Social Studies Teachers' Willingness to Address Controversial Current Events

• In Event: Politics, Partisanship, and Media in the Trump Era: Impacts on Teachers, Teaching, and Youth Engagement

Abstract

Objective
Social studies educators can play a vital role in helping young people understand current events. Considering how social studies teachers enact this role has always been an important topic for our field to consider. However, recent events, like the politicization of public health and resurgent attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, have created a renewed sense of urgency about the need to understand social studies teachers’ practices around including current events in their curriculum.

Perspective
We know, for instance, that teachers and researchers continue to struggle with issues of approach, disclosure, and managing classroom discussions of current events (e.g., Garrett, 2020; Geller, 2020; Journell, 2016, Schmeichel et al., 2018). As more becomes known about the nexus between emotion and political reasoning (Clark, 2018; Garrett et al., 2020: Jacobsen et al., 2018), it is incumbent on researchers to probe the variety of ways that teachers both do and do not include particular issues, events, or perspectives in their teaching. Teachers’ choices to avoid an issue are just as important to understand as how, why, and through what methods teachers choose to address current events.

Methods
In June 2020, our research team conducted a national survey of secondary social studies teachers to explore how they think about using media and addressing current events topics specifically within the context of their school communities. In our paper, we draw on the survey responses of 135 teachers to explore perceptions of student, parent, and community resistance to teaching current events both in general and in relation to 18 specific topics.

Findings & Significance
In our analysis of teachers’ responses, we found that the 2020 election, COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter protests were the most likely to be discussed while marijuana legalization, the Russia investigation, and tariffs were the least likely to be addressed. In initial regression analyses of the data, willingness to discuss some topics (such as impeachment, restrictions on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, and the #MeToo movement) was associated with ideological beliefs on social issues. For example, socially liberal teachers expressed more willingness to discuss these and similar topics. Three topics (impeachment, family separation at the Mexican border, and LGBTQ+ issues) were less likely to be discussed by teachers who reported being concerned that a parental complaint could have negative consequences for their teaching career. In this presentation, we theorize the relationship between imagined parental complaints and avoidance of classroom discussion as a significant hurdle to the social education needed in the present moment.
Using mixed methods strategies, we further analyzed survey responses to understand how teachers’ perceptions of the gap between their ideological position and the ideology of the students and families in the community in which they teach might shape their views of incorporating different current events. Finally, we describe and analyze teachers' self-reported experiences of complaints from students, parents, or community members about controversial issues they have addressed in their classes and discuss the potential ramifications these objections have on teachers' willingness to address current events within the current social and political context.

Authors

• Christopher H. Clark, University of North Dakota

• Mardi Schmeichel, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• H. James Garrett, University of Georgia