by Harper Keenan - 2019
This article addresses how colonial violence is represented to young children in U.S. textbooks through a content analysis of California fourth-grade history textbook chapters on the Spanish colonial mission system.
by Brett L. M. Levy, Annaly Babb-Guerra, Lena Batt & Wolf Owczarek - 2019
In the United States, elected leaders and the general public have become more politically polarized during the past several decades, and political scientists argue that strengthening our democracy requires civic participants to productively negotiate their differences. To explore how educators could help to foster such civic participation, we conducted a mixed-methods study to examine how students’ experiences in highly interactive government courses could affect their willingness to engage in political issues in an open-minded way.
by John Wills - 2019
This paper examines how teachers’ understandings of race and racism inform their use of curricular materials.
by Timothy Patterson & Jay Shuttleworth - 2019
This study analyzes historical portrayals of enslavement in 21 recently published books for elementary students. Informed by critical race theory, our findings suggest elementary teachers will be presented with a more complicated set of options when selecting among historical children’s literature than previously documented by researchers.
by Jack Schneider & Sivan Zakai - 2016
This article explores the nature of the historical writing process by looking at the hallmark writing skills historians develop as they learn the craft.
by Benjamin Jacobs - 2013
This document-based historical study focuses on history/social studies teacher education in the decades immediately preceding and following the National Education Association’s landmark report, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, which commonly is credited with establishing social studies as a school subject. The article interrogates how teacher preparation programs contributed and/or responded (or not) to this curriculum reform and to what effect.
by Jeremy Stoddard - 2013
This article addresses the potential impact of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2009) Supreme Court ruling and the influence of the documentary form on democratic education. The author calls for critical media education to be a core tenet of democratic education in order to prepare citizens for the 21st century.
by Anne-Lise Halvorsen - 2012
This study examines the debate between supporters of history education and supporters of social studies education that originated with the New York Times 1943 survey of college freshmen’s history knowledge. Educators, politicians, and journalists, many of whom were well-known and highly influential, joined the debate. In an exploration of the arguments and claims advanced by both sides of the debate, the study focuses on the continuing controversy over fact-based learning versus historical thinking skills and on the divisive effects of using a single test to draw conclusions about the state of education. The study concludes by calling for a negotiation by all sides in what are known today as “the history wars.”
by Scott Baker - 2011
This article examines the role that African American educators played in initiating, supporting, and sustaining the civil rights movement in the South.
by Stephen Thornton & Keith Barton - 2010
This article argues that the emphasis on teaching history as a separate subject is of recent origin and is misguided for both cognitive and philosophical reasons. Rather than emphasizing the uniqueness of history, advocates of improved history education would be better served by recognizing the natural and long-standing place of history within the broader field of social studies.
by Richard Sawyer & Armando Laguardia - 2010
Using a qualitative methodology, this study examines the relationship between a professional development effort centered on teaching history through a cultural encounters approach, and the history teaching practice of 21 teachers. Findings demonstrate that the participants’ conceptual frameworks toward history, grounded in their own professional knowledge and teaching expertise, were important factors in how they reconceptualized their views of curriculum.
by Thijl Sunier - 2009
This article addresses the growing diversity in religious and ethnic backgrounds among students at primary and secondary schools in Western Europe. Presented are the outcomes of international comparative anthropological (qualitative) research on multiculturalism, citizenship, and nation building in schools in Paris, Berlin, London, and Rotterdam.
by John Wills - 2007
This article examines social studies curriculum and instruction in two teachers' classrooms at an elementary school where instructional time for social studies was reduced in response to state testing in language arts and mathematics. Findings suggest that the institution of an accountability system meant to improve teaching and learning is instead undermining teachers' efforts to enact a thoughtful social studies curriculum in their classrooms.
by Elizabeth Cohen, Rachel Lotan, Beth Scarloss, Susan Schultz & Percy Abram - 2002
This is a study of assessment of groupwork. Students are informed of evaluation criteria. As hypothesized, groups that knew the criteria used to evaluate their group product, had higher quality discussions and better group products than groups without these criteria.
by Ray McDermott - 2001
This paper offers an analysis of Mead’s contributions and contradictions in two sections, one on her ethnography, the other on her legacy applied to the problems of education in the contemporary United States, particularly her rarely noticed contributions to a theory of learning.
