“Just Kind of Stuck”: Possibilities and Pitfalls of TeachersPayTeachers and Pinterest in the Elementary Social Studies Classroom

Preservice teachers (PSTs) readily make use of resources found on platforms such as Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, TeachersPayTeachers (TpT) and Facebook (Sawyer et al., 2020), or what Shelton, Schroeder et al. (2020) termed the Teacher-to-Teacher Online Marketplace of Ideas (TOMI). While a number of studies have shown that the TOMI offers PSTs resources to support student engagement, hands-on activities, and just-in-time professional development (Carpenter et al., 2020; Greenhalgh & Koehler, 2017; Schroeder et al., 2019; Pittard, 2017; Sawyer et al., 2020; Sawyer & Myers, 2018), research also indicates that resource quality on the TOMI is poor, particularly when it comes to social studies topics (Harris et al., 2021; Rodríguez et al., 2020, 2023; Stebbins, 2024). Understanding how teachers weave together disparate curricular resources found across networked spaces is necessary, yet published scholarship that explores why and how PSTs integrate activities from the TOMI into their instructional practice is sparse, if nonexistent (Drake, 2021).

Through 25 semistructured interviews and six teaching observations, the qualitative case study (Merriam, 1998, 2009) reported here explored why and how one elementary-level student teacher, Hannah (a pseudonym), integrated resources from Pinterest and TpT across a first-grade social studies unit focused on community. The in-depth portrait provided in this case study research reveals the complexities of the decision-making process, motivations, knowledge, and skills one emerging teacher relied upon while she curated a social studies unit focused on community, and highlights the knowledge, skills, and experiences she lacked in order to do so effectively.

Literature Review

TOMI

Shelton, Schroeder et al. (2020) defined the TOMI as “the online spaces where teachers exchange classroom resources and ideas, including educational marketplaces such as TpT or Ignite.Amazon.com, social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, or YouTube, subscription sites such as Patreon, and educators’ individual blogs or websites” (p. 531). The TOMI is a relatively new phenomenon in the field of education, where teachers purchase products, browse for inspiration, download curricular resources for free, or simply connect with other teachers. It is a marketplace of both ideas and products — with teacherpreneurs (Shelton & Archambault, 2018, 2019; Shelton et al., 2021; Torphy et al., 2020) and edu-influencers (Carpenter et al., 2022; Shelton, Schroeder et al., 2020) dominating the marketplace, using Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and TpT as interconnected launching points for second or even primary incomes and edu-celebrity status (Reinstein, 2018).

The interconnectedness of the TOMI cannot be understated. A teacherpreneur may post teaching ideas or updates to a blog with links to their TpT account. Created in 2006, TpT is an “online educational marketplace where educators post original digital classroom materials (e.g., lesson plans, worksheets, classroom decor), for other educators to download for free or a small fee” (Shelton et al., 2024, p. 23). Once posted to TpT and a personal blog, these same materials may populate on Pinterest, “a social media site where users create virtual bulletin boards by “pinning” searched items” (p. 25). When users “click a pin, it may link them to external web content, such as a blog, video, or TpT resource” (p. 25). Blog posts may feature additional pins to books or classroom materials that can be purchased from the teacherpreneur or edu-influencer’s Amazon storefront. Similarly, Instagram offers an additional site where edu-influencers share videos and links to their products available for purchase elsewhere, creating a web of interlinked materials. The nature of TOMI sites can be described as “deeply entangled,” in which

a teacherpreneur may post on Instagram to advertise a newly posted TpT resource, create a YouTube video illustrating how their products could be used in the classroom, and post an advertisement to Facebook marketing discounts or sales on their TpT materials (Pittard, 2017). Teachers bounce back and forth between platforms, as posts on one site link to one or many others” (p. 28).

Because of the TOMI as an interconnected web of interlinked materials, a teacher searching on Pinterest, for example, for classroom materials and lessons would find themselves linked back multiple times to TpT.

The TOMI has grown in popularity with educators (Carpenter et al., 2020; Hertel & Wessman-Enzinger, 2017; Kaminsi & Sloutsky, 2020; Opfer et al., 2016; Sawyer et al., 2020; Schroeder et al., 2019; Shapiro et al., 2019; Tosh et al., 2020). National surveys identify that 90% of elementary teachers use Pinterest for professional purposes (Opfer et al., 2017). Similar studies indicate the popularity of Pinterest (Schroeder et al., 2019), Instagram (Carpenter et al., 2020), Twitter (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014) and TpT (Carpenter & Shelton, 2021) by both preservice and in-service teachers (Sawyer et al., 2020; Sawyer & Myers, 2018). Koehler et al.’s (2020) study of TpT transactions indicated that “TPT hosted 4,018,173 classroom resources from 208,748 educator-sellers with 1.5 billion all-time downloads and $3.9 billion in total sales” (p. 1), highlighting the site’s dominance in US curriculum.

Preservice and early career teachers may be particularly influenced by the TOMI (Curcio et al., 2023). With less time and experience in classrooms, Torphy and Drake (2019) posited that emerging teachers find the TOMI to be “an invisible net” that helps them “feel confident that they can search and share resources with one another that will promote engagement in content and quality” (p. 19). Sawyer and Myers (2018) also suggested that the TOMI meets PSTs at their comfort level, is easily accessible, and supports collaboration. Thus, the TOMI offers support for PSTs that may be lacking elsewhere and provides space for potential collaboration, creativity, and mentoring.

Despite the affordances of the TOMI, there are significant drawbacks. The capitalist nature of TOMI can lead teachers to an unhealthy desire to constantly consume materials to feel “good enough” at their jobs (Curcio et al., 2023; Pittard, 2017), particularly when viewing Instagram (Carpenter et al., 2020). With little Common Core alignment and a preponderance of worksheets (Aguilar et al., 2022), resource quality on TpT and Pinterest is lacking across subject areas, from mathematics (Hertel & Wessman-Enzinger, 2017; Hu et al., 2018; Kaminski & Sloutsky, 2020; Sawyer et al., 2019) to English language arts (Benko, 2022; Polikoff & Dean, 2019) to science (McDonald, 2018) to social studies (Harris et al., 2021; Rodríguez et al., 2020, 2023; Stebbins, 2024).

Social studies resources include highly stereotypical imagery and clipart, inaccurate and misleading content around marginalized identities and histories (Harris et al., 2021; Rodríguez et al., 2020), uncritical visions of citizenship and patriotism (Stebbins, 2024) and content that continues to perpetuate a white, cisgendered, heteronormative, vision of society (Gallagher et al., 2019). Reports in the popular press indicate that simulations of slavery or other forms of oppression that have garnered national media attention over the last decade were found on TOMI sites (Schwartz, 2018). Stereotypical representations of Indigenous peoples and the myth of the First Thanksgiving are also rampant (Waxman, 2019). Even with explicit practice in methods courses to analyze individual resources, PSTs struggle to fully unpack and critique TOMI materials (Rodríguez et al., 2020), even if they do report being critical of what they find on TOMI sites (Schroeder & Curcio, 2022; Schroeder et al., 2019).

Aside from resource quality, scholars have also sounded alarms over the fragmentation of curriculum culled from disparate sources (Greene, 2016). Given that materials found on TpT largely lack relationship to standards (Aguilar et al., 2022; Koehler et al., 2020), Greene has warned about the potential for incoherent curriculum, a warning that Gustafson (2019) further underscored. This fragmentation and incoherence is harmful to already underserved students, as “the daily use and growing reliance on low-quality and poorly-sequenced curricula only exacerbates educational inequity for students desperately needing access to ‘the best stuff’” (n.p.).

