Keywords

Cadence Footnote 1 is an enthusiastic pre-service teacher who spent several planning periods conducting think-aloud protocols with high school students, aiming to better understand how they read and interpret conflicting sources of historical evidence. Cadence found that the think-alouds, while time consuming, offered powerful insights into how her students make sense of those sources’ contents, purposes, and contexts; and hence, she proposes to her cooperating teacher a series of small-group think-aloud lessons focused on deep reading of discrepant historical accounts. Yet her cooperating teacher recoils, explaining to Cadence that, with so much material to cover, they simply do not have enough time to spend several lessons looking intensively at just a few documents.

Rebecca is a popular, third-year middle-school teacher whose district is required by the state to implement a set of new and contentious standardized tests. She learns that an upcoming board of education meeting will afford teachers time to share their experiences adapting to the tests and the Common Core State Standards with which they are supposed to align. In conversation with colleagues, Rebecca expresses her intent to participate in the meeting; while she aims to be diplomatic, she believes it is important for community members to hear about the ways in which the tests and standards impact teachers’ instructional priorities and resources. Her department head advises her otherwise, indicating that newer teachers in the district ought to keep their policy positions to themselves, lest they be branded rabble-rousers so early in their careers, without the political capital and job protections earned over time.

Joe, in his tenth year, teaches an elective course called Comparative Religions. He invites a Baptist pastor and a Jewish rabbi to attend a class session and discuss the community service roles of their organizations. During time reserved for questions, one student asks the guests to talk about their positions on gay marriage. While the question is off-topic, Joe permits it, and both visitors respond. The rabbi discusses his journey toward affirming same-sex marriage – a position with which many students nod in agreement – while the pastor explains his viewpoint that, ultimately, gay relationships are condemned in the Bible and could contribute to social instability. After Joe asks the pastor to explain the basis for his claim, one student – a member of the pastor’s congregation – complains to her parents that Joe treated the pastor unfairly, prompting a phone call to Joe’s principal.

Cadence, Rebecca, and Joe are three social studies educators at different points in their careers, yet they all face a common challenge: mediating the political dilemmas of the teaching profession. Their experiences are not fictitious; they are real teachers, in real public schools and classrooms in the United States. Joe’s predicament, which invokes questions about the place of controversial public issues in the school community and teachers’ positioning relative to those issues, is a persistent one in social studies education (Hess, 2009; Kelly, 1986). We often think first and foremost of circumstances like his when considering the intersections of politics and teaching. But Cadence’s problem, which centers on curricular and instructional gatekeeping, or the practice of deciding what educational ends have value and what resources to allocate toward those ends in light of competing interests, also is overtly political (Thornton, 2005). Further, Cadence’s interaction with her mentor demonstrates that making curricular and instructional decisions often requires teachers to negotiate multiple authorities that impact those decisions. Finally, Rebecca’s dilemmas are myriad, implicating local power dynamics, teachers’ advocacy roles and free-speech rights, and the impacts on teachers of high-stakes tests as accountability mechanisms.

Much has been written in the last decade about teachers developing professional knowledge and pedagogical practices. By comparison, the notion that teachers must learn to act politically within the institution of schooling, in situations like Cadence’s, Rebecca’s, and Joe’s, has received less attention. Yet the political nature of teachers’ work – enveloped, for example, in national controversies about the use of standardized tests to evaluate teaching performance (e.g., Baker et al., 2010) and local decisions about how to mediate external curriculum and testing mandates (e.g., Meuwissen, 2013) – is indisputable. Our central argument in this chapter is that professional learning opportunities, from pre-service teacher education through in-service professional development, must acknowledge and powerfully represent social studies teachers’ political roles and, in turn, scaffold their political practices. Put differently, if our charge in this book is to rethink social studies teacher education in ways that advance twenty-first century citizenship as a curricular and pedagogical goal, then we ought to consider seriously what kinds of political stances and capacities social studies teachers should have, and thus, what kinds of stances and capacities teacher educators should support, in order to achieve that goal.

How does what we propose here represent a rethinking of social studies teacher education? After all, we imagine that many teacher educators already acknowledge the political dimensions of teaching, perhaps via conversations with candidates about accountability pressures in schools or course texts that position public education as a space for democratic dialogue and social change. Yet there is astonishingly little empirical evidence that reveals how political practices and discourses actually manifest in social studies teacher education programs. We assume that those practices and discourses are idiosyncratic – that some teacher educators embrace and foster them while others do not. Further, given the National Council of Accreditation for Teacher Education’s (NCATE’s) charge that teacher educators move toward “programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content” (NCATE, 2010, p. ii), it seems conceivable that the political dimensions of teaching might be emphasized decreasingly, if they are emphasized at all, in formal programming. Alternatively, we posit the politics of teaching not as a backdrop, but as practice. We think that pre-service and in-service teacher educators should grant teachers’ political practices, like mediating conflicting professional norms and policy demands and brokering the standings of public policy problems in the curriculum, the sort of status and attention they bestow upon their classroom instructional practices, like assessing student work and coordinating discussions.