by S.G. Grant - 2001
The author presents case studies of two high school social studies teachers and influence of state-level testing on their teaching practices.
by Stephen Thornton - 2001
This analysis deals with four conceptions of the social studies. Although they overlap in significant respects, each type is characterized by a distinctive curricular form and implies somewhat different methods and materials of instruction. Moreover, each type features different educational goals, as we shall see. Figure 1 can also represent the legitimacy assigned to the four conceptions. Generally, content has beaten out process; however, the consequences of alignment with an academic subject are less straightforward.
by Jere Brophy, Janet Alleman & Carolyn O'Mahony - 2000
This chapter focuses on social studies as taught in elementary schools in the United States. It addresses the purposes and goals of social studies, its evolution as a school subject, its present status, and possible future trends.
by Keith Barton & Linda Levstik - 1998
The authors investigated middle graders’ understanding of significance in U.S. history through open-ended interviews with forty-eight students in grades five through eight. Students pointed to steadily expanding rights and opportunities as a central theme in U.S. history, but they also had difficulty incorporating some historical patterns and events into their image of progress. This study suggests that students need experience with the complexities of the past within a context that provides some framework for making critical sense out of both legitimating stories and alternative, vernacular histories.
by Hamilton Cravens - 1997
Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and the new social history each challenged the reigning orthodoxy in their field. The author details his own personal account of how each had much to do with the development of his own sense of what history is and how to practice his craft.
by Walter Parker - 1996
The author presents a conception of democratic citizenship and considers the implications for the renewal of citizenship education.
by Terrie Epstein - 1993
Responds to the New York State Commissioner of Education's paper calling for multicultural, historically accurate public school curricula. The paper emphasizes the importance of students being able to recognize the relationship between the historian's perspective and his/her shaping of the historical narrative in textbooks.
by Thomas Sobol - 1993
This article discusses the need to revise New York State's social studies curriculum to reflect the nation's diversity in a fair way, presenting a less biased, more realistic view of history. The curriculum should cultivate multiple perspectives, teach about common traditions, include examples of many peoples, and tell the whole story.
by Melinda Fine - 1993
The author describes her experience observing a semester-long curricular unit entitled "Facing History and Ourselves" (FHAO). FHAO seeks to provide a model for teaching history in a way that helps adolescents reflect critically on social issues today.
by David Kobrin - 1992
by G. Kuznets & Samuel Wineburg - 1988
Our purpose in this article is to explore several issues that are raised when one reflects on how budding anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, fresh from their undergraduate and teacher training, think about history. We also discuss some of the differences in teaching styles we observed while watching our four novices in their respective classrooms. Finally, we suggest some of the implications of our research for teacher education and research on teaching.
by Laurel Tanner - 1987
Understanding our history means knowing what the hopeful influences on the curriculum were (in terms of democratic ends) as well as the harmful influences. Students can use this knowledge to distinguish what needs strengthening from what needs to be reckoned with in the present situation. Kliebard’s book has clear methodological implications for future work in curriculum history.
by Benjamin Ladner - 1984
The primary issues for those areas of study called the humanities are also the central concerns of both education and contemporary culture in the last part of the twentieth century. Put simply, what are our efforts to educate (educere) "leading" from and toward? What image of humanitas, of the human condition and its possibilities, are we espousing by arranging the relations of adults and children under the rubric of education? What kind of world do we adults understand ourselves to inhabit; and what world do we imagine we are fashioning by introducing its forms and meanings to our children, even as we introduce new beings into the world as it presently is?
by Robert Coles - 1984
The humanities ought to offer young people in school a means of fitting various pieces of knowledge into a larger view of things--to draw upon a Latin phrase: sub specie aeternitatis. The humanities have to do with perspective—the long haul of time; and they have to do also with values, with a sense of what ought be as well as what is. The humanities begin with language—the distinctive attribute of human beings. We are the ones who become self-conscious, through words; who begin to ask questions as well as respond to reflexes; who gaze and wonder, then put into talk what crosses our minds. With language comes distance, a capacity to draw back and render an account of what is and has been taking place: history.
by Abraham Ascher - 1984
In many schools, in fact, the very word "history" is hardly encountered; insofar as the subject is taught it tends to be subsumed under "social studies." In recent years this situation has given rise to a considerable amount of concern among educators and parents who believe that the decline in the rigorous study of traditional history has contributed to a slippage in the quality of education of American youngsters.