Polikoff (2018) suggested that this “proliferation of non-traditional materials…should be researched more extensively” (p. 197), particularly as the curricular materials teachers use move away from the traditional textbook and toward more disparate online materials. Given this concern, Sawyer and Myers (2018) encouraged teacher educators to “engage in conversations with preservice teachers about the sources of lesson plan ideas” (p. 28). Similarly, Drake (2021) recommended that scholars take up “how teachers coordinate the use of multiple instructional materials that were not designed to be used together and might only nominally address the same topic” (p. 138). Drake asked, “How do teachers create a connected, coherent thread across the various materials they select and use from social media?” (p. 138).

The study reported here took up this necessary line of research by focusing in depth on one emerging teacher and the decision-making process she used to design a social studies unit with disparate materials collected from the TOMI.

Teachers’ Pedagogical Decision-Making

Social studies research has long acknowledged that teachers are positioned as curricular-instructional gatekeepers (Thornton, 1989). Rather than simply technicians who impose scripted curricula on students, teachers ultimately make the “day-to-day decisions concerning both the subject matter and experiences to which pupils have access” (Thornton, 2012, p. 29). According to Thornton, teachers make gatekeeping decisions based on a host of factors: teachers’ background knowledge, personal experiences, institutional culture, and standardized testing, to name a few.

Other researchers have indicated a variety of other factors fund to influence teacher decision making, including “teacher training, beliefs about learning, perceptions of student needs, and the school principal” (O’Brien & Norton, 1991, p. 30), emotionality in the classroom (Sheppard & Levy, 2019), teacher intuition (Vanlommel & Schidlkamp, 2018), teachers’ own identities and cultures (Salinas & Castro, 2010), and for PSTs, the influence of their cooperating or mentor teachers (Clarke et al., 2014; Matsko et al., 2020).

Research into teacher decision-making indicates the agentic role of the teacher as curriculum maker (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992), capable of shaping instructional experiences despite top-down mandates. Thus, when considering how teachers use the TOMI, researchers must consider the agentic role teachers play in curriculum design. In emerging scholarship focused on social studies teacher decision-making and the TOMI, scholars have primarily focused on how teachers analyze individual resources found on the TOMI and, ultimately, how that analysis lends itself to decision-making about the use of those materials. Perhaps this focus on individual resource analysis is due to the availability of checklists that support teachers as they analyze the quality of individual activities and resources (Gallagher et al., 2019; Harris et al., 2021). These tools necessarily limit the focus from integration and design across units of instruction to the analysis of the content and pedagogical soundness of individual activities (Schroeder & Curcio, 2022). Crucially, these checklists focus on interrogating singular activities and materials rather than supporting teachers to thoughtfully reimagine how materials could be repurposed, remixed, and adapted within longer sequences of instruction. 

Being able to analyze single resources is essential, but as Brown (2009) contended, the act of teaching means bringing to life curricular materials “through a process of interpretation and adaptation” (p. 17). This ability to interpret, adapt, and essentially, design curriculum is crucial to develop, as “teachers who do not know how to analyze curriculum materials in productive ways may make counterproductive changes or fail to make much-needed modifications to lessons” (Beyer & Davis, 2012, p. 387). Many of these changes can take place during the act of teaching, or through reflection after teaching.

Studies that have thus far focused on decision-making around the TOMI (e.g., Sawyer et al., 2020; Schroeder & Curcio, 2022; Rodríguez et al., 2020) have focused on static lesson plans, written reflections, and student work samples. As a result, Drake’s (2021) call for additional research into the ways teachers design curriculum across a number of TOMI resources is critical, and Polikoff et al.’s (2018) suggestion for qualitative case study research into teachers’ curricular material use can build a necessary knowledge base to understand how teachers weave together and enact curriculum from sites of the TOMI. Moreover, given the paucity of research following “preservice teachers from social studies methods courses into culminating student teaching experiences” (Bauml, 2016, p. 56) and even the challenge of finding student teaching experiences where elementary PSTs are able to teach or observe social studies (Hawkman et al., 2015), this study attempted to build critical foundational knowledge through a case study of how one elementary PST, Hannah, infused TOMI materials into a 12-day unit on the first-grade social studies topic of community.

Theoretical Framework

This study explored two research questions:

1. How and why did Hannah use materials from the TOMI to plan her social studies unit?
2. What was the impact of using those materials on curricular coherence?

The theories of boundary crossing and pedagogical design capacity informed the framing of the study and analysis of data collected.

Boundary Crossing

First, I use the theoretical framework of boundary crossing to understand why Hannah integrated resources from the TOMI to plan her unit. As Akkerman and Bakker (2011) explained, “The term boundary crossing was introduced to denote how professionals at work may need to ‘enter onto territory in which we are unfamiliar and, to some significant extent therefore unqualified’ (Suchman, 1994, p. 25)” (p. 134).

Boundaries across communities and systems are made up of “sociocultural differences that give rise to discontinuities in interaction and action” (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 139). Boundaries can exist between value systems across families, schools, and peer groups (Phelan et al., 1991) or between conflicting information shared across courses in schools (Christiansen & Rump, 2008; East, 2009). Even when professionals are completing similar work, boundaries arise due to differing professional norms and expectations. In teacher education, the most notable boundary is at the field placement site, as PSTs transition across multiple and sometimes competing spaces, such as the teacher education classroom and the K-12 classroom.  

To cross such boundaries requires boundary crossers, or those workers who can “face the challenge of negotiating and combining ingredients from different contexts to achieve hybrid situations” (Engeström et al., 1995, p. 319). Boundary crossers can act as bridges between different communities, managing “multiple, divergent discourses and practices across social boundaries” (Walker & Nocon, 2007, p. 181).

Critical to boundary crossing are boundary objects, which exist as a “means of translation” (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393) across multiple sites. Indeed, boundary objects or tools “inhabit several intersecting worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them” (p. 134), making them capable of moving past what might appear to be impenetrable boundary lines. Boundary objects “have different meanings in different social worlds but at the same time have a structure that is common enough to make them recognizable across these worlds” (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 140). In terms of teaching and teacher education, boundary object examples might be a teacher portfolio, curricular standards, or lesson plan templates.

Pedagogical Design Capacity

The notion of Pedagogical Design Capacity (PDC; Brown, 2009) is helpful in making sense of how Hannah used curricular materials from TpT and Pinterest and to what extent those resources impacted curricular coherence. Summarizing Brown (2009), Matić (2019) explained that PDC is the “ability to perceive and mo­bilise existing resources to create productive instructional episodes in the classroom” (p. 1). Brown explained that “PDC represents a teacher’s skill in perceiving affordances, making decisions, and following through on plans” (p. 29).  Perceiving in PDC means a teacher can recognize, interpret, evaluate and “balance tradeoffs” of curricular materials (Brown, 2009, p. 18; see also Brown & Edelson, 2003; Chong, 2016, Remillard, 2005).

Mobilizing existing resources means that teachers take up or use those resources in an adapted format (Brown, 2009; Brown & Edelson, 2003; Chong, 2016; Land, 2011). When mobilizing resources, teachers can choose to offload, adapt, or improvise with materials. To offload a material, a teacher relies primarily on the curricular material for lesson delivery. When adapting material, a teacher merges their own expertise with the curricular material’s affordances to deliver a lesson. When improvising, a teacher goes completely “off-script,” relying primarily on their own knowledge and agency to teach rather than on a curricular resource (Brown, 2009).

