Kevin Meuwissen

Biography

Kevin Meuwissen chairs the teaching and curriculum program and is director of secondary social studies teacher preparation. His research and teaching focus on how young people learn about politics and history, and on helping social studies teachers develop pedagogical agency within schools as they interact with political and cultural influences on their practices. Prior to joining the Warner School in 2009, Meuwissen taught at the secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Since then, he has participated in regional, statewide, and national curriculum development and professional learning projects related to historical investigation and political thinking, including the C3 Teachers inquiries and several U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History grant programs.

Meuwissen’s recent design-based research brought him into several high school government classrooms in 2018-19, where he co-designed and co-taught a unit of study focused on how people use socially and culturally motivated “shortcuts” to engage in political reasoning, discourse, and activity. That research drew upon novel elicitation tasks encouraging teenagers to think aloud, and together, about the links between identity and partisanship and the nature and consequences of ideological polarization when discussing complex, controversial issues. Meuwissen’s past studies have examined how changes in state certification policies interact with preservice teachers’ educational experiences, and how social studies teachers mediate situations in which the aims of their professional learning programs conflict with their school-institutional priorities.

Meuwissen is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA); the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA), which he served as program chair in 2012; and the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYSCSS). He is an editorial board member for Theory & Research in Social Education and a past winner of the NCSS Exemplary Research Award. In 2018, Meuwissen and Paul Fitchett (University of North Carolina) published Social Studies in the New Education Policy Era, which includes dialogues among social studies education scholars and leaders on contested issues in the field, from the effects of curriculum standardization and assessment mandates on learning and teaching to the roles of social studies educators as public policy advocates.