Lisa Buchanan, associate professor in the Dr. Jo Watts Williams School of Education, presented two conference presentations for social studies educators alongside colleagues from The University of North Carolina Wilmington and Elon student Mary Boyd '26 at the 2025 NC Council for the Social Studies Meeting in April.
Lisa Buchanan, associate professor in the Dr. Jo Watts Williams School of Education, co-presented two “research into practice” focused sessions at the 2025 North Carolina Council for the Social Studies Meeting in April.
The first session, “Beyond Brown v. Board: Exploring the Wilmington 10 through Primary Sources,” was focused on supporting educators in designing and implementing a study of the counter-stories of Brown v. Board, such as the Wilmington 10 and Williston High School with students in grades 5-12. This work is part of a larger collaboration with three Watson College of Education faculty at UNC Wilmington: Cara Ward, Donyell Roseboro, and Denise Ousley-Exum, and Elon undergraduate researcher Mary Boyd ’26. Boyd is a secondary education in English (9-12) major and Elon Teaching Fellow in the Dr. Jo Watts Williams School of Education. She has focused on historical documents surrounding the Wilmington 10 and the closing of Wilmington’s Williston High School in her undergraduate research at Elon.
The second conference session, “They Called Us Enemy: An Interdisciplinary Study of Japanese American Incarceration during WWII,” led audience members through how to use George Takei’s graphic memoir, “They Called Us Enemy,” along with archived primary source documents and questioning strategies, to examine Japanese American Incarceration in the United States during World War II.
These two presentations are the most recent scholarship by Ward, Roseboro, Buchanan and Ousley-Exum, whose scholarship collaboration is largely focused on interdisciplinary inquiry for grades 5-12. The team of four teacher educators have engaged a multi-year series of scholarship focused on the Wilmington 1898 Race Massacre, interdisciplinary place-based education, counter-stories of school desegregation and WWII Japanese American incarceration.