PDC is important, as teachers who lack PDC may make “counterproductive changes or fail to make much-needed modifications to lessons” (Beyer & Davis, 2012, p. 387). Teachers must be aware of affordances and constraints of curricular materials to have PDC (Matić, 2019). Chong explained “that knowledge of curriculum materials, personal practical knowledge, and knowledge of learners play an important role in making teachers more adept at using curriculum materials” and, thereby, enhancing their PDC (p. 85).

These findings are echoed throughout the literature (e.g., Davis et al., 2011), with the caveat that resource quality is also an important factor in teachers’ PDC. Indeed, Gueudet et al. (2013) pointed out that a teacher’s PDC is dependent on curricular resources to some extent, because each resource has different affordances and constraints. Decisions about what to include, delete, or alter are influenced by a variety of factors including “teachers’ contexts, their students’ needs and strengths, and their learning goals, knowledge, beliefs, identities, and orientations” (p. 797). Gaps in pedagogical content knowledge, content knowledge generally, students, and context, then, can all impact PDC and teachers’ ability to design coherent instruction (Trinter & Hughes, 2021). Novice teachers have an especially difficult time developing PDC right away, as they are at the beginning stages of their development as teachers and, as Nolen et al. (2011) pointed out, “Learning to teach happens in multiple settings over a period of years” (p. 88).

Boundary crossing and pedagogical design capacity are both based on the Vygotskian notion that artifacts (or objects) help mediate action (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Brown, 2009). Brown attested that “a key feature of artifacts is that they assist people in achieving goals they could not accomplish on their own” (p. 19). Understanding boundary objects as curricular artifacts that mediate activity in the classroom, I positioned materials found on TpT and Pinterest as boundary objects that, for Hannah, became “plastic enough to adapt to local needs” (her student teaching classroom) “yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). Despite the plasticity of boundary objects, however, “our ability to act on reality is inherently limited, or constrained, by the tools we use,” thus impacting curriculum depending on a teachers’ PDC (Brown, 2009, p. 20). As a result, impacts of curricular materials can be a result not of curricular quality, but a teachers’ PDC. In the discussion, I explicate how these theories help to illuminate Hannah’s unit planning with TpT and Pinterest.

Methods

This study followed a qualitative case study design (Merriam, 2009, p. 5), and all necessary institutional approvals were acquired and abided by. Case studies explore a “bounded system” in depth (Creswell, 2013, p. 40; Miles et al., 2014) and have been recommended as ideal ways to study teachers’ use of curriculum materials (Polikoff et al., 2018). Hannah’s teaching of one elementary social studies unit in a first-grade classroom is a bounded system, and the task of decision-making around curriculum and instruction a “contemporary phenomenon … within its real-life context” (Yin, 2009, p. 18). My goal was to understand how student teachers make decisions around choosing content and instructional methods, making case study involving observation, interviews, and document collection a suitable research design.  

Case study research design was chosen because of its ability to “illustrate the complexities of a situation” (Merriam, 2009, p. 30). Many factors contribute to how teachers make decisions around curriculum, which the theoretical framework of this study further illustrates. Further, because “our experiences are rooted in context” (Merriam, 2009, p. 31), case study as a framework helps to highlight the contextual factors that matter for in the lived experience of the research participant.

This study sought to ascertain the reasons why a teacher made particular decisions and how those decisions unfolded throughout a unit. Yin (1994) explained that case studies are particularly helpful for these kinds of investigations.  Given that we do not yet have much scholarly understanding as to how and why teachers use TOMI materials, case study design can “spread the net for evidence widely” (Merriam, 2009, p. 33), the findings of which can lead to a more narrowed focus in future studies. 

 Context

This research took place in a first-grade classroom of an elementary school serving grades K-5. Three hundred thirty-nine students attended the school at the time of the study, of which 95% identified as white, 2.7% as two or more races, 1.5% as Hispanic, 0.6% as American Indian, and 0.3% as Asian; 14.2% of the students received free or reduced lunch. The school is rated within the top one third of the state’s schools and sits in a rural area adjacent to cornfields in a small town approximately a half-hour drive from a large, public, research-intensive university in the mid-Atlantic region of the US. The district serves approximately 3,000 students through six schools. The elementary school hosts student teaching interns for the university, although only one student, Hannah, was placed there at the time of this study.  

Before beginning this study, I served as Hannah’s instructor for the elementary social studies methods course. Interested in how students in my courses were taking up the content and pedagogy of the class, I sought through this research to better understand how they made decisions around content and instructional methods when they entered student teaching and what factors influenced that decision-making. I recruited participants to this study after the close of the fall semester and invited every student in my methods courses to participate.

Hannah, a senior elementary education undergraduate, readily agreed and invited me to visit her classroom.  Herself a white, middle class young woman from a small town within an hour’s drive from the university, Hannah felt comfortable in the school environment. At the time of this research, Hannah was in the final semester of her undergraduate program and had completed a host of methods courses, including social studies methods. The final semester of her degree program consisted of a full-time student teaching internship under the direction of a mentor teacher and university supervisor. She was also taking a three-credit student teaching seminar at the time with other student teachers in her cohort.  

I approached the methods class that Hannah took with a focus on inquiry-based social studies instruction (Swan et al., 2018) and civic engagement. A core text in the course at the time was Young Citizens of the World: Teaching Elementary Social Studies Through Civic Engagement (Zevins & Boyle-Baise, 2009), and the culminating project in the course asked students to plan a 3-day mini-inquiry using the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework, a lesson and unit design model with an inquiry orientation (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013; Swan et al., 2018).

Instruction about the TOMI was not part of the course. The larger study of which Hannah was a part explored, in general, the decision-making processes of elementary teachers while teaching a social studies unit. While I expected to see the C3 Framework and the inquiry framework in my observations and interviews, to my surprise Hannah invited me into her classroom with no intention of using the C3 Framework or the model of inquiry-based teaching she had learned in my course. As I discovered Hannah’s curricular influences, the salience of the TOMI to Hannah’s planning and teaching took precedence in my analysis of the data and made Hannah a distinct case within this larger study.

Data Collection

Case studies require multiple data points. Merriam (1998) explained that the three most common data points in case study include interviews, observation, and document collection, each chosen by the researcher for a particular purpose. This study made use of each of these three types of data: observation field notes, interviews, and document collection. Interviews were conducted to explore the decision-making process Hannah engaged in as she designed her social studies unit and taught the lessons. I observed Hannah teach in order to ask more precise interview questions about her decision making, as teachers make decisions in the moment of teaching rather than following a script from a lesson. Finally, I collected the unit plans Hannah wrote to analyze the second research question regarding curricular coherence. This combination of datapoints allowed for me to triangulate emerging findings with Hannah through ongoing analysis and data collection (as recommended by Merriam, 1998; Patton, 1990).

I observed Hannah teach half of a 12-day social studies unit focused on the topic of community. She submitted this unit to her university-assigned student teaching supervisor, although the supervisor was never present in the room for the lessons I was able to observe. The unit stretched over a 1-month period, as social studies was taught alternatively with science or sometimes not at all. The title and objectives for each lesson of the unit can be found in Appendix B. At times, Hannah’s mentor teacher, Mrs. Raven (who did not consent to be interviewed), would ask Hannah to teach social studies at an unplanned time, therefore making it impractical for me to observe every lesson.

