attitudes and engagement.

Key findings include:

Cognitive and Content Focus: The curriculum prioritizes cognitive domains (e.g., reasoning and application) and content domains (e.g., civic principles and roles) over attitudes and engagement.
Inconsistencies in Curriculum Elements: While competencies emphasize citizenship commitment, evaluation criteria and basic knowledge lack coherence, limiting practical classroom implementation.
Limited Focus on Engagement: Engagement-related dimensions, such as activism and social participation, are minimally addressed, distancing the curriculum from fostering active democratic citizenship.
Imbalance in Basic Knowledge: Basic knowledge focuses solely on content, neglecting cognitive, attitudinal, and engagement aspects.

The study concludes that while the curriculum incorporates cognitive and content domains effectively, it falls short in promoting critical social action and engagement. Future efforts should focus on aligning curriculum elements and fostering interdisciplinary approaches to empower students as active participants in democracy. Researchers are encouraged to examine the practical implementation of these curricular changes to advance education for social justice.

Navarro Medina, E , Ross, E. W., Pérez-Rodríguez, N., & De Alba Fernandez, N. (2025). Towards an ideal model of education for critical citizenship. An analysis of the Spanish curricular change in social sciences. European Journal of Education, 60(1), e70010. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70010

Interview with Brazilian history education researchers

It has been a great honor and a learning experience for me to have connected with history education researchers in Brazil in recent years.

Prof. Dr. Luis F. Cerri (State University of Ponta Grossa, Brazil) contributed a chapter for the book Social Studies Education in Latin America: Critical Perspectives from the Global South , which I edited with Sebastián Plá .

Cerri’s chapter presents outcomes of an international project researching young peoples’ view of teaching and learning history, historical awareness and culture, political position and culture. The chapter presents comparative data on political position and views regarding history from young people across Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.

Subsequent to the book project, I had the opportunity to speak at the National Meeting of Researchers on the Teaching of History in Brazil and then last summer participated in a video interview with Dr. Cerri as well as Prof. Dr. Maria Lima (Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul) and Prof. Dr. Juliana Andrade (Federal Rural University of Pernambuco).

The interview has just been published in Revista Docentes:

Ross, E. W., Cerri, L. F., Lima, M. A., & Andrade, J. (2025). Entrevista com o professor E. Wayne Ross. Revista Docentes, 10(35), 99-111. https://periodicos.seduc.ce.gov.br/revistadocentes/article/view/1474

Summary

E. Wayne Ross, together with Sebastián Plá, organized a collection on the teaching of Social Studies in Latin America, resulting from the understanding that the Global South is rapidly changing its role in the various spheres of contemporary life, and among them, the debate on the teaching and learning of subjects such as History. In 2022, he opened the proceedings of the National Meeting of Researchers on the Teaching of History held at UFRPE, reflecting on the impacts of neoliberal policies on the teaching of History and other human and social sciences. In this interview, conducted by videoconference on July 14, 2024, three leaders of the ABEH Associação Brasileira de Ensino de História spoke with the professor about their experiences of civic and professional resistance to the advances of militarism, the business perspective and reactionism in education, themes that are older there than here, which resulted in a fruitful debate.

Download PDF of article (in Portuguese).

Thoughts to contemplate on May Day

Consider the thoughts below as part of your May Day activities:

Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch! – Marx & Engels

“Think! It ain’t illegal yet!”
—George Clinton [“Lunchmeatophobia”]

“There was a movement at one time, not so many years ago either, which was international in its scope, which had for its object the setting aside the first of May for a general, international holiday, looking ultimately to the inauguration of a short-hour workday, but this grand idea has been side-tracked in later years by a lot of political buncombe and claptrap, thus persuading the working classes into the notion that they can gain their freedom by electing a lot of fellows to office.”

