DCSSC Sessions & Topics

This session will explore the historical analysis of the American Indian Movement (AIM) protests in the late 1960s and 1970 which also had connections to the recent Standing Rock Reservation protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline. This session will allow for a brief discussion of the 2024 establishment of the first federally-recognized tribal lands in Illinois: the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's Shab-eh-nay Reservation in DeKalb County.

Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020) looks to Hindu India and its elaborate and ancient system of caste to help explain the phenomenon of racial formations and ongoing racism in the United States. This discussion will explore evolving ideologies of caste and race in both India and the United States using Supreme Court cases and modern day campaigns to ban caste-based discrimination in education systems and society.

This session will use a range of resources to apply several historical reading and reasoning strategies to support students' inquiry in Social Studies. Resources that will be examined include photographs, documentary clips, printed primary and secondary sources, maps, and print media.

This session will explore the cognitive and behavioral strategies that have been proven to be effective in dealing with fear and anxiety. This workshop will address tactics designed to cope and even eliminate most fears by examining the role of control and superiority in the creation and maintenance of the problems.

This session will expand upon ways to bring joy into educational spaces when teaching African and African American History, touching on topics such as early African civilizations, west African spirituality, the Moors, and the African Diaspora. This event will include resources and lesson ideas for seamless incorporation into classrooms.

Digital storytelling provides students with many avenues to find their voice and share their work with the world. By creating and sharing their own stories, students can show what they’ve learned, express themselves creatively, build empathy, and develop strong communication skills. This session will explore strategies and student examples to use storytelling for strengthening writing, assessing learning, and creating a classroom culture of storytelling.

The reformations of religion initiated by Henry VIII’s break with Rome were extended, reversed, and remained incomplete for nearly 200 years, until the religious settlement that accompanied the Glorious Revolution. This session will explore the history of Catholic belief and practice in early modern England. The session will also offer strategies for helping students understand early modern documents discussing the problems and realities of Catholic non-conformity.

A popular misconception is that cases are always appealed. Generally, the losing parties in both civil and criminal cases have an automatic right of appeal, but not all cases are appealed. This presentation will detail the criminal and civil legal basis for an appeal such as alleged material procedural errors, admittance of improper evidence, and errors in a judge's interpretation of the law at trial. During the session, we will explore a specific case step by step through appellate jurisdiction to illustrate successful vs. unsuccessful appeals and how outcomes impact appellants and defendants.

Sacred space is a framework that geographers use to understand and analyze bonds between the connection people make with individual spaces. This session will explore the Israel-Palestine situation as one prominent example that illustrates several types of sacred space. In addition to helping to teach our students about fundamental geographic concepts, this particular example can help us connect our students personally to the ideas discussed in class. Sacred space in the Middle East, in other words, can illuminate how ever-present and influential geography is in the world, broadly speaking, and in our own personal lives.

National debt and climate change, while rarely mentioned together, have similar challenges. Both have gotten worse over time and both are problems often pushed to the future. This session will explore the causes of the national debt, its long term effects on the economy and viable solutions to mitigate this potential calamity.

The Roman Empire was immense both in size and impact, and it can be challenging to select what to cover in more detail when pressed for instructional time. This presentation will focus on several key emperors that were the most impactful including Augustus, Diocletian, Constantine, and Justinian I.

This interactive workshop will explore how to develop inquiry-based history lessons with visuals. Participants will engage in a model lesson with a new Reading Like a Historian lesson and learn strategies for implementing these types of resources in their classrooms.

This interactive session will explore how student voices can be engaged to cultivate students’ capacity to develop their own deep and critical inquiries about history and civic life, their identities, and communities. It will present strategies on how to make inquiry the primary mode of learning to advance students’ disciplinary content knowledge, and to connect that knowledge to students and their communities. Participants will walk away with resources that help students cultivate empathy across differences and inquisitiveness to ask difficult questions, which are core to historical understanding and constructive civic participation.

John White served nearly 27 years for a crime he did not commit. Through recent DNA evidence and the support of the Innocence Project, John White was finally exonerated in December of 2007. This session will be a moderated conversation between Naperville North sociology teacher Ryan Dengel and John White to share his story as well as answer questions from the audience. Topics that will be addressed include our criminal justice system structures, taking informed action as well as sociological concepts such as deviance, socialization and social inequalities.

With the war entering its third year, the world is trying to focus on scenarios for negotiations to end the hostilities. This session will explore these possibilities and how the new Trump administration will impact them. Additionally, it will cover possible post war realities for Russia and Ukraine.

