The teaching of religion raises opportunities to reduce prejudicial beliefs and attitudes among students. In this study, 30 religion, history, and civics teachers in Israel, East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Territories were interviewed about their motivations for teaching religion. This study found that teachers expressed a variety of…

In the sixties, student-led protest movements transformed university and college campuses across the United States. The 1969 takeover at the City College of New York had arguably the most far-reaching consequences of all of the protests of this period. As the flagship campus of the City University of New York system, City College had a well-known…

Many school districts across North America have turned to a framework for curriculum design and instruction called "Understanding by Design." Included in the framework is a call for teachers to create "essential questions" that provocatively ask students to consider and learn the "big ideas and core processes within the…

The purpose of this study was to understand how secondary level United States History teachers approached controversial issues in their standards-based, high-stakes testing classrooms. Controversial issues consisted of multiple points of view, were socially constructed, and had the potential to challenge belief systems. The audience and their…

The success of discipline-based teaching requires an interplay between substantive and procedural knowledge. In Finland, disciplinary thinking was included in the National Core Curriculum and in the final assessment criteria a decade ago, which meant a change in history teaching. The outcome of this change is examined in the article with the help…

Historical thinking is an integral part of understanding and doing history, as well as a good example of the kind of critical thinking necessary in today's society. This study, conducted in two phases, investigated ways in which students are brought to this higher level of thinking in the social studies classroom. Data collection occurred…

This article reviews the relationship between the conservative newspaper "The Australian" and the development of a national history curriculum in Australia. The lead author surveyed the major Australian press in the five-year period between 2007 and 2012 and found clear patterns of difference between "The Australian" and other…

Against the background of the pedagogization and internationalization of Holocaust memory discourse, this contribution focuses on the specific conditions of history classes on National Socialism and the Holocaust in Germany. Using a case study, this article shows both how the meanings of these subjects are communicatively negotiated in history…

In an examination of how content knowledge influenced her initial third grade social studies teaching experiences, Suzanne Wilson found that it, among other things, helped her "to hear what students say" and in her students' comments were "often...the seeds of complex and sophisticated historical ideas." She also found content…

In this article, the author talks about innovative high school curricula that engage students through the study of visual art in conjunction with critical study of history and social movements. Just as historians place a premium on locating and interpreting events in time, the visual arts are centered on getting an idea across in a visual form,…

Four undergraduates and a history professor planned for and carried out research in the Belgian State Archives in an attempt to answer the call from the Boyer Commission's seminal report that identified the need for meaningful undergraduate research opportunities in the American higher education system. Our faculty-student mentoring experience…

This article shares findings of how two third-grade children who have systematically studied history in grades K-3 analyzed historical sources on a topic about which they had no prior knowledge. In think-aloud interviews, the children analyzed written documents on the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act. One of the children, who tested on the third-grade…

The article discusses the National Standard in History and its impact on teaching and learning history in Russian schools. It reviews the changes in the content of history education in schools, learning activities and assessment tasks employed.

"Americans," historian Richard White often reminds his audiences, "prefer celebrating to remembering history." The landscape of the United States is populated with local, state, and national sites, house museums, working farms and other places of collective past that are deemed of historic significance. Many of these sites do…

Cross-curricular teaching and learning can be an approach that not only looks to amalgamate subjects together for the sake of greater understanding of each individual subject, but also to make meaningful connections between subjects based on disciplinary similarities. This involves a deeper understanding of each subject's specific characteristics…