Before the unit began and after the close of the unit, I conducted pre- and postinterviews with Hannah, lasting 30-45 minutes. Before and after each lesson I also interviewed Hannah about her decision-making processes, using my observation notes, if available, as prompts. These interviews lasted between 5-20 minutes. On days when I could not observe, Hannah called me on the telephone both before and after her lesson to complete the interviews. I relied on her lesson plan to ask her specific questions in these instances. On one occasion, I was not able to conduct a pre-interview before Hannah taught. In total, I conducted 25 interviews with Hannah over a 1-month period, observed six lessons, and collected each of her lesson plans as well as photographs of class handouts, children’s books, and anchor charts Hannah used while teaching.

Data Analysis

With many data points, I employed multiple methods of data analysis. I made use of constant comparative analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) to analyze the interview data. Constant comparative analysis begins with identifying incidents in the data, comparing those incidents, and identifying categories derived from those patterns. Merriam (1998) explained, “Devising categories is largely an intuitive process, but it is also systematic and informed by the study’s purpose, the investigator’s orientation and knowledge, and the meanings made explicit by the participants themselves.” (p. 179).

To begin, I read each interview multiple times and coded each interview with in vivo codes. Using those in vivo codes, I began comparing incidents across the case record. To capture these patterns, I wrote analytic memos after I read each interview and began organizing Hannah’s statements based on their relationship to each research question. I organized the in vivo codes into larger categories during second cycle coding. An example of the code book is included in Appendix A. After developing a series of categories as presented in the findings, I relied on the study’s purpose and theoretical orientation of Pedagogical Design Capacity and boundary crossing to make sense of the patterns I identified, which I share in the discussion. The coding process was essential to understanding and breaking apart the data I collected, but a holistic reading of Hannah’s decision-making process and the axial relationships between the codes and categories was also just as important. Hannah’s decision-making was complex and influenced by multiple and connected factors.  

To make sense of the lesson plans Hannah created, as well as my field notes of observations, I relied on the university and state-approved teacher education performance framework provided to supervisors of Hannah’s teacher education program, as well as interviews with Hannah to pinpoint issues with curricular coherence. I paid particular attention to the first and second domains of the framework: “Planning and Preparing for Student Learning” and “Teaching.” Framework indicators include items such as the following:

• The teacher develops and selects appropriate instructional goals and objectives.  
• The teacher selects, adapts, and/or creates appropriate instructional resources and materials, including instructional technologies.  
• The teacher assesses student learning in multiple ways in order to monitor student learning, assist students in understanding their progress, and report student progress.  

Categories identified in the coding process such as “student confusion” or discrepancies between the stated objectives written into lesson plans and the goals Hannah shared in interviews helped me to pinpoint where instructional goals, resources, and assessments may not have been in alignment. While I read each lesson for the indicators in the performance framework, these lesson plans served largely as supplemental data, secondary to what occurred during the teaching of the lessons but illustrative of inconsistencies in the planning process.

Findings

Through this study, I sought to understand what led Hannah to use TpT and Pinterest as she planned her social studies unit, how she wove resources from those sites into her lessons, and how the use of those resources impacted curricular coherence. Thus, I organize my findings around each of these three domains.

In this section, I first report what led Hannah to use TpT and Pinterest to plan the first-grade unit focused on communities. Then, I explain how she integrated resources from TpT and Pinterest into her lesson plans as well as the enacted curriculum. Finally, I describe how resources from TpT and Pinterest impacted the coherence of her unit in terms of meeting her objectives, aligning with the state social studies standards, and effectively assessing learning. In the discussion, I report an analysis of these findings in light of the theories of boundary crossing and pedagogical design capacity.

Factors Leading to Hannah’s TpT and Pinterest Use

A variety of factors led Hannah to use TpT and Pinterest, including a sense that she needed to meet her mentor teacher’s requests and expectations, a lack of social studies curriculum and mentor support, a perception that her social studies methods coursework had not prepared her for the reality of a first-grade classroom, and her desire to teach with hands-on activities.

Lack of Curricular and Mentor Support

Meeting her mentor teacher’s expectations loomed large over Hannah’s decision making. Hannah’s mentor, Mrs. Raven, chose the topic for the unit and suggested a lesson trajectory following the expanding horizons curriculum (LeRiche, 1987), starting with the concept of communities that would be more familiar to students, like the neighborhood, and expanding outward. However, Hannah explained that she “didn’t really have a lot of time to sit down and talk” with her mentor before beginning the unit. “So that’s why I’m also worried, because I’ve tried to sit down [and talk], but it doesn’t work. I was hoping it would be, like, more sit down, we can structure it together, just so I know what she wants.”Mrs. Raven did not offer Hannah any resources she had used to teach the topic in the past and no social studies curriculum existed at the school. Hannah told me, “To be honest with you, this was a very hard thing for me to do because there was no curriculum. I didn’t know how to go about it. That was really difficult.” She continued,

I didn’t know if I was teaching the right thing ever. I was always just so worried about is this what I’m supposed to be doing? Or should I have done something else? That’s all I was thinking about, so I feel like that just affected a lot, because I didn’t know.

When I asked her if this influenced how she chose resources, she said, “Yeah, I was trying to make sure it was okay, like to please. I was always still worried.”

Further, Mrs. Raven did not often teach social studies, so Hannah was left with no curriculum, little guidance, and slim experience seeing social studies in action. She explained after one lesson, “I felt myself getting frustrated because I knew I had to do this [a mapping activity] for a certain lesson, but I didn’t know how to go about doing it.” When I asked Hannah how her social studies methods course prepared her for this situation she explained, “It’s different. You’re just thrown into something, so I’m not thinking about that.” Hannah admitted, “You know, I was all over the place. I feel like I had nothing really to base anything off of, so I went to TeachersPayTeachers and Pinterest had stuff on there.” There she found not only lesson activities, but videos of experienced teachers explaining how to use their materials in the classroom. She explained,

Like that one lady who…she even has a video on the whole thing. It was so cool because I got to see what she was doing, how she used it, so I feel like those things are really ideal to use in the classroom because it’s all set up for you, and then you can switch it the way that you want to.

Thus, without guidance from her mentor or methods course, she turned to the internet, where she could identify products and curriculum as well as an experienced teacher who could take her through how to use the materials.

The Presence of Hands-On, Age-Appropriate Activities

Turning to TpT and Pinterest made sense to Hannah, as she wanted to include age-appropriate, hands-on activities in her lessons, and those sites allowed her to search for grade-level specific activities. She explained, “I like it to be more hands-on for them. I feel like when I talk, they get bored. The more that they can do, the better for everything else.” When I asked Hannah what she looked for on TpT and Pinterest, she said, “A lot of hands-on activities pretty much. I feel like that was my go-to for that.”

Out of the 12 lessons Hannah wrote, she included hands-on activities from TpT and Pinterest in 10 of the 12, ranging from bulletin board crafts to station activities to matching cards to simple drawing activities. Some of these activities she chose because she saw her mentor teacher use them in other subject areas. When I asked her why she bought one station activity focused on using task cards to teach state-level symbols, she explained, “Because they’ve done it before. So they knew.…I thought it would be easier for them to listen if they already know how to do it, because she does them [task cards] a lot.”  She also found anchor chart examples that would describe concepts to students in terms they understood. When I asked where Hannah found the definition of a map, she said,

It was on Pinterest. It was. Well, I had to try to figure out how to explain a map without it being too confusing. So, I kept looking for all these different things of like, “map for first graders.” And that popped up on one of their charts, so I was like, “Oh, that’s good.”

For Hannah, TpT and Pinterest served as places where when she lacked curricular materials elsewhere, she could find age-appropriate language and hands-on activities that she was confident her students could complete.

