Chapter 7: Designing and Teaching a Local History Curriculum to Promote Culturally Relevant Pedagogies in Middle Grades Social Studies

For decades, social studies teachers have been encouraged to implement culturally-relevant pedagogies to foster engaged learning among students. This approach to social studies teaching is vital for student learning, engagement, and achievement, particularly given the major socio-economic and political issues facing the nation and the world in the wake of the social justice protests during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, before teachers can engage in this critical work of developing culturally relevant curricula, we recommend that they engage in action research methodology, which involves a reflective analysis of students’ work, as well as their own teaching, in order to identify potential needs and enact changes that promote cultural relevancy and democratic practices in the classroom. In this chapter, we discuss the process and results of a middle-school-based action research study in order to provide practical steps for educators to develop and teach local history curricula steeped in culturally relevant pedagogies as a means to promote student motivation and engaged learning in social studies. We highlight how the first author created a local history curriculum modeled around the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogies in order to engage an 8th-grade class of at-opportunity students in a low-income, urban school in the Northeast. In order to achieve these goals, she collaborated with an archivist at the local library to provide students with primary sources to examine the socio-economic and political contexts of their neighborhood during the 19th and 20th centuries. Major findings suggest that when teachers experience flexibility and autonomy to make curricular decisions to meet students’ needs through the implementation of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, students can demonstrate greater engagement and motivation in social studies. We provide recommendations for how teachers can develop their own local history research projects as a means to promote culturally relevant and sustaining teaching in middle grades social studies that support students’ (a) demonstration of cultural competence, (b) experiencing academic success, and (c) becoming critically conscious of how socio-economic and political issues impact communities.