Social Studies Education

In this editorial the authors drew upon metaphor studies to identify limitations of the literacy metaphor, which has become a master metaphor for competency in education, particularly through discussions of media literacy. It considers how the literacy metaphor ignores media forms within media literacy education. Building on the authors’ initial editorial as CITE—Social Studies Education editors and drawing on the work of media ecologists, the authors suggest different avenues for media and technology education that view media as environments.

Traditional civic education in the U.S. often does not meet the needs of students. Whether through outdated or uninspiring methods or by functionally disenfranchising students who are not part of the predominant power structure, mainstream civic education maintains hegemonic structures and, in turn, systems of oppression. Scholars have argued that reconceptualizing citizenship is an important component to addressing these shortcomings. Further, an increased use of social media as a tool for new forms of civic participation has been observed, but little research has been done to examine how teachers are using these platforms in their teaching of civics. This study explored high school social studies teachers’ conceptualizations of citizenship and their use of the social media platform, Twitter, with their students for civic education. Findings showed that teachers’ conceptions of citizenship were influenced by their local context: teachers observed geographic or racial barriers for their students’ civic participation, which informed how they understood and taught about civic participation. Teachers’ use of Twitter was intended to provide ways for students to disrupt the systems that established these barriers; however, teachers’ practice of using Twitter did not always align with their intentions.

This paper reports an analysis of the work of teaching in the wake of the profound and swift transformation of the educational landscape due to the global crisis of Covid-19 as well as concrete suggestions for teachers and teacher educators related to the labor they are expected to perform. Ultimately, the aim of this article was to discuss how understanding the immaterial labor of teaching, the labor that creates value but is often intangible and unseen, can prepare teachers to recognize and possibly resist what might get counted as best practices in the new normal that is and is to come. The authors use the concept of immaterial labor to expand on and complement technoskepticism, a recognition that technology is not neutral and has exploitive and antidemocratic tendencies and, therefore, must be approached with appropriate caution.

This paper responds to the recent call for technoskeptical or critical studies of educational technology in the classroom. The authors intentionally push against more established theoretical frameworks used in the field of teaching with technology by testing Latour’s Sociology of Translation or Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) to shift the gaze away from solely knowledge-based or dispositional accounts of teachers’ use of digital technologies within the social studies. When used alongside qualitative methods, ANT sensibilities open up an analytical middle ground between sociocultural and sociomaterial perspectives to help illuminate new perspectives regarding how certain forms of digital technologies are favored over other technologies by social studies preservice teachers within the contexts of their internship classrooms over time and space.