How Hannah Integrated TpT and Pinterest Into Lesson Planning

After finding materials on TpT and Pinterest, Hannah set about configuring them into a lesson plan. Hannah’s process for integrating materials from TpT and Pinterest into her lessons followed a general process:

The Internet is just my best friend. I just start typing in things and then look what other people did, and then things just start flowing together. I’ll take one thing from one place and then another thing from another place and put it together and make it my own thing.

First, she sought out an activity on TpT or Pinterest that addressed the topic of the lesson. After finding an activity, she sought out a book or video that would help introduce the content. She would then seek out a worksheet or craft that students could do as a way to close the lesson, often incorporating drawing and coloring. She explained that for each activity she “was trying to figure out how do I…so I have my hands-on activity but how do I get to teach that hands-on activity. What do I need to build up to make them get to that?” For example, reflecting on a lesson about continents, she explained,

I found an activity where they glue each continent on a plate that’s colored in blue and I was like, “How do I teach so they learn what is what?” I found another thing online. It was a video. I thought a video would be good for visual learners. It’s him…this guy, the teacher is explaining where everything is, giving them mnemonics to where everything goes. Yeah, so that’s how I learned to do that, I have a video and a song I thought I’d do.

Reflecting on another lesson, Hannah explained how she pieced together a demonstration with crayons with a self-portrait as assessment. After deciding on activity and assessment, she then found a book online that would emphasize that humans are diverse: “I was looking for books. I really just typed in books about diversity for children.” Standards were an afterthought, as Hannah reflected:

I think that’s where I messed up. At first, I started to add things that weren’t.…I wasn’t really thinking about it [standards]. I feel like sometimes that’s the last thing that I put in there. I make the lesson and I think, “How does this fit in?”

Ultimately, Hannah knew this was not the way to go about unit planning and lamented that often she was just trying to check boxes off the lesson plan template provided through her student teaching supervisor, combining the TpT and Pinterest materials with the lesson plan template she was familiar with to meet the demands of her new environment.  She explained,

I feel like when I went into student teaching with a different thought of what it was going to be, more of “I would do it based on how I feel like I would be a good teacher,” but now I’m conforming to how they are and how they teach it [the other first-grade teachers], what our supervisor gives us, what the Education Department has given and thinks how you’re supposed to teach it.

Confined by the lesson plan templates and expectations from both mentor and supervisor, Hannah sought out materials that she imagined would bridge all of these expectations and wove them together to create her “own thing.”

The Impact of TpT and Pinterest on Curricular Coherence

Hannah’s process of finding an activity on TpT and Pinterest, planning how to prepare students for the activity, and then finding standards to fit what she had planned led to curricular incoherence throughout the 12-day unit. Serving an “activity first” mentality, TpT and Pinterest led Hannah to base her lessons around a “fun” or “cute” activity that directed learning, rather than the more linear path taught in her teacher education program that encouraged aligning standards, objectives, activities, and assessments in a coherent and connected thread. Cute activities replaced formative assessments, making it difficult for Hannah to identify whether students met stated objectives, creating student confusion in the process. 

Student Confusion

Searching on Pinterest and TpT for curricular materials led Hannah to activities that used metaphors to teach concepts like diversity and community. Making sense to her as an adult, Hannah uncritically infused those activities into her lesson plans without accounting for how first-grade students might be unprepared to understand metaphor. One of these activities occurred on the first day of the unit, when Hannah’s lesson plan objectives included the following:

• Students will recognize what diversity is.
• Students will begin to notice that different people make up a community.
• Students will be able to draw and write what makes them different, special, and unique.

Verbally, Hannah shared that her goal was for students “to realize that they’re unique, they’re special, and they’re all different.” To introduce the concept of diversity, Hannah poured out a box of crayons on the carpet and asked students to identify their similarities and differences. She had previously broken some of the crayons and torn the paper wrapping on others. She explained,

I’m hoping that they see more differences, and then I’m going to introduce diversity. I know they’re not going to know what it is because none of them wrote it on the pretest, so I think I’ll have to just give the answer.

Hannah’s goal was to illustrate that humans are different and diverse, just like the crayons, and thus, use this demonstration to define diversity. She followed up the activity by defining diversity and then reading The Crayon Box That Talked by Shane DeRolf (1997). As an assessment, Hannah asked students to create a self-portrait using all the crayons from their individual crayon boxes to further illustrate a need for all of the crayons and, with them, a need for diversity. After the lesson Hannah struggled as she reflected on how the lesson went. She realized that students did not understand that the crayons were a metaphor for human diversity and even questioned the metaphor herself as she read The Crayon Box That Talked to the students:

So, I read the book myself and thought about how I could say it to them to make them understand differences. Like why the crayons were different, why they didn’t like him [a crayon in the book] at the beginning. But then when I was saying it, it wasn’t making any sense to me either. I was like that thing [the crayon activity] was so confusing. 

When asked if she thought students learned what was intended, she reported that during the lesson she thought, “Wow, they’re stuck on the crayons right now, and I don’t know how to switch them over to that’s the same for humans.” In other words, she could not find the words to effectively explain that the diversity in the crayon box was similar to the diversity of humans. By the next lesson she had decided to move on from crayons, exclaiming, “I feel like they were getting confused with it. So, I’m trying to move on from it. Because it’s just too confusing”

A similar problem occurred during Lesson 5, when Hannah intended for students to understand that there are many important members of a community with differing roles and responsibilities. She found an activity on Pinterest that would introduce the concept of a community working together by demonstrating that ripping one piece of paper is easy but ripping a stack of many papers is more difficult. She explained that she wanted to see “if they can tell that I’m trying to get community. So that when all the papers work together, just like all the people work together in a community, we’re able to create something strong.” She followed this activity up with reading the book Franklin’s Neighborhood by Paulette Bourgeois (1999), which highlighted different community members who made Franklin’s neighborhood special. When reflecting on the lesson, Hannah explained,

I don’t think they got it. I don’t know. I feel like I shouldn’t have started the way that I did with the paper. In my mind it makes more sense. I’m going to stop using objects to explain us. I feel like they can’t really, when they see the paper, they’re not able to visualize in their head that like this is us, you know? They’re just seeing the paper. Just like the box of crayons. People keep bringing up the box of crayons, and how they’re all different, but they’re still not understanding that we are the crayons.

Reflecting after teaching, Hannah could see her students were confused, and she connected that confusion to the types of activities she found on TpT and Pinterest. Ultimately, these activities at first seemed fun and engaging when Hannah was browsing Pinterest and TpT but proved to be more confusing than clarifying for students, causing continued confusion throughout the unit.

Straying From Objectives and Standards

Relying on materials from Pinterest and TpT also led Hannah away from her originally stated objectives and the first-grade social studies standards. Hannah’s mentor asked her to teach a unit about communities, yet in her browsing of the Internet she was swayed by the “cool” activities she found. She explained to me at the end of the unit, “I don’t even think I really needed to do diversity because that wasn’t my unit. My unit was communities. That’s what I was given to do, so I don’t know.”

When I asked Hannah, “Did you do diversity because of the crayon thing that you found?” she replied, “Yeah, probably. I liked it, I mean it was cool and I think it’s important for them to know that they’re all different from each other.”