We begin with the contention that social studies teaching inevitably involves regular, multidirectional political activity, even though educators may attempt to keep politics out of their work to avoid conflict and accusations of bias. After explaining what we mean by the political roles and practices of social studies teachers, we discuss two examples – one in a pre-service context and the other in an in-service context – that illustrate the kinds of circumstances in which teacher educators might help teachers cultivate those roles and practices purposefully and productively. Our examples help us lay out grounds for this chapter’s final section: recommendations for supporting social studies teachers’ political activity through pre-service and in-service teacher education.

We suggest that teacher educators bear three important responsibilities if they are to prepare professionals for today’s school-institutional contexts. First, they must encourage teachers to situate political activity in strong educational purposes and consider the conceivable consequences of that activity for their students, their communities , and themselves. Second, they must not only facilitate inclusive and productive forums for deliberating contested educational issues, but also they must demonstrate potential pathways from deliberation to impacting policy and practice. Finally, they must help teachers forge and nurture sustainable social and political networks, linking them to resources that support ambitious teaching and meaningful activism.

The Inevitability of Political Activity in Social Studies Teaching

All this talk of resisting policy stresses me out. I didn’t go into teaching to be an activist; I went into teaching because I love history, and I want to help high school kids love history, too. Alexa, pre-service secondary social studies teacher

Like Alexa, many prospective teachers are loath to think that engaging in political action is an upshot of their chosen profession. But of course, teachers act politically all the time, collaterally and overtly, on large and small scales. We define the political as a situation that involves problems of public concern, in which people deliberate and act upon those problems, and in which mechanisms of power and authority play into those deliberations and actions (Dewey, 2012/1927; Latour, 2007). In some circumstances, the mechanisms at hand are governmental, like the state policy that ties Rebecca’s performance evaluations to her students’ standardized test scores. Such mechanisms are subsumed in more circuitous systems of activity, which manifest as “echo chambers” that circumscribe how people think about teaching and its purposes (Cornbleth, 2008). Cornbleth defines echo chambers as “prevailing discourses… [that] delimit, shape, and dominate questions of educational quality, equity, and student achievement. Alternative conceptions of the issues are effectively excluded from the public main stage” (p. 2166). Cadence’s pressure to cover content and scrap her think-aloud lessons, with their considerable potential to strengthen learners’ critical and reflective capacities, is a consequence of an activity system in which narrow curricula and high-stakes testing demands, aligned with a prevailing construct of history as collective memory, steer teachers’ priorities and codes of conduct (Au, 2007; Engeström, 1991).

The State Policy Context

Apple (2011) and Giroux (2009) maintain that public schools in the United States are inherently and inevitably political . The state supports them; they are constructed to benefit the commons; citizens debate what children ought to learn there and what purposes that learning serves; and those factors play powerfully in political narratives. Australian scholars Reid, McCallum, and Dobbins (1998) concur, explaining that any interaction with the curriculum – an artifact of public deliberation over what values and resources should be passed on to future generations – constitutes political activity. Further, school communities are populated with children and adults who come from different backgrounds, understand the aims and consequences of schooling differently, and bring those things to bear in social settings where some voices and experiences carry more influence than others. Joe’s dilemma clearly demonstrates this confluence of divergent values in the curriculum and community .

Giroux (2009) observes that public schools often are held responsible for broader social and economic problems, and thus, the demands placed upon them reflect the particular political discourses of their time. For example, the current movement to regulate curricula and instruction, use carrot-and-stick policies to hold teachers accountable for student achievement, and correct alleged failures by privatizing schools and stripping educators of professional assets reflects public concerns over economic instability and demonstrates elite political actors’ success at perpetuating the narrative that public education primarily bears responsibility for these concerns (Hursh, 2013). This accountability agenda – a product of the longstanding tradition of charging American schools with generating a competitive and efficient workforce – inhibits alternative educational rationales and pathways, including the cultivation of an active, politically tolerant democratic citizenry via situated civic experiences (Kliebard, 1987; Levine, 2012).

The Local Institutional Context

Teachers engage in political activity on a local scale, with school administrators, colleagues, and learners. Alexa’s objection conjures up the old mythology that teachers can remain politically neutral, close the classroom door, and just teach social studies without the interference of external authorities. Dispelling that mythology, Spillane (2002), Stillman (2011), and Stein and Coburn (2008) demonstrate that school leaders filter policy mandates and organizational priorities to teachers via ethos messages, pressure points, material resources, and shared leadership opportunities. We find political activity in the ways teachers adapt ethos messages, advocate for themselves and their students in response to pressure points, utilize and demonstrate the impacts of material resources, and command particular roles within shared leadership opportunities.

The classroom also abounds with authority negotiations, not the least of which is teachers’ dependence on students’ willingness to participate in what goes on there. Cohen (2011) describes a direct relationship between ambitious teaching and potential student opposition: “because changes that are risky and difficult for [students] threaten practitioners’ prospects, they have incentives to define improvement in such a way that [students] will not resist… for modest improvement may be better than resistance or failure” (p. 14). As Pace and Hemmings (2007) report in a review of research on classroom authority, teachers engage in various practices to mitigate risk and attain students’ buy-in, including the use of humor, personal narratives, and collaborative learning opportunities to build social cohesion; the use of bargains and reward structures, including grades, to negotiate goal completion; and the use of contracts and sanctions when those negotiations fail. Via these interactions, students internalize particular political values – for instance, what rules are firm and what rules are malleable, what roles different students play in the classroom, and what kinds of speech are valid and what kinds are not (Bernstein, 1977).

