John Palella’s research explores how media, communication, and creative expression can transform the teaching and learning of social studies. His work brings together his training as a historian and more than two decades of experience in secondary and university classrooms. Across his research, Palella examines how media literacy and culturally relevant pedagogy can deepen historical thinking while helping young people develop the communication skills they need to participate in civic life today.
Palella is currently writing Reimagining the Social Studies Classroom through Media and Communication: A Student-Centered Approach, under contract with Routledge. The book examines what happens when teachers place communication and media at the center of disciplinary learning. Across chapters on storytelling, speech and rhetoric, poetry and music, visual media, and screen studies, Palella combines research and classroom practice to position students as critical interpreters and creators of media who investigate the past, construct historical arguments, and communicate their ideas to relevant audiences.
His collaborative research with media literacy scholar Renee Hobbs connects social studies education with media literacy. Their article, “‘Yes, But How Did We Do It?’: Embedding Media Literacy in a Preservice Social Studies Education Program,” examines how preservice social studies teachers integrate media literacy into curriculum and instruction and how those practices shape secondary student learning. Palella has also collaborated with Hobbs, Benjamin Thenavin, and Kent Lanci on research examining media literacy professional development and its role in preventing violent extremism.
Palella also collaborates with Diana Turk and Stacie Brensilver Berman through the National Council for the Social Studies as coeditor of the “Inclusion in Social Studies Education” feature for Social Education. He served as a principal writer of Rhode Island’s History Anchor Standards and currently contributes to national efforts through NCSS, including revision of the C3 Framework and the integration of multiliteracies into social studies standards. Together, these projects connect his scholarship with national conversations about representation, inclusion, and what students should learn and do in social studies classrooms.
Culturally relevant and inclusive social studies education anchors both Palella’s published scholarship and his continuing research agenda. His chapter “Queer Comics as Windows, Mirrors, and Magical Portals in Social Studies Curricula” examines LGBTQ+ representation through comics and historical and media literacy, while “Dreaming of Resilience, Resistance, and Joy in a Culturally Relevant Social Studies Classroom” focuses on student-centered teaching that resists deficit approaches to historically marginalized communities. As director of Brown’s MAT Social Studies Cohort, he works with graduate students developing culturally sustaining approaches and curricula addressing histories of race, gender, and sexuality. He welcomes future research and curriculum collaborations in these areas as well as history; physical fitness discourses; storytelling and classroom communication; communication strategy and civic engagement; social studies and public speaking; and Queer, Trans*, LGBTQ+, intersectional, and identity studies.
Across these projects, Palella examines how social studies classrooms can prepare young people not simply to understand the histories and media that shape their world, but to question them, challenge them, communicate about them, and create something new.
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