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. He is particularly interested in moving students beyond consuming historical content. Instead, he asks how teachers can prepare students to analyze, interpret, create, communicate, and reflect. 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 challenges the teacher-centered traditions that still shape many history and social studies classrooms. It asks what happens when teachers make communication and media central to disciplinary learning. Drawing from research, classroom practice, and more than twenty years of teaching, Palella explores storytelling, speech and rhetoric, poetry and music, visual media, and screen studies. Throughout the book, students become critical interpreters and creators of media. They investigate the past, construct historical arguments, communicate ideas to relevant audiences, and connect historical inquiry to the media world they already inhabit.
His collaborative research with media literacy scholar Renee Hobbs connects teacher education and media literacy in social studies contexts. Together, they examine how preservice social studies teachers center media literacy in their curriculum and instruction. They also study how those practices shape the learning of the secondary students they teach. Their article, “‘Yes, But How Did We Do It?’: Embedding Media Literacy in a Preservice Social Studies Education Program,” examines this work within Brown’s teacher preparation program. Palella has also collaborated with Hobbs, Benjamin Thenavin, and Kent Lanci on research into media literacy professional development and its role in preventing violent extremism.
Culturally relevant and inclusive social studies education provides another foundation for Palella’s scholarship. His chapter “Queer Comics as Windows, Mirrors, and Magical Portals in Social Studies Curricula” explores how teachers can use comics to expand LGBTQ+ representation while developing students’ historical and media literacy. His chapter “Dreaming of Resilience, Resistance, and Joy in a Culturally Relevant Social Studies Classroom” focuses on helping early-career teachers create classrooms that center students while resisting deficit approaches to historically marginalized communities. This scholarship grows from Palella’s broader work in LGBTQ+ history, histories of race and education, and culturally sustaining teaching.
Palella’s commitment to inclusive social studies also shapes his ongoing collaboration with Diana Turk and Stacie Brensilver Berman through the National Council for the Social Studies. Together, they coedit the “Inclusion in Social Studies Education” feature for Social Education. The feature creates a national space for educators to examine what inclusion actually looks like in contemporary social studies classrooms. Their work connects scholarship with classroom practice while asking who is represented, who belongs, who has access, and whose histories find a place in the curriculum. Through this collaboration, Palella pushes inclusion beyond simply adding new voices to an existing curriculum. Instead, he asks teachers to reconsider how they construct the social studies classroom itself. The project reflects a goal that runs throughout his scholarship: helping more students see themselves as participants in history and as people capable of shaping its future.
Palella approaches research as work that should connect multiple spaces. He served as a principal writer of Rhode Island’s History Anchor Standards and currently contributes to national efforts through the National Council for the Social Studies. This work includes the revision of the C3 Framework and the integration of multiliteracies into social studies standards. His scholarship, teacher education, curriculum development, and professional service all return to a central question: How can social studies classrooms prepare young people not simply to understand the stories and media that shape their world, but to question them, challenge them, and create something new?
As director of the MAT Social Studies Cohort within Brown’s Department of Education, Professor Palella works with graduate students interested in creating culturally sustaining frameworks for secondary social studies education. He also welcomes students who want to develop curricula for teaching histories of race, gender, and sexuality. His work with preservice teachers connects directly to his larger research agenda by treating the classroom as a place where scholarship, disciplinary thinking, media literacy, and creative teaching come together. Professor Palella is particularly interested in working with students and scholars on research, theses, programming, and curriculum related to history, public health, and physical fitness discourses; storytelling and communication in the classroom; communication strategy and civic engagement; connections between social studies and public speaking; and Queer, Gay and Lesbian, Trans* and Transgender, LGBTQIAA2S or LGBTQ+, intersectional, and identity studies.
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