Yet despite this initial desire to include diversity within communities into the unit, the focus on diversity fizzled out soon after the crayon box activity. Hannah mentioned diversity in only the first three lessons and then again during the 11th lesson. She lamented “I wanted to [include diversity more], and then I completely forgot [to include diversity].” This omission resulted in students failing to explain diversity on the posttest. As Hannah explained, “That was the number one thing they didn’t know.” Hannah had a piecemeal approach to planning, which she told me “would change what I was doing if I saw an activity that went well.” This led to an initial enthusiasm that quickly faded when resources that seemed to fit with the new topic of the day appeared through Google and YouTube searches, steering her in new and different directions. Another example of Hannah straying from objectives occurred later in the unit during Lesson 9, when Hannah taught a lesson focused on the United States as an organized community. For this lesson, Hannah was excited to use an activity found on TpT, in which students receive a paper passport and suitcase and pretend that they are flying to various national symbols and locations in the United States. At each station, students read about the symbol or national site. She explained,

So, I have a little suitcase for them that I made. I didn’t do the passport because I felt like it would just take too much time for them to do to stamp it and everything when I only have 30 minutes. So, I made them the suitcase, which they’ll just glue everything into. I actually found.…I was typing in YouTube trying to find videos, and then her [the online TpT seller’s] video popped up of how to teach about it, so I watched it, and I was, like, “Oh, this sounds good.” So that’s how I did it.

She explained to me that the goal of her lesson was for students “to know that they are a part of the community of the United States,” although her chosen standard focused on identifying national symbols and her written objectives included the following:

• Students will be able to write facts about the places and symbols they read about.
• Students will identify places in the United States that are important.

While related, teaching that students are part of the community of the United States and teaching national symbols are different aims for a lesson. When introducing the lesson, Hannah explained to students that the United States is another community they are part of and that they would be flying around to different places in the United States. For the remainder of the lesson, which constituted the bulk of the time allotted, students explored symbols like Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, writing notes in their paper suitcase. At the end of the unit, Hannah admitted that she had not included questions about American symbols or landmarks on the pretest or posttest she created at the outset of the unit but chose the activity because of the guidance offered by the TpT seller who had created videos about how to teach the lesson. When reflecting on the use of this activity, Hannah found it more salient to reflect on what the resources did for her — offer guidance around how to teach — rather than how the activity led her students away from the objective to learn how the United States is a community, underscoring her rationale for turning to the materials in the first place.

TpT and Pinterest Activities Replacing Assessments and Student-Led Questions

A final, connected impact of Pinterest and TpT on curricular coherence was the way Hannah allowed the activities found on these sites to ultimately replace assessments or simply take time away from her ability to authentically assess students’ knowledge and questions. In every postteaching interview, I asked Hannah if students met the learning objective and how she knew. Repeatedly she used the phrase “I hope” when answering this question, lacking concrete evidence for her to answer with more confidence. For example, after Lesson 1, I asked Hannah if students had met the objective of learning to recognize what diversity is. She replied, “I think they did understand diversity because they brought it up. I hope that worked out well. I don’t know.”

The following lesson, which focused on diversity across different family types, she shared a similar sentiment: “I think they’re understanding that families are different.…I’m going to hope that that’s happening. And then also I do that all the time, just hope.” During that lesson, Hannah explained that her goal was for students to “see that families are also different and that their family has something special about them too.” Her written objectives included the following:

• Students will illustrate a picture of their family.
• Students will be able to identify one reason why their family is important to them.
• Students will be able to identify that their family is different from other families.

Her assessment, a TpT activity that she planned to post on the hallway bulletin board, asked students to draw a picture of their family on paper cut into the shape of a house, using the roof of the house to write why their family was unique. Yet, to meet her objectives, students would need to go one step further to compare their families to other families and explain that families are different. Moreover, because Hannah wanted to post these crafts in the hallway, she ignored many student questions about families and diversity that were spurred by the reading of a picture book about diverse family types and asked students to move from the carpet back to their seats without answering their questions. When I asked her why she did this, she explained, “It’s going to take them awhile, and they’re going out in the hallway, so I don’t want them to look bad.” While students worked on their drawings, Hannah prioritized gluing the roofs on houses for the hallway display rather than following up with students who had questions at the carpet. Student learning became secondary to the craft.

Later, in a “spur of the moment” lesson that Hannah taught to follow-up on confusion from Lesson 5, a similar issue involving assessment occurred. This impromptu lesson was not part of Hannah’s formal lesson planning she submitted to me or her supervisor. During the lesson pre-interview, Hannah explained her objectives were “that they understand that they’re all part of a community, there’s different communities, and there’s people in our community that help us with survival.” In other words, Hannah was aiming to teach about community helpers and jobs in the community. She found an activity on TpT to teach about different community helpers in which students were given cards with different job titles and job descriptions on them and were supposed to find their match in the classroom.

She paid $5 for the activity on TpT, saying, “It better be real good” for the amount of money it cost. She then explained “After that, we’re going think about all the different jobs, if we get there, and then they’re going to do a worksheet that they get to pick what job they would do.” I asked her how she decided on these two activities. She responded, “I was actually just looking for things on the computer and that’s what popped up, and I thought it would work well.”

Yet, given Hannah’s objective to have students acknowledge that there are people in our community that help us with survival, asking students to essentially identify their favorite job or the job they would want to do as assessment failed to give her adequate insight into whether students understood the concept of community or the essential role of many community helpers. Hannah recognized this when I asked her after the lesson if students learned what she intended. She responded, “I don’t know if they really understood all the jobs.” However, even if she realized that the activity did not meet all her needs for the lesson, Hannah said, “I spent money on this, so it had to work. I did really like it but at the same time, I did settle for it because it was the only thing I found.” Hannah, then, was willing to sacrifice curricular coherence in order to not waste her money and be able to fill the gaps in her own knowledge of how to teach the topic of community helpers.

Discussion

Through this study, I sought to understand Hannah’s decision-making process. Specifically, I sought to understand what led Hannah to use TpT and Pinterest as she planned a social studies unit, how she integrated resources from those sites into her lessons, and how using those resources impacted the coherence of her lessons and unit. In this section, my aim is to illuminate the findings through the theoretical frames of boundary crossing and pedagogical design capacity, closing with implications for practice.

TpT and Pinterest Resources as Boundary Objects

My first research question explored why Hannah used TpT and Pinterest to plan her unit. The theory of boundary crossing is helpful in shedding light on her decision-making as well as the allure of TpT and Pinterest to Hannah.

As a student teacher, Hannah entered new, unfamiliar territory in the first-grade classroom and sought out boundary objects that could help her traverse the boundary between her university learning, her estrangement from K-12 settings, and the realities of the elementary classroom. In the absence of curricular or mentor support and looking for materials that have been appropriate in other first grade classrooms, TpT and Pinterest appeared to be those objects capable of mediating her transition into student teaching. Materials found on TpT and Pinterest operated for Hannah as boundary objects that served as a “means of translation” to make sense of new and uncertain expectations (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). The resources offered Hannah a glimpse into how and what other first-grade teachers taught, particularly as she felt “kind of lost” and wondered “is this what I’m supposed to be doing?”

Those wonderings make sense in light of Bauml’s (2016) warning that “prospective elementary teachers may observe very few social studies lessons during field experiences, and the lessons they see may be textbook based (Zhao & Hoge, 2005), emphasize literacy skills (Boyle-Baise et al., 2008), or trivialize opportunities to teach rich social studies content by focusing on making lessons “cute” or “fun” (DiCamillo, 2010; Slekar, 2009)” (p. 55).  

Suchman’s (1994) definition of boundary crossing, when professionals “enter onto territory in which we are unfamiliar and, to some significant extent therefore unqualified” (p. 25), can clarify Hannah’s need for translational materials absent pedagogical models. Using these resources helped Hannah navigate unknowns and take instructional risks in ways she believed methods coursework and her mentor teacher’s social studies instruction had not. The materials fit her lesson plan template, and many of the structures used in the activities were structures she had already witnessed her mentor use to teach in other content areas. At least in the planning stage, the materials were able to provide a bridging function, making sense to Hannah and, she presumed, her mentor teacher. They seemed to her to be “typical” first-grade content and activities occupying, as boundary objects do, “several intersecting worlds” and satisfying “the informational requirements of each” (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 134).

