The present plays an important part in history education, in particular in efforts to make the study of the past relevant for today. This contribution examines how the relationship between past and present is dealt with in current Flemish secondary history education by analyzing 190 written history exams for the 11th and 12th grade. Ten percent of…

Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons. Arguing that although highly accessible, images are not…

Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation. It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their "signpost sentences". She found herself showing students how an academic historian…

Similar to educators in mathematics, science, and reading, history educators around the world have mobilized curricular reform movements toward including complex thinking in history education, advancing historical thinking, developing historical consciousness, and teaching competence in historical sense making. These reform movements, including…

Self-assessment is a process during which students evaluate the quality of their work in a given domain based on explicitly stated criteria. Accurate self-assessments improve students' academic achievement. Yet, students often have difficulties assessing their own work. It is possible that appropriate instructional supports will help students…

This article focuses on university students' understanding of the concept of nation. First an analysis of this concept from a historiographical point of view is presented. This allows for distinguishing between different conceptions of the nation related to 3 main approaches: the romantic, the modernist, and the ethnosymbolic approaches. Based on…

The Industrial Revolution is the subject of one of the high school inquiries of the New York State Toolkit. Social Education presents the following excerpts from the inquiry as an example of a typical Toolkit lesson. The supporting questions include: (1) Where did people move to and from during the Industrial Revolution?; (2) How did daily life…

Technological innovations and inventions are changing society and world culture so fast that it's often difficult to keep up. This article provides many web sites that will provide classroom teachers or even full social studies departments with information and lesson plans to integrate the importance of inventions and technology into their…

The aim of this explorative study was to develop and test a pedagogy aimed at promoting students' ability to perform historical contextualization. Teaching historical contextualization was conceptualized in terms of four pedagogical design principles: (1) making students aware of the consequences of a present-oriented perspective when examining…

While the conceptual work on critical pedagogy is undeniably rich, few empirical studies have examined its applications in K-12 classroom settings and impacts on students. Based on ethnographic research in 2 public 11th grade U.S. History classrooms with critical teachers, this article describes 3 pedagogies that enhanced students' critical…

Scholars contend that disciplinary literacy is a productive route for all secondary learners, including those identified as struggling readers, to build knowledge. Relatedly, scholars point to disciplinary literacy as a socially just alternative to decontextualized skill instruction and deficit positioning. Yet, little research has examined how…

Study abroad is recognized as a means to teach global citizenship to students, but little empirical research exists to support the notion. This qualitative research study details how a large, urban, public high school implemented a study abroad program to enrich its Advanced Placement World History course. The diverse school collaborated with a…

There are few topics more engaging, polarizing, controversial, and relevant than the issue of race relations in the United States. As race and racism are enduring issues of importance and popularity, it seems fitting to explore the topic through one of the more engaging and divisive eras in U.S. history; the Civil War. National and state standards…

Due to its direct approach and its detailed analysis of race, the "A More Perfect Union" (AMPU) speech makes for a likely primary source to be included in a lesson addressing Obama's racial significance. As social studies teacher-educators who draw from critical perspectives on race and racism, the authors hope to see Obama's speech used…

Back in 1993 and 2000, Lang and LeCocq, respectively, in their reactions against reductive and de-contextualised forms of "source work", pointed out that all sources do hold value in some way, even, and often especially, in those aspects that might be deemed "biased". The author's Year 10s' difficulty in shaking off a certain…