Teaching for informed civic action presents a unique gatekeeping dilemma. We know, for example, that effective civic educators are strongly committed to active citizenship as an educational outcome, and that they prioritize critical media literacy, productive discussion, the development of political tolerance, and participation in governance as means (Campbell, Levinson, & Hess, 2012). We also know that a range of possible civic educations exist, from conveying the structures of government in a traditional classroom setting to connecting learners with their communities to address public problems. Evidence suggests that the latter can strengthen adolescents’ commitments to future political participation; yet many social studies educators take the former approach, using civics and government textbooks as de facto curricula, focusing abstractly on government functioning, and imploring students to be personally rather than socially responsible citizens (Kahne & Sporte, 2008; Lopez & Kirby, 2007). This approach, which has a veneer of non-partisanship, is grounded in curricular and instructional precedent; it requires fewer human and material resources and is less politically risky than an action-oriented approach, but it also is less ambitious and may undermine, rather than promote, civic engagement and complex understandings of public problems (Saavedra, 2012; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Put differently, social studies teachers may think that textbook civics circumvents controversy and, in turn, constitutes an apolitical move, but in fact, doing so conveys several important messages: that political processes are clean and procedural, that uncomfortable disagreements should be avoided, and that civic action largely involves working within rather than changing social, political, and economic conditions (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 1996).

Framing the Politics of Social Studies Teaching

Our point thus far is that social studies educators inevitably are political actors, even those who try not to be. When teachers decide to keep their heads down and quietly acquiesce to the demands placed upon them, they choose to be a more passive kind of political actor – one, we suspect, policy makers appreciate as they hastily launch reform initiatives into the educational milieu. While those policy makers influence teachers’ work by mandating and normalizing particular artifacts and practices, teachers also have the power to resist or reinterpret those things to fit alternative possibilities (Meuwissen, 2013). Activity theory is a useful tool for thinking about how mechanisms of power affect social studies teachers and, in turn, how teachers exercise their agency in light of those mechanisms, “which allows for critique and revision” (Roth & Lee, 2007, p. 210). To more fully understand teachers’ work, it is important to look at the systems in which that work is embedded – specifically, their norms or rules, community dynamics and divisions of labor, and artifacts – and the different directions in which power and authority flow within those systems (Engeström, 1999).

Teachers’ power to act must be framed by purposes that guide how they mediate institutional rules and roles, artifacts, and community dynamics. We find the compass to be a fitting metaphor for these purposes. A compass allows its user to see the pathway from present circumstances to desired ends, yet it also requires that person to exercise agency to navigate obstacles that emerge along the way. This is in contrast to global positioning technologies, which are designed to absolve users of the need for agency through calculations and commands. We are reminded of a memorable scene in the American television series The Office, when two characters drove their vehicle into a lake because their GPS device told them to do so. With strong compasses, teachers are less likely to follow external directives simply because they are issued and more likely to critically assess the ways their own purposes align with those directives and their conceivable consequences.

We suppose that teachers’ compasses are built from parts that are concomitantly professional and political and oriented toward what they perceive are the larger purposes of education. For those who support informed democratic discourse and participation among their students as key pedagogical aims, compass parts would include the principles of pluralism and tolerance, prioritization of learners’ political efficacy and engagement, and the knowledge needed to systematically investigate, interpret, and advance arguments about social circumstances and their political implications (Colby, Beaumont, Erlich, & Corngold, 2007; Hess & McAvoy, 2014; Parker, 2003; Selman & Kwok, 2010). Let us imagine the history teacher who regularly asks students who benefits from particular historical narratives and why it matters that certain accounts are included in or left out of the historical record. She does this because she believes it is important for students to critically approach the vast information they encounter in and beyond the classroom, paying special attention to the purposes and perspectives represented in that information. This orientation could pose dilemmas for her as she makes curricular and instructional decisions, particularly if there is a misalignment between her pedagogical aims and the contents of high-stakes tests that impact others’ judgments of her effectiveness (Leonardatos & Zahedi, 2014). What makes these dilemmas political are the risks associated with speaking honestly and assertively about her practices and intents as a subordinate or colleague of those who respectively administer or support policies that confound them (Journell, 2014). These risks demonstrate the importance of teachers’ compasses. It is crucial, then, for teacher educators to support the assembly of those compasses and effectively represent their relevance to the work of teaching.

Supporting Politic-Positive Social Studies Teaching

You know, seeing politics in a negative light isn’t the only option. It also means trying to positively influence people and contribute to the professional culture in your school; and freeing yourself to make a tough decision because you’ve got strong grounds for it… When you disagree with colleagues, and you decide to hear them out and try to find a way to move forward together rather than just disengaging with them, that’s also a political decision. Steve, fifteenth-year social studies teacher and department administrator

As Steve suggests, there is more than one way to look at the political arena in which social studies teaching takes place . The avoidance narrative, demonstrated above in Rebecca and Alexa’s examples, portrays political activity negatively, as something that generates tension and distracts teachers from their work. On the other hand, acknowledging, understanding, and learning to work within their political milieus could help teachers think more critically about their practices and be intentional and strategic in their public deliberations and actions. It could even help them bring about change in their schools.

