Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides. As she reports, her aim was to not create a hierarchy of suffering or…

In the past, nativists opposed immigration, period. The sharp distinction between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants emerged fairly recently, according to immigration historian David Reimers, a professor of history at New York University. "Basically, by the mid-90s 'legal' immigration was no longer an issue," he says.…

Active learning is a teaching methodology with a focus on student-centered learning that engages students in the educational process. This study implemented active learning techniques in an orthopedic assessment laboratory, and the effects of these teaching techniques. Mean scores from written exams, practical exams, and final course evaluations…

Much of the sociological curriculum often represents society as tragedy. This article explores the incorporation of a society as comedy component in introductory courses at two institutions using the sociological insight and social critique of comedians. A general discussion of parallels between the comedic eye and the sociological imagination is…

Emma Dearborn originated the Speedwriting Alphabetic Shorthand in 1924. The system became well known in 1928 when it became the first shorthand system publicized for dual use in verbatim recording and selected notetaking. For the next 50 years, speedwriting was marketed in a franchise arrangement with proprietary schools. It became available to…

Comparative biography can be used as a means of enlivening the teaching of college level interdisciplinary world civilization courses. By providing (and writing) well-written "human interest" material drawn from biographical essays, instructors can illustrate problems or issues in human life by showing how major political or cultural…

Explains how the pairing of the two works allowed the teacher to show the culmination of nineteenth-century short story development with James and a current trend with Oates. (FL)

Given that critical thinking development is an essential part of undergraduate education, and in most cases faculty members accept their role to promote some level of it in their classrooms, this article explores the complicated relationship between faculty perceptions of critical thinking and pedagogical applications. Following a review of the…

Teachers like to believe that students learn what they are taught. Following up on research that questions this belief, a large-scale study of the acquisition of German as a foreign language by French-speaking school students in Geneva (DiGS, or "Deutsch in Genfer Schulen," "German in Geneva schools") further explored the…

The purpose of this paper is to explore face-to-face discussions and electronic threaded discussions. Forty high school students engaged in both face-to-face and threaded discussions during a world history course. Their comments and interactions were analyzed, and they revealed that both types of discussion hold promise for helping students…

Instructors have long used short descriptive stories such as vignettes as a tool to model, teach, and research behavior and understanding as well as to stimulate discussion and problem solving in learning situations. This article summarizes the results of a study comparing the effectiveness of two types of vignettes (evaluation and synthesis) as…

Two lessons from comparable undergraduate courses in physics and engineering are analyzed to identify content, issues emphasized, and concepts used. Differences reflecting the pure nature of one field (physics) in contrast to the applied nature of the other are identified. Implications for classroom instruction and for research on college teaching…

Compares the teaching of literature in East and West Germany. Discusses both the nature and titles of the material taught and problems of teaching literature espousing individual thought and criticism in a communist system. Describes common ground in the literature curriculum of both that may serve as a basis for curriculum of unified Germany. (DK)

Asserts that not using a cross-cultural approach to American Studies is paradoxical, since comparative analysis is the principal sociological method of discovery and proof. Describes an American Studies course in which the core is comparative analyses of work and education in other countries. (CFR)

A study of the role of subject matter in shaping high school teachers' beliefs, curricular concerns, and instructional practices complements studies of the disciplines in higher education. Factors discussed include the "hard/soft" distinction between disciplines, curriculum sequencing, range of classroom techniques, breadth of course content, and…