Verity Morgan took an unusual approach to the challenge of teaching the Holocaust, coming to it through the lens of environmental history. She shares here the practical means and resources she used to engage pupils with this current trend in historiography, and its associated concepts. Reflecting on her pupils' responses, Morgan makes a case for…

"Big history" is a term receiving a great deal of attention at present, particularly in North America where considerable sums of money have been invested in designing curricula and assessment tools to help teachers teach history at far larger scales of time than normal. Hawkey considers the pros and cons of incorporating components of…

Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of…

The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give meaning to that substance. While the nature of that interplay and the processes by which we enable pupils…

Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn about the Holocaust or about what they should learn. Tamsin Leyman and Richard Harris decided to use the opportunity presented…

This article discusses values education in schools and offers pre-service teachers with an insight as to why values education should be incorporated in classroom teaching. The list of current values in the Australian Curriculum and the importance of values education are discussed. Suggestions are made on how to improve values education, with a…

As the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda approaches, Mark Gudgel argues that we should face the challenges posed by teaching about Rwanda. Drawing on his experience as a history teacher in the US, his experience researching and supporting others' classrooms in the US and UK, his training in Holocaust education and his knowledge…

Synchronous technologies, particularly interactive video conferencing (IVC), are becoming common modes of teaching and delivering college courses. The increasing popularity of IVC in the U.S. and abroad calls for more pedagogically effective practices for instructors using this technology. This volume focuses on innovative and proven approaches to…

This article discusses values education in schools and offers pre-service teachers with an insight as to why values education should be incorporated in classroom teaching. The list of current values in the Australian Curriculum and the importance of values education are discussed. Suggestions are made on how to improve values education with a…

This article explores the development of utilizing music as a Personal Practical Theory (PPT) in the teaching of English and history. Specifically, the authors explore the nature of PPT's, the benefits of utilizing music, and the process through which teachers begin using a new approach in their pedagogy. Unique contributions are the application…

The special educator in the content area classroom often experiences an ill-defined role, which can translate into marginalization within instructional settings. Indeed, most students with learning disabilities (LD) receive content area instruction from a general education teacher with the support of a special educator. However, the literacy…

Literature pertaining to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is growing but there are few studies dealing with disciplinary differences. The SoTL relating to History is a recently emerging development. But what use is SoTL for History if it can not be translated into improving teaching practice? This paper examines the process of…

The dialogic nature of discourse which stems from the work of [Bakhtin, M. (1994). Speech genres and other late essays. In P. Morris (Ed.), "The dialogic imagination" (pp. 81-87). London: Edward Arnold. (Original work published 1986)] provides important understandings in an investigation into the nature of classroom discourse. Using…

During the Vietnam War, and the years following the conflict, history teachers were often hesitant to examine the war in the classroom for a variety of reasons. This article explores some of the factors that prohibited the effective teaching of the Vietnam War. Implications regarding how these inhibiting factors might affect teaching about the…

A common feature of contemporary curriculum design is the transposition of the curriculum's objectives with its content and methods. A general method for avoiding this and some related forms of conceptual confusion is outlined, with history curriculum given as a specific example of its aplication. (Author/MSE)