What follows are two examples in which social studies teachers and teacher educators unpacked their political circumstances and developed strategies for working within and against them. In the first example, Cadence, Alexa, and their colleagues in a graduate-level, pre-service teacher education program conducted qualitative investigations of their adolescent students’ historical and political thinking and social studies learning experiences, ultimately generating curricular tools and instructional strategies that aligned with the results of their investigations. Their political discourse and compass tuning came during discussions about mismatches between those tools and strategies and the norms, practices, and artifacts that candidates found in their student teaching placements.

The second example centers on a professional development program for middle-level and secondary social studies teachers that involved collaboratively designing, implementing, and refining instructional strategies aimed at strengthening adolescents’ capacities to interrogate and build arguments using historical evidence. Steve, quoted above, was the executive director of that program and took on the challenging role of mediating his district’s increasingly restrictive policy controls with the professional autonomy teachers needed to try new approaches and learn from their professional development experiences. We highlight two teachers in the program, Roz and Elaine, whose participation provided them with a network for mediating and making room for curricular and instructional change within their district’s increasingly stifling climate.

We chose these examples – one pre-service and one in-service – because they demonstrate the importance of teachers’ compasses to their political activities. Further, they reinforce Steve’s characterization of political challenges as opportunities for social studies teachers to act with agency, decisively and influentially, in the interests of their students, school communities , and themselves.

Deliberating Sources and Consequences of Authority in the Pre-service Context

The How Students Think (HST) project is a pivotal component of the first methods course in Olmstead University’s graduate-level, secondary social studies education program. The course runs concurrently with a field experience during which candidates gradually progress from observing and assisting to co-teaching with classroom mentors. For the half-semester project, candidates collect evidence of students’ thinking about and experiences with social studies from several sources, including: (1) classroom observations using a semi-structured protocol that focuses on three different learners’ interactions with the subject matter, the teacher, and other students; (2) structured interviews that compare adolescents’ views about the purposes and processes of learning history and civics with their cooperating teachers’; and (3) verbal reporting protocols with individual learners that require them to read and explain their thinking about conflicting political arguments and sources of historical evidence. Following a series of biweekly discussions about candidates’ progress with the HST project, pairs of pre-service teachers synthesize their findings and design instructional tools that correspond directly with what they learned about adolescents’ historical and civic thinking through the project. Then, they try those tools out in the field.

With striking regularity, the HST project introduces prospective teachers to power dynamics and gatekeeping dilemmas within their placement classrooms and schools. Typically, that introduction goes something like this: by observing and listening to adolescents’ social studies experiences and delving deeply into how they read and interpret historical texts and discrepant political positions, candidates discover unrecognized or underutilized social resources for teaching and learning; yet they also find that the pressures to rush through a relatively fixed curriculum, align classroom assessments with high-stakes tests, and sidestep potentially contentious subject matter along the way inhibit the recognition and utilization of those resources. Further, they learn that few teachers engage in the same kinds of qualitative, systematic investigations of student thinking that the HST project embodies. Clinton explained as follows:

[My cooperating teacher] kept calling [the HST] that university project, in kind of a derogatory way… When I asked her, I mean, doesn’t it make sense to base your teaching on understanding how kids think and learn, she said, of course; I already do that with tests and quizzes and homework. But to me, test and quiz results just don’t serve the same purpose… I tried explaining what I was getting out of [the project], but she just responded like, well, when you’ve got a real teaching job, you won’t have time for that kind of thing.

Clinton’s exchange with his cooperating teacher was steeped in both interactional and institutional politics . Within it, we find a student teacher with very little power cautiously entering a contested space with an experienced adviser who plays a role in his career advancement; we find judgments about how teachers build expertise and attain the authority to make curricular and instructional decisions; and we find echo effects of the imperative to cover curriculum and focus on testable content. On the last two points, it seems that Clinton’s and his cooperating teacher’s compasses were pointed in different directions.

As noted, pre-service teachers and their methods course instructor routinely deliberate on the HST project’s evolving revelations and vexations. Oftentimes, those vexations and the resultant discussions hinge on contested issues and turn toward the political . For example, Joaquin prompted a lengthy conversation with this comment:

I don’t see a lot of people asking the kinds of questions we’re asking [about students’ thinking] and collecting this kind of data. There’s a lot of talk about data-driven decision making, but this isn’t what they mean. They mean tracking test scores and stuff like that, which is fine, but – I don’t know, is it the best way to get to know your students? Probably not. Personally, I think there’s too much having data just to have data.

