Teaching Social Studies to Multilingual Learners in Middle School: Connecting Inquiry and Visual Literacy to Promote Progressive Learning explores effective strategies for teaching social studies to multilingual learners. The centerpiece is a visual literacy framework that integrates inquiry, primary source analysis, and visual literacy to provide a progressive learning sequence to meet the varied needs of learners. The visual literacy framework brings together related aspects of progressive, sequential learning into a cohesive, coherent whole. It has an adaptable structure that allows teachers to customize learning activities to meet individual student needs. The progressive learning sequence has varied modes of learning that help teachers move students from basic to proficient to advanced levels of support.
This book is organized into two related parts. The first three chapters provide important content and context on social studies, multilingual learner education, and the visual literacy framework. The remaining chapters discuss U.S. history, world history, geography, and civics/government. Each chapter defines the subject area, briefly traces its development as a middle school subject over time, and offers classroom exercises on using the visual literacy framework in these disciplines. The exercises are plotted so that differing levels of the visual literacy framework are explored throughout the book.

Dr. Xiaoning Chen is an associate professor and chair of the ESL/Bilingual Education Program at National Louis University. She holds a doctorate in language and literacy education from Purdue University. Dr. Chen has two decades of experience in language education and teacher training in the United States and abroad. Her research interests include visual literacy, multicultural children's literature, and multimodal literacies. She has shared her work through numerous presentations at national and international conferences, as well as publications in various journals and edited volumes. She also co-authored two volumes of Teaching Social Studies to Multilingual Learners: Connecting Inquiry and Visual Literacy to Promote Progressive Learning for Rowman & Littlefield. Dr. Chen has served as an International Visual Literacy Association board member since 2019 and has served two terms as an assistant editor for the IVLA Book of the Selected Readings. She has directed the Library of Congress Teaching With Primary Sources Regional Grant and two rounds of the STARTALK teacher training grant from the US National Security Agency.