TpT and Pinterest Resources as Failed Boundary Objects

Despite the boundary crossing potential of TpT and Pinterest for Hannah, TpT and Pinterest resources failed to fully serve as boundary objects, causing student confusion and leading Hannah away from her stated objectives and state standards. While the possibility exists that TpT and Pinterest materials could be boundary objects for some teachers, boundary objects can be “perceived or used differently over time, at one time enabling communication and collaboration across sites, whereas at other times losing their boundary crossing function (Barrett & Oborn, 2010; Pennington, 2010)” (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 141). Indeed, research suggests that boundary objects can “fail when they do not fully or rightfully capture multiple meanings and perspectives” (p. 141). If novice teachers are typically “uncritical users of curriculum materials, relying heavily upon them to determine what and how to teach” (Beyer & Davis, 2012, p. 389), the allure of TpT and Pinterest as boundary objects may be a siren song, steering preservice and novice teachers astray despite their appeal.

Hannah’s role as a novice teacher, lacking in an established sense of professionalism that experience provides, and the lack of PDC novice teachers often display, can help explain the failure of TpT and Pinterest materials to be true boundary objects for Hannah. Recalling Brown’s (2008) definition, that “PDC represents a teacher’s skill in perceiving affordances, making decisions, and following through on plans” (p. 29), PDC requires that a teacher uses knowledge of curriculum materials, learners, subject matter, pedagogical content knowledge, goals, beliefs, as well as other knowledge (see also Chong, 2016; Davis et al., 2011) to make decisions about how to plan and teach. This knowledge “may emerge over time, as familiarity with the pedagogical affordances of available resources and ability to use them increases” (Brown, 2008, p. 31).

Hannah lacked experience seeing social studies instruction in the classroom, a common experience for elementary PSTs (Hawkman et al., 2015), was not provided curricular materials or clear guidance for the unit from her mentor teacher, and did not find her methods course to be preparation for the realities of a first-grade classroom, leaving her without critical knowledge to pull from as she attempted to perceive the affordances and constraints of certain materials. When those resources, like those found on TpT and Pinterest, are poorly aligned to standards and lacking in rigor (Aguilar et al., 2022; Polikoff & Dean, 2018), the ability to perceive affordances — and constraints — of those resources is made more difficult, as teachers’ PDC depends on resource quality (Gueudet et al., 2013; Matić, 2019).

A curricular resource, as a mediating artifact, can “have a significant influence on the nature of the tasks that can be accomplished with it” (Brown, 2009, p. 20). Hannah’s inability to transform the materials she chose into a coherent curriculum, with lesson objectives aligning with standards, activities, and assessments may be, in part, a result of the constraints of those materials in the hands of a novice teacher. Indeed, Aguilar et al. (2022) suggested that the popular materials on TpT may be “profitable” but “not actually…beneficial for students” (p. 8). This research suggests that Aguilar’s assertions may be true in some cases, particularly when those materials are used by PSTs whose PDC is still emergent.

Growing Complexity of PDC in a Digital Age

It is important to note, however, that PSTs often struggle with PDC regardless of the curricular resources they use, and teachers have always made decisions around the curricular materials they teach with. Thomas (2013) noted further that “teachers experience the pull of many factors that influence their beliefs and actions and result in conflicts, contradictions, and inconsistencies” (p. 232). Yet the nature of how Hannah sourced curricular materials through the TOMI adds an extra layer of complexity and concern to the process. Hannah’s method for curating curriculum involved a process of Googling, searching YouTube through keywords, and browsing platforms like Pinterest and TpT, all of which are driven by a profit motive (Scholz, 2013; Srnicek, 2017).

Fyfield et al. (2020) argued that teachers may use “rushed, or uncritical methods” when searching YouTube, resulting in an increased “entanglement of human and software labour” and an increased “influence of the algorithm in their practice” (p. 47). Issues of algorithmic bias within platforms that are driven by a desire to advertise products or simply designed with the racialized and gendered biases of their creators (Cotter, 2019; Noble, 2018), are now necessary concerns for PSTs to consider as an influential factor in the sourcing of their curricular material, complicating what perhaps was once a more straightforward (and less commercialized) task of simply borrowing from the textbook and the teacher next door.

Implications

The findings presented here have implications for elementary social studies teacher education, as well as teacher preparation and professional development, more generally. First, Hannah found her social studies methods course and student teaching experience to be insufficient preparation for teaching, which led her to use online sources to supplement her lessons. Methods instructors should take note of why PSTs turn to sites like Pinterest and TpT to plan lessons (see Sawyer et al., 2020) and then alter practice so PSTs are more likely to find boundary objects within the scope of research-based teacher education coursework. Methods instructors might ask how to support teacher candidates to see instruction as relevant and meaningful beyond the university classroom, partnering with mentor teachers and communities to do so (Zeichner, 2016). This is a particular challenge in elementary social studies methods courses, as PSTs report seeing little social studies in field placements due to its marginalization (Hawkman et al., 2015; Heafner 2018). When they do see that instruction, it may not be of high quality.

Given the well-established challenges of preparing elementary teachers for social studies instruction, elementary social studies methods courses should provide PSTs with the tools to find appropriate curricular materials by engaging PSTs in exploration and critique of vetted websites, inquiry-based social studies curricula, and high-quality education influencers and online teacherpreneurs. A recent survey of elementary social studies syllabi indicated this is not currently a focus in elementary social studies methods courses (Schroeder et al., 2021).

The field of elementary social studies would also benefit from high-quality videos of elementary teachers in action, given Hannah’s desire to see expert teachers explain their instructional materials and the lack of experience teacher candidates have observing social studies in field placements. Housing these materials in a common, easily searchable place —  perhaps even Pinterest, TpT, and other platforms within the TOMI ecosystem — may facilitate accessibility. Rodríguez et al. (2020) recommended “the development of nonprofit platforms and networked communities of practice that capitalize on the affordances of social sharing technologies to promote curriculum development and sharing in elementary social studies education” (p. 519), bypassing the corporatization of curriculum altogether. Whatever the venue, highlighting dynamic illustrations, or “lesson stories,” of social studies instruction in authentic elementary classrooms that is anti-oppressive, coherent, and standards-aligned will support preservice and early career teachers as they seek to access high-quality curriculum and “storytelling” (Curcio et al., 2023, p. 8) around how to teach it.

Lesson stories might mimic the education influencer and online teacherpreneur genre, with videos of practice, explanations of teaching materials, and linked curricular resources, all available for free and updated continuously. Research indicates that early career teachers will turn to education influencers on TeachersPayTeachers.com, Pinterest, Instagram, or other unvetted and unreliable online sources that perpetuate inaccurate histories and use questionable pedagogies (Carpenter et al., 2022; Rodríguez et al., 2020, 2023; Schroeder & Curcio, 2022; Shelton et al., 2020), even when they have a district or school-mandated curriculum provided to them. Provided these tools and spaces, PSTs may be more inclined to see methods coursework as true preparation for their careers and digital repositories of lesson stories as ongoing spaces of support. When paired with intentional and focused preparation for use, these tools and spaces could become sites of possibility for PSTs and early career teachers.

