In episode 218, Dan and Michael chat with Rebecca Geller and Jamie Gravell about their new TRSE article titled, “‘My thinking has changed but beliefs have not’: Motivated reasoning in learning to teach abortion.”

Transcript 

Books, Articles and Other Amazing Resources

1. Geller, R. C., Gravell, J. D., Richardson, A., & Strang, S. A. (2025). “My thinking has changed but beliefs have not”: Motivated reasoning in learning to teach abortion. Theory & Research in Social Education, 53(1), 1-26.
2. Episode 162: Teacher Political Disclosure in Contentious Times with Rebecca Geller
3. Practice-based teacher education model reading/source
4. University of Washington Learning Lab model
5. Gravell, J.& Geller, R. (2024) “What Else Can We Try Here?”: Designing for Collaborative Teacher Learning Through Mixed-Reality Teaching Simulations. Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Buffalo, NY. https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/10784 
6. Digital Inquiry Group website
7. Jane Lo’s 2022 book, “Making Classroom Discussions Work: Methods for Quality Dialogue in the Social Studies,” Teachers College Press
8. Judy Pace’s 2021 book, “Hard Questions: Learning to Teach Controversial Issues,” Rowman & Littlefield website
9. Street Law resources that we modified for background information on case law
10. Two Michigan State studies on controversial studies:
    1. Jacobsen, R., Halvorsen, A. L., Frasier, A. S., Schmitt, A., Crocco, M., & Segall, A. (2018). Thinking deeply, thinking emotionally: How high school students make sense of evidence. Theory & Research in Social Education, 46(2), 232-276.
    2. Crocco, M. S., Segall, A., Halvorsen, A. L. S., & Jacobsen, R. J. (2018). Deliberating public policy issues with adolescents: Classroom dynamics and sociocultural considerations. Democracy & Education, 26(1), 1-10. (this is the one on immigration)

11. To think about how you might address conspiracy theories, check out: “How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories,” Zach Mack, NPR, 2025 (the Embedded podcast episodes are linked at the bottom of the article)

Biographies

Rebecca Geller is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at the University of Georgia. She began her career in education as a classroom teacher at Berkley Maynard Academy in Oakland, CA teaching elementary and middle school. She obtained her Ph.D. in Education (Urban Schooling) from UCLA and her BA with distinction from the University of Washington in the Comparative History of Ideas. Her research attends to the experiences and sensemaking of social studies teachers navigating contested and complicated sociopolitical environments, including their experiences navigating school-based gun violence and teaching reproductive rights and histories.

She forgives Dan for his support for the Oklahoma City Thunder because they are actually her beloved hometown SuperSonics and belong in Seattle. She is, in fact, still bitter.

Jamie Gravell is an instructional assistant professor of secondary education with an appointment to the teacher education programs. Previously, she was an assistant professor of educational technology at California State University-Stanislaus. In addition, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University, supporting the department of teaching and learning’s research-practice partnership with Dallas ISD. Dr. Gravell holds a Ph.D. in Education, Urban Schooling and Learning Sciences, and an MA in Education, Race and Ethnic Studies in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Before her graduate work, Jamie was a high school social studies teacher and credit recovery coordinator in the District of Columbia public schools. Her undergraduate degree is in political science and secondary education. Dr. Gravell’s research utilizes critical sociocultural theories of learning to understand how teachers learn to teach with technology and the ideologies, practices, and pedagogies of civic education in a digital age.