Joaquin’s comment elicited various responses from colleagues in his cohort. One passionately argued that policy makers and school leaders use data as surveillance mechanisms to remind teachers that those in powerful positions are always watching them. Another keenly observed that no one in her placement school ever invoked data-driven decision making in the context of successful practice: “it’s all about focusing on deficiencies and using data as a cop-out when people start to ask why we’re doing what we’re doing.” Still another expressed frustration with those points of view, explaining that test item analyses and data walls illuminate important patterns of student performance that she and her cooperating teacher might overlook otherwise. “And I don’t mean to sound cynical,” she added, “but if studies like [the HST project] were sustainable in schools, wouldn’t we see more teachers doing them?”

In light of the conversation’s increasingly Crossfire-like tone, the course instructor posed two ideas drawn from Hargreaves and Fullan’s (2012) work – (1) the recommendation that educators “be evidence-informed, not data-driven” (p. 171); and (2) the argument that “[data] only measure what has been tested; and people only test what they feel they can measure” (p. 172) – and facilitated an exploratory discussion around those ideas using a public policy deliberation model (Melville, Willingham, & Dedrick, 2005; Parker, 2003). During that conversation, course participants clarified how and why the discrepancy between being evidence-informed and data-driven is a practical dilemma for teachers. Then, they shared examples of and perspectives on that dilemma, drawing from relevant interactions within their placement schools and discussing the consequences of those interactions. Finally, they articulated goals for gathering and using evidence to inform their social studies teaching and proposed various modes of achieving those goals. Cadence, for instance, suggested that teachers who see value in HST-like studies of students’ thinking might place their findings alongside test item analyses, in settings like department meetings, faculty meetings, and open houses, and use them to engage colleagues, administrators, and parents in conversations about different forms and functions of evidence as a decision-making tool.

We present this example as a singular event, knowing, of course, that the conditions for powerful deliberation develop over time. These conditions include fair and effective moderation, opportunities for trust- and relationship-building, and a foundation of ideological tolerance, all within the context of actionable problems that connect to participants’ values and experiences (Hess, 2009; Levine, Fung, & Gastil, 2005). Yet even in this one circumstance, pre-service teachers began tuning their compasses toward evidence-informed rather than data-driven instruction and considered the trade-offs associated with grounding social studies teaching largely in what is easy to measure. More broadly, they seemed to accept and imagine their roles as political actors in an institution with particular norms, divisions of labor, and policies and practices that reinforce those things.

Networking to Negotiate Institutional Controls in the In-Service Context

Roz and Elaine are middle-level and secondary social studies teachers respectively, who participated in a federally funded, school district-wide professional development program from 2009 through 2013 called Teachers As Historians (TAH). The purposes of the program were to strengthen teachers’ substantive and conceptual knowledge for teaching and pedagogical strategies for supporting adolescents’ historical reading, writing, and investigative capacities. To facilitate these purposes, TAH program coordinators grouped participants according to their grade levels and subject areas into lesson study teams, through which they designed and taught common lessons, gathered evidence of student learning during those lessons, brought that evidence back to their groups for analysis, and then redesigned and implemented follow-up lessons based on their reflections. With support from program coordinators, the teams designed their lessons around historical thinking, analysis, and argumentation practices shown promising in educational research (Bain, 2005; Monte-Sano, 2008; Reisman, 2012; Van Drie, Havekes, & Van Boxtel, 2012; VanSledright, 2002). Around 40 teachers participated in the program each year, with each lesson study team consisting of six to eight participants.

Simultaneously, Roz’s and Elaine’s Lakeside City School District (LCSD) was in upheaval. During the program, an unpopular superintendent who vowed to disempower the union and increase teacher accountability came and went; several schools closed for failing to make adequate yearly progress under federal No Child Left Behind statues, and then reopened under different names and organizational frameworks; the state enacted new teacher evaluation policies that tied teachers’ performance ratings to high-stakes test scores; and the Common Core State Standards came to pass, which brought about a decrease in social studies instructional time in the elementary schools and new expectations for reading and writing competencies in the middle and high schools. Consequently, TAH program coordinators faced a number of contextual challenges in their efforts to help teachers rethink history teaching and learning. They decided to acknowledge those challenges and their implications with participants throughout the program, framing its activities as follows: how do we provide students with new opportunities for powerful historical thinking and understanding while also easing the effects of policies and circumstances that constrain our efforts?

Roz’s and Elaine’s compasses pointed strongly toward that question in the thick of sometimes confounding policy messages and the echo effects they generated. Elaine, for instance, found that TAH program coordinators staunchly supported student discussions of conflicting historical evidence while her school building leaders did not:

Complicated historical problems take time; but we’re not encouraged [by school administrators] to go into that kind of depth. We’re encouraged to get them to pass the tests. And they’re mostly multiple-choice. There’s nothing on those tests like [the kinds of open-ended questions we address in the TAH program]. So the pressure coming from building leaders is, I mean, what do they really have to get into groups and discuss if the goal is really to know enough to answer some multiple-choice questions?

Roz made a similar point, explaining that conflicting priorities among different offices within the LCSD made the process of managing multiple authorities challenging. She noted:

I’m bound by state standards and tests, a city curriculum and instructional format, a required number of assessments per marking period; and now we’re told to do formative assessment certain ways in our classrooms… And we have to test them multiple times because we need test results for this and that, so we know our widgets work… Are you kidding me? Can I just teach and let them dig into something?