Second, teacher preparation and professional development should focus on supporting the growth of novice teachers’ PDC, specifically when curating materials from online sites. Numerous studies around PDC in math and science education suggest that teachers can develop “a robust pedagogical design capacity” (Brown & Livstrom, 2020) if provided explicit support in doing so. While tools exist to analyze individual resources on Pinterest and TpT in social studies, these checklists do not go beyond analyzing individual resources.

Moreover, as Rodríguez et al. (2020) indicated, while the notable Pinning with Pause checklist “served as a helpful tool to develop critical analysis of online resources, its applicability for preservice teachers was limited, as they had no broader curricular objective nor learning context for reference” (p. 515). Developing guidelines to support PSTs as they work toward creating meaningful, coherent social studies units that may include elements of TpT and Pinterest materials is critical given their popularity in lesson planning. However, the usefulness of any set of guidelines or checklists depends on the knowledge PSTs bring to the tools, the contexts for using the guidelines, and essential lesson planning skills.

PSTs must also develop critical literacy skills and deep content knowledge to analyze online platforms and the materials found there (Schroeder & Curcio, 2022; Rodríguez et al., 2020, 2023). Strong methods coursework is essential for this task and should be the precursor for focused professional development for early career teachers. Anyone invested in the development of PDC in teachers should take note of teachers’ use of curricula from online spaces, particularly alongside the new reality of generative artificial intelligence (Philippakos & Rocconi, 2025).

Finally, this study was limited to examining how one student teacher made use of TOMI sites in her student teaching experience. To have broader implications for this work requires expanded research in this field. More portraits of practice are needed in the form of case studies of student teachers, early career teachers, and experienced teachers to see how different levels of PDC impact how savvy teachers are with their TOMI use. For instance, research could explore the kinds of decision-making early career teachers engage in as they plan new units of instruction and, specifically, how they incorporate the TOMI into their lesson and unit planning. Comparisons across experienced teachers and first-year teachers could yield use insights into the kinds of professional development support teachers need in this domain.

Researchers might also look to explore the possibilities of the TOMI: How are teachers creatively and coherently engaging with curricular materials from the TOMI in ways that enhance student learning? What might be learned from those teachers?

Conclusion

Ultimately, TpT and Pinterest resources operated for Hannah as boundary objects that served as a means of translation to make sense of new and uncertain expectations. The resources offered Hannah a glimpse into how and what other first-grade teachers taught, particularly as she felt “kind of lost” and wondered, “Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?” Using these resources helped Hannah navigate unknowns and take instructional risks in ways she believed methods coursework had not.

They also steered Hannah away from the standards and objectives she initially set out to meet, serving an “activity first” mentality wherein a “fun” or “cute” activity was substituted for substantive and purposeful learning. Drake (2021) argued that researchers must explore “the potential and pitfalls of the new paradigms in teacher-materials interactions in the social media context,” as they “will require new or enhanced conceptual frameworks and additional methods for understanding, in particular, the ways that teachers experience and navigate the landscape of instructional materials on social media” (p. 139). This study has provided an in-depth portrait of one student teacher and her experience using the conceptual frameworks of PDC and boundary crossing to understand why material from TpT and Pinterest were appealing but ultimately lacking in their ability to enhance instruction. These findings call attention to Hannah’s feeling of being “just kind of stuck,” unsure of what to do in her student teaching classroom. Based what is known about the quality of and use of social studies materials on the TOMI and the ever-expanding landscape of curricular offerings in the online space, elementary social studies teacher educators and must continue to develop rigorous coursework that takes into account digital sites of curricular inspiration.

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Appendix A
Example Code Book: “Lack of Curricular and Mentor Support” Category

Category	In-Vivo Code	Quote
Lack of Curricular and Mentor Support	“I’m just teaching to teach for her”	“I felt overwhelmed, and I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything right, because I wanted to make sure I'm touching a lot of things that she wants me to be touching on. When she leaves the room, I feel more comfortable because it feels like it's my [classroom] and otherwise I'm just teaching to teach for her. I have to. I don't know.” (Post-Interview 1)
	“I’m worried when she comes back”	“Cause I feel like we didn't really have enough time to talk, and I was trying to push it in, which I shouldn't have done. But I'm worried when she comes back tomorrow if it's still going on, she's going to be angry.” (Post-Interview 3)
	“I don’t know how she would want me to do that’	I feel like if it was tomorrow maybe and she wasn't here and we were doing the whole lesson on their owns, I would've a little bit different. I feel like I would've made it less of a lesson. Cause it's big. It's a big part where they live. But I don't know. Drawing like a map of their house, I don't know how she would want me to do that. So if it was tomorrow, I feel like I would change it and knock that out. And I was already thinking about that, wishing that I would get to some of it today so I wouldn't do all of it. (Post-Interview 3)
	“Didn’t have a lot of time to sit down and talk”	I feel like it didn't have to be a whole lesson. Unless I'm interpreting it wrong and she didn't want this. But we didn't really have a lot of time to sit down and talk. So that's why I'm also worried because I've tried to sit down, but it doesn't work.” (Pre-unit interview)
	“I just want to know that I'm doing”	“So, I was hoping it would be like more sit down. We can structure it together. Just so I know what she wants. Not even that I need her help making the unit. I just want to know that I'm doing.” (Post-Interview 4)
	“There was no curriculum.”	“To be honest with you this was a very hard thing for me to do because there was no curriculum, so it was hard. I didn’t know how to go about it.” (Pre-unit interview)

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Appendix B
Unit Plan Progression

Lesson 1: We’re Just Like Crayons

• Students will recognize what diversity is
• Students will begin to notice that different people make up a community
• Students will be able to draw and write what makes them different, special and unique

Lesson 2: All Kinds of Families

• Students will illustrate a picture of their family.
• Students will be able to identify one reason why their family is important to them.
• Students will be able to identify that their family is different from other families.

Lesson 3: This is My Home

• Students will understand that there are many different habitats for humans, animals and things
• Students will design an interior and exterior view of their home

Lesson 4:

• Students will be able to explain what a community is
• Students will be able to identify different places within their own community

Lesson 5: Who is a member of my community?

• Students will identify different important members of a community
• Students will identify the different roles the important members of a community do to help maintain a good community.

Lesson 6: Communities in my world

• Students will be able to compare rural, suburban, and urban communities
• Students will be able to determine which community they are from and provide reasons why

Lesson 7: My School is a Community

• Students will identify community/staff members within their own schools
• Students will be able to understand the role the play in our school community
• Students will identify the responsibilities they have as a student and as a good friend
• Students will be able to determine that our school community is rural and give three reasons as to why that is true

Lesson 8: All About Pennsylvania

• Students will be able to identify the state in which they live in
• Students will identify the capital of our state
• Students will be able to give at least one new fact about Pennsylvania

Lesson 9: The United States is an Organized Community

• Students will be able to give their opinion about their favorite attraction they flew to
• Students will be able to write facts about the places and symbols they read about
• Students will identify places in the United States of American that are important

Lesson 10: What is a continent?

• Students will locate major topographical features of the earth’s surface
• Students will identify and label all the continents: North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, and Australia

Lesson 11: There are all different kinds of communities all over the world

• Students will be able to determine one way we are similar to Europe and Asia
• Students will be able to determine one way we are different than Europe and Asia
• Students will understand that there are different kinds of cultures all over the world (in different continents) and not all communities are alike

Lesson 12: I am a citizen who can help save the earth!

• Students will identify what a good citizen is, does, says, and what a good citizen is not
• Students will be able to explain that Earth is the largest community in which they belong to
• Students will be able to give at least one way they can help may the world a better place