In the aftermath of the contentious 2024 Presidential Election, the contemporary federal policy landscape was shaped by changes to party control and congressional leadership, victories by political newcomers, and current public issues. This presentation will discuss how President-elect Trump may approach his term with divided (or unified) party control of Congress. Attendees will learn of the policy priorities of key political leaders at the federal level in the next two years and return to their classrooms with ready-to-deploy resources to engage students in structured discussions of current public issues.

Advocacy and solidarity are rarely highlighted when learning about the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) experience, yet it’s critical for all students to be aware of how individuals and communities have fought for their rights and dignity. This session focuses on these themes by highlighting the Japanese-American community’s redress movement that led to the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. It will also explore how this group has served as witnesses and voices of caution and advocacy when other communities face mass incarceration. Primary and secondary resources as well as lesson plans will be explored to offer ways for educators to include this important chapter in U.S. history and to let students know how they can participate in advocacy and solidarity work.

Drawing from three years of direct experience using it in the classroom, Mike will unpack AI’s dual nature as both a tool and a challenge in education. Through practical examples, he’ll showcase AI’s role in teaching workflows, its applications for assessment, its associated problems and potential solutions—all while addressing the age-old issue of student indifference.

The discipline of geography maintains a strong tradition of connecting popular culture, in its various manifestations, with geographic ideas and principles. Film is one arena of popular culture that can be an attractive and approachable way to teach geography to our students. In this discussion, examples and approaches to using specific films will be shared to teach geographic principles that are often included in human geography courses.

This Session will address the rationale and updates in organization and skills practices for the 2025 AP Psychology exam. Particular emphasis will be placed on scaffolding the skills and practices necessary for students to master the new updates for the written portion of the exam including the Evidence Based Question (EBQ) and the Article Analysis Question (AAQ). Samples and templates will be shared, participants should come with a paper or electronic copy of the Course Exam Description (CED).

This session will explore a new history curriculum that teaches students how to evaluate the information that floods their screens. Based on research with historians and professional fact checkers, these document-based lessons integrate digital literacy into history instruction and have been tested with teachers across the country. Leave with classroom-ready resources!

Military history is a nuanced field of history, but when considering political and cultural change in early modern Europe (ca. 1400-1648), it is difficult to ignore the impact of military spending by political leaders. Warfare, local as well as international, was endemic during parts of the period. Sometimes an innovation – a “military revolution” - completely changes warfare in a short period, sweeping all prior military organization before it. Gunpowder, for example, was not a revolutionary weapon until it was employed efficiently. Historians have argued that “Revolutions in Military Affairs” (RMA) in early modern Europe contributed significantly to political and cultural change. Because of the way these innovations drove spending on all sides, political leaders had to adapt, which contributed to the consolidation of state power. This presentation will explore the debate over this trending term, RMA, and discuss what it means for our understanding of political and cultural change in the period ranging from 1400-1700 in Europe.

This session will be a panel discussion which includes speakers from several of the more misunderstood religions represented in the United States. The panel will include representation from the faith communities of Sikhi (often referred to as Sikhism), Islam, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and Orthodox Judaism. The panel discussion will be moderated by Naperville North Social Studies teacher, Ryan Dengel. Aligning with the religious studies standards, the presentation will address the religious studies standard of explaining how religious identities shape and are shaped by the beliefs people hold, the behaviors they exhibit, and the ways people experience membership in intersecting communities.

Competition for social studies openings can be fierce. Area department chairs will walk through job postings, cover letters and resumes, job fairs and networking, and interviews. This session is for current or recent student teachers, or teachers early in their careers. In addition to providing time for answering questions, this session will provide tips and strategies for landing a position in the district of your dreams.

For years prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, scholars and observers debated the fallout of NATO's long expansion into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union starting in the post-Cold War era. Advocates warned that a failure to integrate these countries into NATO would serve as an invitation to future Russian expansionists to retake them. Critics, on the other hand, claimed that expansion would precipitate precisely the resurgence of Russian nationalism that NATO was designed to thwart. In light of the tragic events in Ukraine over the past decade, the future of Ukraine in NATO is still unknown. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists on a permanent exclusion as part of any peace settlement.

While presidential politics dominated 2024 election coverage, the results have major implications down ballot in Illinois. This session will explore how Governor Pritzker builds on his legacy of policy wins and the legislative agenda for Speaker Welch and Majority Leader Harmon. Also included will be a consideration of who policy makers will watch should Senator Durbin and Pritzker decline to seek office in 2026. Teacher attendees will emerge with insights and resources to teach students the inner workings of state government in Springfield as the 2025 legislative session takes shape.

