The researcher's goal is to instill a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world by encouraging students to think critically and gather information from numerous sources. By introducing field experiences and primary sources into the curriculum, student engagement increased. Students were able to make a personal connection with their studies and…

Providing engaging, rigorous social studies education at the elementary level is a challenge faced by school districts across the country. In K-12 schools nationwide, social studies education is often neglected so that more time can be devoted to ELA and math, both of which have annual standardized tests associated with them that often carry high…

Despite accounting for a majority of college students in the United States, women fill a minority of professional leadership positions often associated with collegiate success. This suggests that educational access alone does not guarantee equitable societal outcomes after graduation, but rather remains shaped by a patriarchal social order. The…

This study examines 523 student newspapers from Athens State University from 1901 through 2000. The result is the discovery of unique student voices as expressed through perennial themes such as race and women's roles. These voices are periodized into four eras in which dominant values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms vary over time. These four eras…

Limited professional training regarding elementary social studies content and pedagogy contributes to the reduction of elementary social studies instruction. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to explore how the experiences of elementary educators during the 2018 Alabama Bicentennial Summer Institutes held in Mobile,…

This study addresses current trends in theological higher education by proposing a potentially viable mechanism for institutional reform, namely the Montessori method. Although Maria Montessori is widely known as an early childhood educator, this study suggests that her approach aligns quite well with the telos of theological education, the…

Primary literature serves an integral role within disciplinary communities to facilitate communication and mediate knowledge construction. As such, scientists devote much of their time immersed in primary literature to negotiate and update disciplinary knowledge. Despite the importance and relevance of this task, many biology students express…

The historic Highlander Folk School has recently been recovered as a unique model of rhetorical education that significantly impacted labor organizing and civil rights work in the United States. While scholarship and mainstream publications consistently celebrate the folk school as a gender inclusive, racial sanctuary, this dissertation reorients…

The purpose of this study was to systematically locate primary studies in Sub-Saharan Africa that addressed student-, teacher-, work environment-, state/government-, cultural-, and community/external-related factors and burnout implications and resolutions among special education teachers (SETs). A systematic integrative review with six tasks was…

Demographic trends in Texas continue to change and diversify the population; however, despite this trend, school districts and state officials continue to maintain a curriculum that is not relevant to this diverse population. Furthermore, studies show that Hispanic students, who represent 45% of the students in Texas public schools, have little…

A proliferation of ethnic hate speech and racial intolerance in New Jersey are two of the key points listed in the 1994 New Jersey State Legislature which mandated Holocaust education. As the mandate enters its third decade, there is an increasing urgency for educators to recognize, prepare for, and implement strategies to achieve these intended…

This dissertation examines the surviving archival evidence from several 19th century prominent West Feliciana families found in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) at the LSU libraries in an effort to understand how Louisianans' value and support education. The antebellum period was chosen for study because it was…

Driven 2 Teach is a privately funded program for history teachers in the state of Utah. The program emphasizes the importance of teacher travel to educate history teachers in the places where history happened. This study investigated the program's influence on participant gains in learning about history and how to best teach about the past, social…

A study of the Holocaust is a challenging task. Schools often dedicate little time to the study of the subject, and teachers are often largely unprepared in regard to their content mastery of the subject, as well as the appropriate pedagogical tools to help guide students through the study of intellectually and emotionally difficult material.…

This study focuses on discovery of what combination of scaffolds will allow 8th grade social studies students to successfully interact with primary source historical documents. The teacher-researcher examined the impact of scaffolding on two obstacles to learning in the discipline of history: (a) the inability of students to navigate successfully…