Sarah B Shear

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at The Pennsylvania State University-Altoona. I teach undergraduate courses in elementary social studies methods and foundations of education. I also have experience teaching secondary social studies methods and graduate-level qualitative inquiry courses. Prior to becoming a teacher educator, I taught middle and secondary social studies in Connecticut. My primary research focuses on teaching and learning social studies within Indigenous contexts, and in addition my research includes examining race and settler colonialism in social studies curriculum, teacher education, and qualitative research methodologies. My work has been published in Theory and Research in Social Education, Journal of Social Studies Research, Doing Race in Social Studies: Critical Perspectives, and forthcoming work has been accepted or is under review in Qualitative Inquiry, Social Education, and Cinematic Social Studies: A Resource for Teaching and Learning Social Studies with Film. In addition, my work has been featured in the Zinn Project, Teaching Tolerance, Huffington Post, Indian Country Today, and other state and national media outlets. Committed to addressing bias, racism, and other social justice issues locally, I am a member of Penn State Altoona's MOSIAC Committee, African American Read-in Committee, and I sit on the board of directors for the United Nations Association of Centre County, PA. I am a member of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), College and University Faculty Assembly (of NCSS), various divisions and SIGS of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), including Division B, Social Studies Research, and Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.