The Social Studies Curriculum, Fifth Edition: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities

The Social Studies Curriculum, Fifth Edition updates the definitive overview of the issues teachers face when creating learning experiences for students in social studies. Renowned for connecting diverse elements of the social studies curriculum--from history to cultural studies to contemporary social issues--the book offers a unique and critical perspective that continues to separate it from other texts. The social studies curriculum is contested terrain both epistemologically and politically. Completely updated and revised, the fifth edition includes fourteen new chapters and covers the politics of the social studies curriculum, questions of historical perspective, Black education and critical race theory, whiteness and anti-racism, decolonial literacy and decolonizing the curriculum, gender and sexuality, Islamophobia, critical media literacy, evil in social studies, economics education, anarchism, children’s rights and Earth democracy, and citizenship education. Readers are encouraged to reconsider their assumptions and understandings of the purposes, nature, and possibilities of the social studies curriculum.

E. Wayne Ross is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia. He is the coeditor (with Jeffrey Cornett and Gail McCutcheon) of Teacher Personal Theorizing: Connecting Curriculum Practice, Theory, and Research (also published by SUNY Press), and the author of Rethinking Social Studies: Critical Pedagogy in Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship, among other books.