Teachers as Historians program leaders and participants represented their work not just as an opportunity to develop their professional knowledge and instructional practices, but also as political activity. Coordinators relentlessly promoted the program’s aims, teacher and student learning goals, and annual evaluation results in the district’s schools, and they worked to prop up participating teachers as curricular and instructional leaders in their buildings. Steve, the program’s executive director, noted, “some principals are completely on board [with the program’s purposes and intents]; some are indifferent, or even opposed to how we do history teaching and learning; and then there are others who just don’t know anything about what we’re doing.” Consequently, Steve and the other program coordinators helped participants adapt their history teaching to, and in some cases resist, school leaders’ priorities and modi operandi. Program leaders and teachers also constructed the lesson study groups as professional networks, through which participants built trust in each other over time via shared experiences and peer critique, and then drew upon that trust to strategize the demands of administrators in their schools. These professional networks served as safe, consistent spaces to conduct the difficult and prolonged work of curricular and instructional change amidst the tumult of shifting state and LCSD policies and priorities.

Networking is an important component of social studies teachers’ political activity – one that teacher educators and professional development coordinators should support overtly. We define political networking as building alliances that: (1) help teachers unpack their schools’ political circumstances; and (2) advance particular educational goals, face down common barriers to achieving those goals, and contribute resources to address those barriers. A key goal within Roz’s and Elaine’s lesson study groups was to satisfy the competing demands of substantive historical investigation and expeditious content coverage. To do this, they took an approach that Cornbleth (2009) calls strategic redefinition, whereby teachers reinterpret educational goals and practices proffered by those in power to advance modifications or alternatives. For instance, Roz’s group couched its lessons, which involved classroom discussions about relationships among historical phenomena (Van Drie, Havekes, & Van Boxtel, 2012), in the Common Core State Standards ’ language of seeking to understand others’ perspectives, evaluating claims and the reasoning behind them, and writing well supported arguments. By collectively underscoring their lessons’ direct alignment with the standards and deemphasizing the implications for covering (or not covering) tested content, Roz and her colleagues positioned their work alongside specific norms and artifacts that administrators valued and to which they also were beholden – a strategy that TAH coordinators encouraged and reinforced by helping teachers adapt policy language to their own pedagogical aims.

Supporting Political Practices in Social Studies Teaching

We talk a lot [in this class] about looking for balance; you know, balanced information, balanced points of view, things like that. But balance isn’t always the right objective, because sometimes one opinion isn’t just as good as another. Some arguments and positions have stronger evidence to support them, or maybe they’re more ethically defensible than others. And it needs to be okay for us to acknowledge that without putting each other down, and without feeling upset for being challenged. Noah, second-year high school social studies teacher, speaking to his Peace Studies class

Noah’s remark came during a class discussion marked by vehement disagreement about whether or not the United States was obligated to intervene during the Rwandan genocide. That disagreement crested when one student claimed that rejecting international intervention because it would cost the United States resources, and because the international community usually “condemns American interference” in the world, is just as reasonable and credible as supporting it on the grounds of seeking justice and exercising compassion for victims. We share this example not only because it illustrates the delicate mediation that many social studies teachers are called upon to demonstrate in their teaching practice, but also because Noah’s comment represents a compelling orientation for teachers’ and teacher educators’ political compasses. Indeed, some positions on learning and teaching have stronger evidence to support them and are more ethically defensible than others.

In the state policy context, for instance, new evidence suggests that value-added models (VAMs) of teacher effectiveness “are not meaningfully associated with the content or quality of instruction,” and thus, basing teachers’ performance evaluations and professional improvement plans on them may be fallacious at best and unjust at worst (Polikoff & Porter, 2014, p. 16). Yet VAMs and the standardized tests that inform them proliferate within states’ and school districts’ teacher evaluation systems, including Roz’s and Elaine’s, fundamentally impacting teachers’ professional priorities and prospects without a clear understanding of what they actually measure. In the local institutional context, the teachers represented in this chapter contend with a number of concurrent and sometimes conflicting factors. They include administrative pressure to condense complex curricula and homogenize students’ writing in ways that align with narrow high-stakes tests, despite evidence suggesting that these approaches may not support powerful social studies learning (Au, 2007; Monte-Sano, 2008). Further, administrators sometimes reinforce these pressures with pacing assessments designed to ensure that teachers follow district-approved instructional units in a timely fashion.

Tensions like these warrant careful deliberation and strategic action. How might teacher educators encourage such things in ways that are politic-positive? Grossman et al. (2009) suggest three core methods associated with fostering teachers’ – particularly novices’ – learning and development. First, teacher educators must clearly and authentically portray specific practices and their implications. Second, they must help novices atomize those practices, so that teachers understand their component parts and purposes, in context. And third, they must generate opportunities for novices to build their own practices via that atomizing process and try them out in real situations. While some have applied Grossman and colleagues’ framework to the development of teachers’ instructional strategies (e.g., Boerst, Sleep, Ball, & Bass, 2011) and curricular visioning (e.g., Conklin & Hughes, 2013), we believe it also works as a way to support social studies teachers’ political practices.

