John Palella is currently working on several projects. He is excitedly awaiting the publication of Stacie Brensilver's new book, Teaching LGBTQ+ History: Practical Strategies and Voices of Experience (Routledge, 2025) where he contributed the chapter "Queer Comics as Windows, Mirrors and Magical Portals" based on his work in equipping pre-service teachers in culturally relevant pedaogies through Queer comic books. Moreover, Palella recently submitted his chapter, "Dreaming of Resilience, Resistance and Joy in Culturally Relevant Social Studies Classrooms" for a new book project from the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) for preservice and early career social studies teachers entitlled Empowering Social Studies Educators in the Early Years of Teaching (NCSS 2025). Furthermore, Professor Palella is coauthoring a paper for publication with Renee Hobbs, URI professor of media and communication, who is a pioneering force in media literacy education.   Their paper "Modeling Identity Stories for Building Students' Media Literacy Skills through a Preservice Social Studies Education Program" is rooted in their participatory research in the Brown Summer High School social studies program that Palella directs and that Hobbs observed during the summer of 2024. Finally, John Palella is working on a book proposal for Routledge tentatively entitled Transforming Social Studies Education through Communication, Media, and Creative Expression in the Classroom.

Palella's long term project, stemming back to graduate level work with historian Amy Murrell Taylor,  explores multiple and intersectional LGBTQIAA+ communication strategies and storytelling modalities from the years 1960-1980 (specifically focusing on pre-and post-Stonewall uprising and pre-HIV/AIDS activism lenses). Using pamphlets, publications, letters, diaries, oral histories and multiple LGBTQ-focused media, he explores the communication strategies of the first decade of Gay Liberation, as well as the multiple stories that LGBTQIA people told about themselves in this decade. Dr. Palella focuses on the racial, gendered, classed, and ability-based discourses and interpelations of those discourses in constructing subjectivities and identities.  As an activist, John hopes to decolonize the liberation stories of Queer history that try to silence Trans* and BIPOC members of LGBTQIAA2S communities. More importantly he highlights the ways in which they fought against silencing and erasure. Eventually, Dr. Palella will transform the project into a database of primary sources and curriculum guides for high school teachers and social studies education students to utilize in their classrooms for teaching LGBTQIAA+ histories as well as intersectionality and social justice related courses.

As the director of the MAT Social Studies Cohort within the Department of Education, Professor Palella is excited to work with graduate students who are interested in creating culturally sustaining frameworks for teaching secondary social studies as well as those who want to create curricula for teaching the histories of race, gender and sexuality in social studies classrooms. 

Professor Palella is particually interested in working with students and scholars on projects, theses, programming, and curricula related to history, public health and physical fitness discourses, storytelling, communication in the classroom, communication strategy and civic engagment, the connections between social studies and public speaking; Queer, Gay & Lesbian, Trans* & Transgender, LGBTQIAA2S or LGBTQ+, and intersectional & identity studies.

Co-Editor, "Inclusive Social Studies," Social Education (National Council for the Social Studies)

Call for submissions!

 

• Swearer Center for Public Service, Brown University
• The Choices Program, History Department, Brown University
• National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)
• Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE)
• Media Education Lab
• Courageous RI
• Organization of American Historians (OAH)
• Lamba Pi Eta

I teach a wide variety of courses in education, history, and intersectionality studies.  At Brown I teach the three graduate courses in social studies methods. My foci in my social studies courses are in culturally relevant social studies, inclusive and identities-rooted histories, storytelling, communication strategy in the classroom and with all stakeholders, communcation-based-backwarward design, and the connections between public discourse and civics. My undergraduate courses are in histories of education, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, storytelling in the classroom, LGBTQ+ history and the interconnections of education, physical fitness, and media. I have also previously taught the student teaching seminars as well as the graduate level course on learning theories and special populations.