5 Harvard Educational Review Vol. 91 No. 1 Spring 2021 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College How Social Studies Teachers Choose News Resources for Current Events Instruction CHRISTOPHER H. CLARK University of North Dakota MARDI SCHMEICHEL University of Nebraska–Lincoln H. JAMES GARRETT University of Georgia Integrating current events and news media in the curriculum is essential to social studies teachers’ efforts to promote critical citizenship skills. In this mixed-methods study, Christopher H. Clark, Mardi Schmeichel, and H. James Garrett draw from a survey of more than one thousand social studies teachers to examine factors that influence the frequency of teachers’ current events instruction and their choices of news resources for use in their classes. They found that respondents’ ideologies influ- enced the number and type of sources they preferred and that teachers listed student- focused reasons like reading accessibility more than news-focused criteria like in-depth reporting as reasons for their choices. These findings have significant consequences for researchers and teacher educators who must find ways to help teachers discard assumptions that news sources are neutral or without perspective. The authors main- tain that if teachers are to help students develop the ability to interpret news media within a complicated political and informational landscape, they must be better pre- pared to think critically about the news sources they incorporate into their lessons. Keywords: social studies, secondary school teachers, news media, media literacy, current events Social studies education places a particular emphasis on developing students’ capacity for participation in democratic life. Learning about and discussing current events in the classroom is frequently listed among the best practices Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/her/article-pdf/91/1/5/2813320/i1943-5045-91-1-5.pdf by guest on 22 April 2021