Conference Program

Social studies education is increasingly tasked with helping young people, and those preparing to teach them, navigate complexity, uncertainty, and contested knowledge, while cultivating the dispositions necessary for democratic life (Cohen & Cohen, 2025; Hawkman, 2023; Rodriquez & Swalwell, 2023). In this context, we ask: What does it mean to teach elementary social studies education methods to preservice teachers in a moment marked by political polarization, intensifying global crises, and democratic erosion? How might reflexive journaling operate as a method for democratic learning within social studies education?

Our paper draws on a collaboratively taught social studies methods course where reflexive journaling functioned as a central methodological practice for both instructors and

pre-service teachers. Kathy is a PhD student, Contract Academic Instructor, and former middle school Social Studies teacher. Melissa is an assistant professor and former secondary history teacher. Together, we designed and co-taught the course to 70 pre-service teachers during the winter of 2026 at a mid-sized university in New Brunswick, Canada. Course content included Indigenous education, rights and responsibilities, decision-making, Black histories, place and space, protest and social movements, community, environmental stewardship, and geography.

Grounded in Black feminist theories of knowledge that foreground lived experience and embodied learning (hooks, 2014; Lorde, 1978), our reflexive journaling emerged as a shared space for wondering, noticing, feeling, questioning, and meaning-making together around complex social studies issues. Feminist traditions of teaching and learning have long positioned journaling as a practice of critical self-reflection and relational knowing - one that values intimacy, connection, and communities. hooks (2013) captures this orientation when she notes that “we write because language is the way we keep a hold on life…We communicate to connect, to know community” (p. 22).

This commitment to relational meaning-making and community directly informed how journaling functioned as a key method within our social studies methods course. Our collective journaling aligned with Ross’s (2024) assertion that social studies teaching and learning should support learners in developing personally meaningful understandings of the world and their capacity to act within it. The practice of journaling invited students to think with the course - tracing personal, emotional, and professional shifts as they encountered the pedagogical tensions of teaching social studies in polarized times. Students’ entries, alongside our own, engaged with discomfort, uncertainty, and contradiction, connecting course concepts to experiences, current events, media texts, and emerging identities as social studies educators.

This paper draws on our instructor journals and a sampling of students’ journals, including visual artifacts and narrative writing, to examine how this method shaped our collective learning during a moment marked by global uncertainty and social upheaval. Our findings suggest that reflexive journaling emerged as a methodological anchor for making sense of social studies teaching and learning in a world on fire (see Morrowu, 2026; Khonina & Salway, 2025; Stefanovich, 2026). Functioning as a powerful form of methodological innovation, reflexive journaling empowered educator and student voice and centered relational accountability while fostering critical thinking and a shared sense of purpose and community.