Supporting Productive Political Deliberation and Demonstrating Pathways to Action

Alongside activities like the HST project, which can illuminate school norms and demonstrate the need for effective curricular gatekeeping, case methods are promising tools for deliberating the political practice of social studies teaching (Merseth, 1996). Relevant cases would facilitate analysis of a specific political dilemma, targeting teachers’ choices and constraints, the social circumstances in which that dilemma is situated, the ways power and authority flow within those circumstances, and the conceivable consequences of addressing the dilemma at hand in certain ways. Rebecca’s and Joe’s situations at the beginning of this chapter might constitute reasonable introductions to complex cases, as could Roz’s and Elaine’s professional development experiences. So, too, could larger-scale activities like those described by Johnson and Slekar (2014), who discuss the challenges of building a grassroots coalition via social media , blogs, and other online technologies around resisting the proliferation and inappropriate uses of standardized testing. Activity theory, with its foci on community norms and dynamics, divisions of labor, and mediating artifacts, would be a useful tool for decomposing such cases. Ultimately, we believe it is important for pre-service and practicing teachers to recognize and engage with a range of perspectives on teachers’ political roles, from strategic compliance and redefinition as ways to “work within” to modes of pressure and resistance as ways to “work against.”

Yet the practice of reading and discussing a case does not guarantee productive deliberation, as novice teachers might not fully understand the case, consider the case’s nuances from different points of view, or interpret it on sound evidentiary footing (Cherubini, 2009). Furthermore, cases that invite discussion of controversial political problems could become fruitlessly quarrelsome. Consequently, it behooves the teacher educator to utilize a strong model for deliberating cases of political activity in social studies teaching. One model that teacher educators could adapt is study circles, in which diverse groups of up to a dozen people plus a facilitator use experiential accounts to identify how a problem manifests from different perspectives, explore viable solutions to the problem, and plan a course of action (Scully & McCoy, 2005). Teacher educators, serving as facilitators, might construct such groups around any number of educational problems, inviting pre-service teachers , cooperating teachers, and other relevant stakeholders to meet and talk regularly about contested issues like school race relations or funding and program cuts. Parker (2003) and the authors in Gastil and Levine’s (2005) edited volume lay out several other deliberative models, including National Issues Forums, which bring organizations together around common problems and ground rules for discussing and acting upon them, and town meetings that draw in participants remotely using electronic communications technologies.

As we suggested above, an important upshot of deliberation is public action; yet as Levine et al. (2005) explain, the pathways from small-scale to larger-scale discussion and from deliberation to action are bumpy, in practice. Even teachers who are savvy gatekeepers in their classrooms or effective strategists within their departments may find it difficult to impact larger district, state, and national conversations and initiatives. Granted, most political dilemmas present themselves locally; and oftentimes, public deliberations simply do not compel power brokers to change positions or amend policies. That said, teacher educators might emphasize cases that strongly link deliberation with action, such as the evolution of the standardized testing boycott in Seattle’s Garfield High School from 2012 through 2013. Further, teacher educators can demonstrate the connection between deliberation and action by modeling participation in civic forums, from school board meetings and community working groups to state legislative hearings on education policies, and inviting pre-service and practicing teachers to participate alongside them. Finally, since dialogue and public action overlap – as long as the dialogue is generative and continuous – teacher educators can encourage social studies teachers to listen intently and extensively to policy discussions, to ask powerful, pragmatic questions about the effects of policy on their teaching, and to find ways to share their experiences so the public better understands the implications of policy for learning and teaching.

Helping Social Studies Teachers Cultivate Sustainable Social and Political Networks

Finnigan and Daly (2012) and Bryk and Schneider (2002) convincingly argue that robust social networks, through which peers share knowledge and other resources in high-trust environments, are vitally important to teachers’ growth and effectiveness. Yet we know how challenging it is to cultivate those networks. Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth (2001) explain that fault lines within teachers’ networks can develop around participatory and interactional norms, subgroup identifications, a lack of opportunities for authentic interaction, and the directions of teachers’ compasses, practically and politically. Negotiating those fault lines can take a substantial amount of time, motivation, and effort, but doing so is essential, particularly given the aims of this volume. As Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth (p. 1000) note, “if teachers themselves cannot reclaim a civil discourse and an appreciation and recognition of diverse voices, how can they prepare students to enter a pluralistic world as citizens ?” Further, collaboration within and among teachers’ networks is pivotal. For example, the Stand with Spencerport initiative, which employed community forums and speeches, correspondence and meetings with state officials, and dissemination via websites and social media outlets, convened more than 60 teachers at a New York middle school in an effort to lobby state policy makers to reconsider the implementation of New York’s controversial Common Core tests.

Teacher educators should connect pre-service and practicing teachers to professional development opportunities and advocacy groups through which they might forge powerful working relationships with like-minded others. As Roz, Elaine, and their colleagues in the Teachers as Historians program got to know each other and collaboratively explored the effects of new instructional strategies in their classrooms, their network evolved into a community of practitioners striving to make room for historical investigation in the midst of a sea change associated with new state standards , teacher evaluation demands, and student data management requirements. Those teachers were fortunate to regularly interact with colleagues in their district who experienced similar policy pressures. Others who are more isolated might find encouragement in professional organizations or regional groups targeting specific educational policies and problems.

