This study investigated what is remembered about social studies education, how memories can be made useful in current classrooms, and how this knowledge can inform a social studies-to-be imagining future memories. Special attention was paid as well to issues of social justice and how they were engaged in in the past, how they have been taken up in the present, and how they might be re-imagined in the future. By doing so, this study enlivened the utility of memory and opened remembering up as a terrain of analysis to be included and considered in both social studies classrooms and teacher preparation institutions. Memories shared and analyzed in part 1 of this qualitative study were drawn from experiences over the past twenty years, both through surveys and semi-structured active interviews. In part 2, interviews with current practitioners and a thorough analysis of their units were combined with interviews of students who participated in those units to provide a fuller picture of how memories are formed, challenged, and/or reified in the process of learning to teach. Finally, in part 3 of the study, pre-service teachers, using data from other parts of the study, envisioned what memories their future classrooms might create and how they might better be realized. Embracing poststructural notions of time and memory expressed through the theorizing of Gilles Deleuze, the study seeks to trouble the notion of time and elucidate potential utility in both the past and future, or better put, the mingling of them in the present moment. By doing so, it demonstrates that the intentional consideration of what and how we remember social studies experiences may help in advancing the cause of developing a more just understanding of ourselves, the world we live in, and how we might experience it more justly.
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