This session is designed for educators who want to prioritize engaging, student-centered experiences. Project-Based Learning is a teaching method in which students explore real-world problems over an extended period of time. Research demonstrates that PBL increases student engagement and leads to deeper learning while providing students the freedom to drive learning, identify problems and determine how to best address them. This session will focus on the essential design elements of PBL and the construction of driving questions that lead to sustained inquiry and maximize authenticity.

Native American history in the United States is incredibly diverse and extensive, leaving many with questions about where to begin. This session will focus on how to approach teaching Native history by starting locally. Using a section of one module within the Newberry Library's Indigenous Chicago curriculum, participants will engage in a classroom-ready lesson regarding treaties and removal in the Chicagoland area and will learn how they can connect local Indigenous history with common topics in US History. This session will serve as a preview of the many other digital resources in the broader Indigenous Chicago curriculum and will be a useful resource for more respectfully and accurately teaching Native history in the classroom.

Approximately 11,000 military women were stationed in Vietnam. Ninety percent of these women were nurses, while many others filled critical supporting roles. In addition to military women, an unknown number of civilian women served in Vietnam as volunteers in the International Red Cross, United Service Organization (USO), and other humanitarian organizations. Most women served dangerously close to the front lines and many others filled critical supporting roles.

Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, countless diplomats and global leaders have tried and failed to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The inability to secure a just and lasting settlement between these two peoples exploded gruesomely in October, 2023 with the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and the subsequent Israeli military operation in Gaza. This presentation will examine why this conflict had proved so intractable and resistant to mediation. Past efforts, including the 1993 Oslo Accords, collapsed offering lessons that may shape a potential peace agreement today. While the two sides may look and feel further apart than ever, the most likely solutions to the conflict are probably closer to those that have been negotiated in the past than to any radical reimagining of how Israelis and Palestinians can live and thrive together.

The session will examine the relationship of elections to democracy and why we seldom think about the phenomena of elections. 2024 is an extraordinary year with eight billion people in 78 countries voting for their leadership. Many will have chosen leaders who are not offering genuinely democratic regimes. Teaching about politics does not encourage students to think carefully about the mechanics and requisites of elections. The simple focus is on the choices presented and the citizen's responsibility to vote. This presents a very skewed picture. The session will provide an inventory of reasons to drill down on the phenomenon, but each of you will need to decide which factors are appropriate for your students. These ideas are drawn from a regular "global learning experience" course offered annually with 65 students from five countries -- South Africa, Croatia, Georgia, Ukraine and DePaul.

“The West” holds a mythic place in American history. Many Americans saw their identities inexplicably linked with the frontier while others were forcibly removed or killed to make way for the expansion of the United States. The West has always been complicated. This session will explore how perspectives can help us make sense of complicated, often conflicting narratives, of settlement and conquest, genocide and progress.

In this session, participants will explore innovative strategies for partnering with students in their learning journeys. Attendees will learn how to equip students with essential tools to become self-directed learners, create a collaborative learning environment, and have practical approaches that allow students to be in the driver’s seat of their learning.

This session will explore how historical fiscal practices have impacted core government policies in Illinois, and whether intentional or not, have disadvantaged various demographic groups. It will provide summaries of recent statistical analysis on these issues. Additionally, it will explore changes to fiscal policies that can increase access to opportunity, economic self-sufficiency, and education for traditionally marginalized populations.

This session will present the how and why, in the early nineteenth century, the state of Illinois adopted laws designed to marginalize and oppress African Americans. It will also describe how Black Illinoisans organized to fight back against those laws. The session will draw on Dr. Masur’s own original research and on a freely accessible web exhibit she and a team at Northwestern created: Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice. The lecture and website shed new light on Illinois history and offer histories of Black individuals and organizations, white allies, and the struggle for racial equality that resonate into the present.

The samurai is one of the most prominent cultural icons of Japan. This session will first examine the history of the samurai and then analyze representations of the samurai in popular culture, particularly in films and video games. This session will highlight how an analysis of the samurai in history and popular culture can foster historical thinking and critical thinking skills.

This session will explore the importance of civic discourse in classrooms, especially with recent social studies standards and the unique challenges of having difficult discussions in middle school. Civic discourse fosters an inclusive environment where ideas are respected, equipping teachers and students to engage with controversial topics constructively. Participants will reflect on their own identities and comfort levels, establish ground rules, and learn strategies to create a respectful space for dialogue. Emphasizing empathetic listening, this session aims to provide educators with practical tools for leading meaningful discussions, ensuring students can thoughtfully engage with diverse viewpoints.

AP Psychology Roundtable: Led by teachers from IPSD 204, this session will share EBQ and AAQ resources.