Though we use the term “like-minded others” to describe membership in such groups, they may be quite heterogeneous, ideologically. For example, several advocacy organizations exist in New York around refusing or “opting out” of the Common Core assessments. Yet while some participants rally around the demoralizing and curriculum-narrowing effects of high-stakes tests and their exacerbation of resource inequities across school districts, others see the assessments and the standards on which they’re based as flagrant government intrusion into the affairs of communities that ought to be able to teach their children whatever they please. This calls up an earlier point: when it comes to the political activities in which teachers participate, the directions of their compasses matter.

Student teaching and new teacher mentorship also can be avenues for reinforcing the importance of political networking. Most teacher educators, we imagine, try to connect their candidates with cooperating teachers who are effective at designing curriculum and instruction, using evidence of student learning to inform their teaching, fostering rich and inclusive learning communities , and communicating with parents and administrators. The same criteria usually apply when administrators link new teachers with mentors in their districts (Yusko & Feiman-Nemser, 2008). To this list of important considerations, we would add another: the strength and visibility of those cooperating teachers’ and mentors’ political activities, within and beyond the school.

Arguably, many experienced teachers reach the apexes of their careers by following the pathway Alexa articulated toward the beginning of this chapter. They keep their heads down, eventually acclimate to their school institutions, and attempt to mitigate political pressures along the way by focusing on classroom instruction. Achinstein (2006) suggests that more politically active mentors can guide new teachers’ compasses in a politic-positive direction and enlarge their political networks. They do this by helping novices read their school climates, ask good questions of the right people, and address points of conflict favorably – three crucial elements of student and self advocacy. Just as a skillful cooperating teacher can point out classroom interactions and instructional nuances that a candidate might not see otherwise, so, too, can she reveal and contextualize subtle political norms and dynamics, concurrently conveying that new teachers are agents who can affect those norms and dynamics.

Conclusion

Rethinking social studies teachers’ interactions with politics means also rethinking the kind of teacher education that supports those interactions. Our argument is not that teacher educators should simply explain to candidates that their chosen profession is a politically charged one. Anyone reading this chapter knows that such explanations, even with striking evidence and seductive details to support them, could elicit nods of interest and concern initially, with little enduring effect on practice. Instead, we believe that teacher educators must do the following things, overtly and repeatedly:

  • They should powerfully represent and atomize political activity in teaching – i.e., multidirectional flows of power and authority among teachers and institutions – and help novices build nuanced, well-reasoned political stances and practices, driven by clear aims that are grounded in what is good for students and their school communities ;

  • They should proficiently facilitate deliberations of controversial issues that affect teaching – framing problems, moderating the rules of engagement, drawing participants into the discussion, and helping participants look ahead toward future action – and encourage teachers to act publicly and decisively via those deliberations;

  • They should help social studies educators cultivate productive and sustainable political networks and demonstrate how pivotal those networks and their resources are to the development of what Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) call teachers’ social and decisional capital; and

  • They should be positive models of political activity themselves, making transparent their own political stances and practices, how they arrived at them, and how they interact with networks to advance them.

We teacher educators know that there are risks associated with these assertions, particularly the last one, which involves acknowledging rather their concealing our own views and commitments while simultaneously trying to ensure that other perspectives are expressed and heard fairly (Kelly, 1986). What, however, are the alternatives? One is steering our curricula and conversations away from political positions and practices – in essence, simply teaching teachers about subject matter learning and instruction and, thus, continuing to nullify the political practices of social studies teaching within the teacher education curriculum. Another is communicating that we all hold equally valid positions on controversial educational issues, which belies Noah’s astute observation that some standpoints are more empirically and ethically grounded than others.

We find neither of these alternatives acceptable at a time when teachers increasingly are pushed out of important policy decisions – particularly at state levels, where flooding public education systems with multiple poorly warranted, rapidly implemented reforms seems to be a national trend. Further, defining and expressing teachers’ political roles and practices clearly represents an open controversial issue in and beyond teacher education. Public discourse proliferates about whether or not teachers should broadcast the implications of policy pressures on their practices (Warren, 2014), let alone actively resist what Yohuru Williams (2014) calls “[bullying] by politicians, pundits, and public administrators, quick to blame teachers for problems in the schools.” During a conversation at a recent academic conference, another teacher educator lamented to one of us:

I can’t think of any other field with such weak political advocacy in response to absolutely withering attacks on its professionals. If the best teachers can do is hope that these attacks just go away on their own, or create a bunch of Facebook communities and collectively complain about how bad things have gotten, we’re doomed.

No matter one’s position on this allegation, it is hard to argue that teachers’ political positions and practices are not complex, contested spaces. While the suggestions in this chapter certainly are meant to support teachers like Cadence, Rebecca, Joe, Clinton, Joaquin, Roz, and Elaine in their efforts to navigate the pressures of social studies teaching, we also hope that teacher educators consider how they might apply to broader arenas of educational politics , which we believe could use a strong dose of active, democratic twenty-first century citizenship .