in this article, author Neil Shanks writes about a "people's economics" approach to teaching K-graduate economics, an approach he argues should replace the more traditional and pervasive neoclassical approach. Similar to the shift from 'great white men and wars' history to social and 'bottom up' history, Shanks believes a people's…

By some estimates, over 1.2 billion tons of soil was blown across the Great Plains during the height of the Dust Bowl. The so-called "black blizzards" these massive dust storms caused suffocated cattle, sickened children, and destroyed thousands of family farms. Formerly prosperous farmers, unsure why they had such bad luck, wondered if…

For most undergraduate students, history prior to college has been dominated by learning through a settler colonialism lens. Settler colonialism embodies the typical United States, master, or traditional narrative. It erases marginalized perspectives, histories, culture, and identity in favor of the white settler perspective. By overlooking the…

The authors' scholarly reflective narrative addresses the rewards and challenges of an immersive experiential active learning pedagogy. They ask, "was it worth it?" for students and for themselves. Although research evidence makes it clear that active learning benefits student learning and engagement, designing a course to incorporate…

When the author tells people that her research focuses on how people teach and learn with historic places, the first response is usually "Oh, I love field trips." This sensibility, that field trips are required to teach about a place, is the single greatest barrier to understanding what can be learned from Place. Every Place is an…

Studying the 2000 U.S. General Election, students read the word, "hanging chad." A dictionary definition reveals "fragments from holes made in paper cards," but leaves students dangling with uncertainty, which shortchanges the importance of this word in history. Is knowing the definition of "hanging chad" enough? When…

In this article Sophie Harley-McKeown identifies and addresses her Year 12 students' blind spot over agentive explanation. Noticing that the examination board to which she teaches uses 'motivations' rather than 'aims' prompted her to consider whether her students really knew what that meant. Finding that her students' causal explanations tended to…

By using the "Game of Thrones" pop-culture television series, the author has structured courses in a way that seeks to solve problems that plague many history courses serving university requirements. In this article, the author will discuss how gaming the classroom can serve as a solution to the issue of engaging majors and non-majors…

In this article, the author describes three inquiry activities based on a children's book set in the Philippines during World War II. In many U.S. history and modern world history curricula and textbooks, events in the Philippines (and more generally in the Pacific theater) during World War II are not covered well. Because these events cannot be…

Implementing curriculum that includes all students, that celebrates individual learners' needs, that fosters student responsibility, and that teaches skills that transcend discipline-specific outcomes is possible with a pedagogy that embraces immersion learning. Reacting to the Past is a High Impact Practice (H.I.P.) approach that uses elaborate,…

This article describes a workshop to develop students' understanding of how to investigate a cross-disciplinary question that bridges science and history. The question 'Why did the "Titanic" sink?' is interpreted scientifically and then historically to help students to better appreciate the strengths and limitations of each discipline's…

In this article, the authors discuss the possibilities and benefits of inquiry-based learning at National Park Service (NPS) parks, historic sites, and their companion websites. They also stress that you can extend the guidance and resources that may be provided by any historic monument or park close to your school, whether it is a part of the NPS…

Oral history as a field of research, teaching, archival collection, community building or engagement, truth and reconciliation, and creative practice, emerged with the diffusion of the tape recorder in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of enormous social and political upheaval. As a result, oral history was quickly taken up by feminists,…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

This article discusses authentic inquiry-based learning in a hybrid graduate course, "Teaching Hidden History," taught in 2015 and 2016. Students in this course created online history learning modules based on their own scholarly research. They defined their intended audience and crafted modules tailored specifically for those learners.…