"Why do people hate history classes?" That is a common question that the author, like countless other history instructors, poses to his students on the first day of class. From a recent survey of the author's "Introduction to Asian American History" course, which the author has taught at the University of California, Los…

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…

December 16, 2023, was the 250th anniversary of an event that has become known as the "Boston Tea Party." This article discusses an upper-level history class about that event that allowed students to take a closer look at what really happened that night. In addition to the traditional approach of having students read large volumes of…

This volume collects the work of historians, researchers, and classroom teachers to define what it means to be a racially literate educator and citizen. History classes should be spaces in which all students learn about their predecessors' legacies as a context for understanding and decision-making in contemporary society. In reality, the…

Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

We discuss an original study and two replications conducted over 18 years examining the impact of Teacher Study Group (TSG) in Vocabulary, a professional development (PD) approach for improving pedagogy and student learning. Study 1 focused on the design and development of the PD and included a small-scale randomized controlled trial to assess the…

This article details an experiment with flipped/hybrid courses that was guided by questioning how history units across the nation's colleges and universities can curb enrollment decline, improve student experiences, and impart to students the value of studying history and why it should remain an essential part of college curricula. A team of…

Despite decades of research to the contrary, public discourse continues to insist on the direct power of curriculum to shape student learning, rather than acknowledge the complex and situated ways that teachers and curricular materials interact to shape enacted instruction. In this paper, we use a model of curriculum enactment to illustrate the…

The field of education in America--oft-viewed as a catalyst for change and self-improvement--has a racist history, which is often undiscussed by teachers and likely unknown to students. This article guides high school students to explore how educational texts, tasks, and policies have been products and producers of racist ideas in the past and…

Get started with an innovative approach to teaching history that develops literacy and higher-order thinking skills, connects the past to students' lives, and meets state and national standards (grades 7-12). Now in a second edition, this popular book provides an introductory unit to help teachers build a trustful classroom climate; over 70…

Political history lends itself to traditional patterns of teaching and learning in social studies such as students memorizing facts presented in lectures or textbooks. This article presents a recurring activity structure for teaching U.S. political history--Consensus Circle Presidential Rating (CCPR)--which requires students to read across…

Data visualizations, including timelines, maps, and graphs, are often used to present social and political information in the media. Students need to learn how to make sense of data visualizations and recognize when they are being used to mislead, or when they advance white supremacist views. In this study, we used critical race analysis to…

No single story can represent fully and comprehensively a complex historical movement such as the Civil Rights fight for freedom and social justice. Learning about this movement through multi-perspective biographical young adult graphic novels cultivates in students a nuanced understanding of this historical struggle, making it more concrete and…

Museums are everywhere. Along the Northern Rail Trail in Franklin, New Hampshire, the author came across an old train yard with an interpretive sign indicating, "the granite blocks you are looking at are all that remains of this eighteenth-century railroad table." Of course, trains did not cross the region until the nineteenth century.…

How individuals interpret the justifications for historical war can have a large effect on how they see modern warfare. In the social studies classroom, particularly in the U.S. context, so much of what educators focus on in regard to war are the events of World War II. This focus on the Second World War is understandable. However, it could also…