― Lucy Parsons (1906)

“I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men.”
— Emiliano Zapata

“… the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.”
— Guy Debord et al [“Position of the Lettrist International,” 1952]

“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
—Karl Marx

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.”
—Marx & Engels

“When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.”
– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
—Henry David Thoreau

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
—Raoul Vaneigem

“One form of wage labor may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labor can correct the abuse of wage labor itself.”
—Karl Marx

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
— Guy Debord [Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 1, 1967]

“[In The Power Elite (1956) C. Wright Mills quoted] Sophie Tucker (without either approval or disapproval in the context) ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is best.’ For a radical, the corollary of the this attitude is that it is not wealth that is wrong with America but poverty, and that what is reprehensible about the rich is not that they enjoy the good things of life but that they use their power to maintain a system which needlessly denies the same advantages to others.
—Paul M. Sweezy, “Power Elite and the Ruling Class,” Monthly Review, September, 1956

“Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy and let it be a war of extermination without pity.”
—Lucy Parsons quoted in Women Building Chicago, 2001, p. 671

“… and there will be rivers of blood!”
– Anonymous Rouge Forum Member

Review of The Social Studies Curriculum (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson

I am happy to share a review of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson (UBC) that was published in Theory and Research in Social Education on January 31, 2025.

While the focus of the review is on the fifth edition, Nelson puts the latest edition of the book in conversation with previous editions that were published in 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2014.

Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum
Book Review by Peter M. Nelson

The social studies curriculum: Purposes, problems, and possibilities (5th edition), by Ross, E. W. (Ed.) Statue University of New York Press, 2024, 430 pp., $99.00 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). ISBN (hardcover) 9781438499024, ISBN (paperback) 9781438499031

With the fifth edition of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (TSSC), editor E. Wayne Ross and the book’s contributors deliver a vital, timely addition to the influential TSSC series. Across 17 chapters—14 of which are new to this edition—the boundaries of the social studies curriculum are relentlessly complicated and contested, and the book’s authors offer critical, compelling visions for how social studies teaching and learning can attend to a range of contemporary issues and topics.

Contextualizing the book

The fifth edition of TSSC arrives at a time when efforts to “capture,” or tame, social studies curriculum are ubiquitous and well-funded. To put it another way, if TSSC offers visions of the social studies curriculum as inherently wild terrain—even feral in its disorderly commitments to real-world action, to understanding that “social studies curriculum and teaching is by its very nature a political undertaking” (p. 381), to its critical attention to the complicated contexts in which education actually occurs—then the capture of social studies begins with its reduction. Phenomena like uncertainty, ambivalence, unpredictability, and spontaneity, while embedded in human experience (and presumably entangled with the project of education as well), are viewed by policy makers, administrators, ideologues, and politicians as problems to eradicate, let alone the more explicit socio-political potentialities that are part and parcel of any meaningful social studies education. To be sure, attempts to capture social studies curriculum, or to reduce its radical potential to foment sociopolitical change, are not new; what Evans (2004) called the social studies wars have been waged since the advent of the field in the early twentieth century. My point, here, is that the fifth edition of TSSC provides an updated glimpse of current contestations around numerous issues, and one of the book’s most valuable, and unique, contributions is how Ross and other chapter authors manage to frame a wide range of sociopolitical issues as readily available for social studies teachers and students to explore and attend to in meaningful ways. …

To continue reading the review see the link below or download the review here.

Peter M. Nelson (31 Jan 2025): Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum, Theory & Research in Social Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2025.2459031

Towards an Ideal Model of Education for Critical Citizenship

Thanks to Noelia Pérez‐Rodríguez for the opportunity to work with her and colleagues Elisa Navarro‐Medina and Nicolás De‐Alba‐Fernández – all in the Department of Didactics of Experimental and Social Sciences at University of Seville – on an article analyzing social science curriculum in Spain and working towards an ideal model of critical citizenship.

Abstract:

In this study, we analysed the presence of citizenship education in the new Spanish social sciences curriculum, focusing on both the primary and secondary education stages. The relevance of the study stems from the need to adapt to a new reality, in which it is crucial to develop in children and young people the skills to understand, interpret and make critical decisions. Considering the model outlined as ideal, and being aware of the difficulty involved in achieving it, we took as a reference a possible model to analyse the Spanish curriculum, the ICCS study framework. The research presented is based on a review of policy documents and analyses the curricula of compulsory education stages through a content analysis technique. The results show that in the Spanish curriculum, under the logic of the ICCS framework, cognitive skills and citizen content are more prevalent than those based on attitudes and engagement. This issue prompts us to reflect on the future changes that should be made to approach the model we consider relevant.

Citation:

Research seminar at UWE Education and Childhood Research Group

I was delighted to have the opportunity to lead a research seminar with the Education and Childhood Research Group at the University of the West of England in Bristol this week.

