Maria Montessori's visit to California in 1915--her second visit to the United States--coincided with multiple events in the region: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), San Diego's Panama-California Exposition (PCE), and the National Education Association of the United States (NEA) annual meeting in Oakland. Her visit…

In the United States of America, democratic education has evolved philosophically over 200 years from Jeffersonian ideas of educated citizenry to Deweyan principles of democracy as a "mode of associated living." In contemporary society, Dianna Hess has written about democratic education as a process of deliberative democracy. Yet the…

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…

Following the American Civil War, several school music series were published to serve the needs of graded schools. These gradually became more popular than the single-volume songbooks previously used in public schools. Yet, school songbooks by Ransom Hubbard Randall and other authors continued to be used in the public schools as late as the 1920s.…

There is a renewed interest for the use of inquiry in social studies classrooms; though, research has long shown numerous benefits. This lesson seeks to utilize the inquiry method to invigorate the social studies curriculum as well as explore a controversial topic of gender equality in historic representation. Women are often underrepresented in…

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote--college students--would cast their ballots was a…

The author argues that, in the early 1920s, many urban White Americans saw in the Arctic an escape from a world of rapidly expanding technology and became captivated by images of Inuit communities. To pass down an antimodernist form of imperialism to children of the period, educators used lead ethnographic "Escimo" figurines, which…

The author examines the therapeutic value of puzzles for adults during two major crises in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Each period saw a huge surge in jigsaw puzzling throughout the country, she finds, and in both cases people turned to home-based leisure activities, either for…

In this article, the authors discuss a month-long research study where sixth grade students researched three women for the half-century after the U.S. Civil War War that worked to change their respective communities to address public issues: Jane Addams, Clara Lemlich, and Ida B. Wells. The sixth graders read a picture book for each of the three…

When teaching the Civil Rights Movement in elementary classrooms, heroic figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. tend to dominate the curricular landscape. While it is essential for students to learn about their contributions and struggles, it is equally important to frame the broader injustices they were combating. In this article,…

I explore the possibilities for domestic educational travel to impact students' understandings of racism, and their attitudes and planned behaviors toward enacting change in their communities. Prompted by movements for racial justice and drawing from the critical pedagogies of Paulo Freire, students on the "America's Race Issues"…

The author provided a brief exploration into the origins of racial/ethnic categories and facilitated a linkage between a colonial past and the present. She encouraged educational researchers and practitioners to adopt an understanding of Latinidad beyond a pan-ethnic model of identity by making critical colonial connections. She underscored how…

Immersion into fiction is associated with many educational and social benefits. The current study compared read-alouds of a historical fiction novel and a nonfiction textbook to determine whether differences were observed in student's transportation, content learning, and socio-emotional development. In all, 41 students between the ages of 9 and…

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…

How much should student effort matter in their course grades? How much does student effort actually matter? What is the link between student effort and student performance, especially when the effort is not specifically focused on a specific performance metric? This paper examines these questions normatively as well as by analyzing student data…