This dissertation presents three cases of three different high school social studies teachers and the curricular forms through which they express different ideological constructions of America as a contested concept in the social studies curriculum. The concept of America is read across all three cases as a curricular text theorized through three distinct curricular forms: fantasy, myth, and fabulation. This method of critically reading the forms of teachers' pedagogical expressions entails explaining characteristics of America produced discursively through their teaching. This method also accounts for how the curricular forms in the teachers' pedagogy work as symbolic structures that contain various social and political anxieties and desires social studies teachers may or may not realize are appearing in their teaching, anxieties that constitute and constrain teachers' expressions of America. -- Abstract.
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