The seminar was titled “Critical Social Education: Insurgent Pedagogies & Dangerous Citizenship” and explored how social studies education in the Americas is being used to contribute in significant ways to creating a society where individuals have the power and resources to realize their own potential and free themselves from the obstacles of classism, racism, sexism, and other inequalities often encouraged by schools, the state, and oppressive ideologies.

The seminar also framed the role and nature of social studies education in the Americas, with an emphasis on critical perspectives in the field, drawing on my recently published edited collection, The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Edition, SUNY Press) as well other critical scholars including contributors to the book Insurgent Social Studies: Scholar-Educators Disrupting Erasure and Marginality (2022, Myers Education Press), edited by Natasha Hakimali Merchant, Sarah B. Shear and Wayne Au.

I also touched on related research on social studies in the Latin American context based on the book Social Studies Education in Latin America: Critical Perspectives from the Global South, which I edited with Sebastián Plá.

The ECRG is led by Alpesh Maisuria, Professor of Education Policy in Critical Education at UWE Bristol, who I thank for the opportunity.

I also want to thank UWE Bristol education Professor Jane Andrews for the chance to participate in their monthly reading group which discussed a recent chapter of mine titled “Society, Democracy, and Economics: Challenges for Social Studies and Citizenship Education in a Neoliberal World”. I enjoyed the lively and diverse discussion.

New online cohort M.Ed. in Social Studies Education at UBC: Curriculum, Historical inquiry, & Pedagogy (CHiP)

Master of Education: Curriculum, Historical inquiry, & Pedagogy (CHiP)

Issues of equity, diversity, and social justice serve as foundational lenses for interrogating social studies curriculum and pedagogy.

This graduate program delves into key aspects of social studies curricula with connections to historical thinking, historical consciousness, visual culture, anti-oppressive and anti-racism education, gender studies, moral education, and the history and politics of curriculum.

The cohort-based model invites you to work through the program in a collaborative community of practice. Students in this program will construct strong, foundational knowledge about teaching and learning in social studies. Building on that base, you will investigate the ways in which inquiry, inter-culturalism, and 21st century teaching and learning are central to social studies education.

By the end of the 26-month program, students will have a wealth of knowledge to share. During the first semester of the program, incoming students will have a chance to learn from graduating students though a mini conference where they will share what they have learned and consider how it can help other Social Studies teachers in their contexts.

This program is offered by the Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia

Start Date: July 2025
Length: 2.5 years | Part-Time
Format: Online

Objectives

Through the program, students will consider theories, principles, and practices in social studies education related to:

Critical analysis of dominant and alternative theories of learning, teaching, and assessment in Social Studies,
Improvement of practice through the study of educational theory, philosophy, and practice in Social Studies,
Analysis of different approaches to curriculum development and implementation and their impact on social studies teaching and learning,
The place of curriculum and pedagogy for social studies education in historical context, understanding the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that direct past, present, and future decision making, and
Using an inquiry stance toward your professional practice as an educator in a variety of settings.

Additionally, students will continually reflect on what they are learning and consider how it can help them understand the aims and purposes underlying social studies curricula in their contexts. This knowledge can then be used to inform new practices in their educational contexts.

More information here.

Video Interview: “Desafios e possibilidades para a educação histórica em um mundo neoliberal” / “Challenges and possibilities for history education in a neoliberal world”

In November 2022, I had the honour giving the keynote address at the National Meeting of Researchers in History Teaching (XIII Encontro Nacional de Pesquisadores do Ensino de História – XIII-ENPEH) organized by the Brazilian Association of History Teaching (Associação de Ensino de História – ABEH).

Subsequently, the talk — “Desafios e possibilidades para a educação histórica em um mundo neoliberal” / “Challenges and possibilities for historical education in a neoliberal world” — was published as a chapter in the book Os presentes do Ensino de História: (re)construções em novas bases / The gifts of History Teaching: (re)constructions on new bases, edited by Luis Cerri (State University of Ponta Grossa) and Juliana Alves Andrade (Federal University of Pernambuco).

Below is a a link to a video interview that was conducted last month with my Brazilian colleagues including professors Cerri and Andrade and the president of ABEH, Prof. Maria Lima (Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul). The interview covers quite a bit of territory including the politics of history and social studies education and their role in construction of a more democratic society, critical teaching and the dangers it entails, plus organizing and action for educational and social change.