Marginalized
Elementary social studies receives too little instructional time, curriculum investment, and professional development—limiting children’s opportunities to build historical and civic understanding.
Partnerships & Support
Help build a new future for elementary social studies.
OPALIS Curriculum House is developing a research-grounded K–5 social studies curriculum designed to expand children’s perspectives, build historical expertise, and cultivate civic agency. We’re seeking partners who share our vision and want to help bring this new approach to elementary classrooms nationwide.
The need
Elementary social studies deserves sustained investment.
Social studies is where children begin to understand how people, places, and systems shape one another. Yet in many elementary classrooms, it remains limited in four persistent ways.
Fragmented
Traditional curricula often separate disciplines, geographic environments, and historical topics—limiting children’s opportunities to recognize connections across human experiences.
Narrow
Conventional historical narratives have often centered certain groups and perspectives while overlooking others—limiting children’s understanding of our shared human history.
Unsupported
Teachers are often expected to navigate complex histories and sensitive topics without sufficient background knowledge, curriculum resources, or instructional guidance.
What we are building
A distinctive curricular architecture.
Rather than treating history, geography, economics, and civics as separate subjects—or moving children outward one environment per grade—OPALIS units help students build coherent conceptual frameworks they revisit and deepen from kindergarten through fifth grade. Five interconnected elements shape every unit.
THREE INTERCONNECTED ORGANIZING MODELS
P.O.W.E.R. Framework
Guides which dimensions of human experience students encounter and the intentional sequence through which they study them.
Spiraling Environments Model
Connects students’ immediate experiences to wider geographic and historical contexts, revisiting them throughout K–5.
Integrated Disciplines Model
Brings historical, geographic, economic, civic, and cultural perspectives together to illuminate interconnected human experiences.
TWO ADDITIONAL INTEGRATED APPROACHES
Backward Design with Iterative Synthesis
Aligns learning goals, evidence of understanding, content, and instruction through an ongoing process of discovery and refinement.
Purposeful Inquiry
Students investigate meaningful questions through historical knowledge, credible sources, and evidence-based reasoning—connecting deeper understanding with opportunities for informed civic participation.
Where OPALIS is today
Built on a strong foundation. Growing toward a national vision.
OPALIS is an emerging curriculum publisher with a developed intellectual foundation, an initial published resource, and a comprehensive K–5 curriculum in development.
Accomplished to date
Intellectual Foundation & Early Milestones
Doctoral research: The P.O.W.E.R. Framework emerged from research synthesizing 38 critical theories and 105 curricular frameworks.
Original curricular architecture: Three interconnected organizing models, integrated with two additional design approaches, guide OPALIS’s curriculum development.
First published resource: Melanin & Our Origins, a standalone K–2 unit available on Teachers Pay Teachers.
Professional expertise: Twelve years of elementary teaching, university instruction, curriculum development, and professional learning experience.
Future work
What’s Next
Developing the comprehensive K–5 curriculum and scope and sequence.
Refining teacher guidance, instructional materials, and assessments.
Exploring classroom pilots, educator feedback, and research collaborations.
Building partnerships to support curriculum development and eventual distribution.
WHAT SUPPORT MAKES POSSIBLE
From research to classroom-ready curriculum.
Developing a comprehensive grade-level social studies program requires much more than writing lessons. It involves curriculum research and design, historical and developmental review, teacher guidance, original instructional materials, classroom piloting, and revision.
OPALIS is developing a phased funding strategy to support this work, with opportunities for partners to contribute to specific stages of curriculum development, expert review, pilot implementation, and production.
01
Curriculum research & design
02
Historical & developmental review
03
Teacher guidance
04
Original instructional materials
05
Classroom piloting
06
Revision
Detailed development budgets and partnership proposals are available for discussion with prospective funding partners.
Partnership opportunities
Where collaboration could make a difference.
The areas below describe opportunities OPALIS is actively exploring. They are starting points for conversation—not existing programs or commitments—and each partnership would be shaped around shared goals.
Funding & Institutional Support
Help bring the OPALIS vision to classrooms.
Financial and institutional support can accelerate the development, review, and production of OPALIS’s comprehensive K–5 curriculum, while creating opportunities for classroom pilots, research, and broader distribution.
Potential opportunities include sponsored curriculum development, grants or contracts for defined projects, and in-kind expertise, services, or resources.
OPALIS is an independent, for-profit curriculum publisher. Funding arrangements would be developed according to the nature of each partnership; direct contributions to OPALIS are not tax-deductible charitable donations.
Curriculum Development
Help bring the full K–5 curriculum to completion.
Support could accelerate the design, writing, review, and production of OPALIS units, helping the complete curriculum reach classrooms sooner and with the depth it requires.
Sponsored development of specific grade levels or units
Expert and educator review of content and materials
Production of teacher guides, student materials, and visual resources
Classroom Pilots
Learn alongside teachers and students.
OPALIS intends to pilot units with schools and districts, gathering teacher and student feedback to refine materials before broader release. No pilots are underway yet; we welcome conversations with districts interested in helping shape the first ones.
Piloting units in elementary classrooms
Structured teacher feedback and collaborative revision
Professional learning for participating teachers
Research
Study what coherent social studies makes possible.
We welcome collaboration with university researchers and educational organizations interested in studying curriculum design, implementation, and the development of children’s historical and civic understanding.
Design-based and implementation research
Studies of student learning and teacher practice
Continued refinement of the P.O.W.E.R. Framework
Strategic Partnerships
Bring OPALIS to more schools.
OPALIS seeks relationships with organizations that share its commitment to substantive, historically honest, developmentally responsible social studies—including districts, educational organizations, universities, and publishers.
District and network partnerships
Publishing and distribution collaborations
Joint professional learning initiatives
Let’s explore what we might build together.
Whether you represent a foundation, a university, an educational organization, or a school district, we would welcome a conversation about shared goals and possible collaboration.