This article explores the different meanings of "Europe" in Swedish history textbooks over the course of the 20th century. Utilising the concept of myth, this textbook analysis looks at how the older history of Europe, and Sweden in relation to Europe, had changed by the end of the century. In particular, it examines the way in which…

This study investigated the strategic uses of music in the U.S. history classroom of six expert secondary U.S. history teachers identified by their administrators as expert teachers based on the merit of national certification, exemplary student and/or administration evaluations, high achieving teacher awards, or a combination of these criteria.…

Artists today draw on a range of sources--newspapers, magazines, photographs, film, audio, and of course the Internet--to create artworks that serve as visual "texts" of a specific place and moment in time. Using artworks as sources and understanding how to decode them in the service of "drilling down" into difficult topics can create powerful…

Successful curriculum development in any school subject requires a clear and established set of elements: agreed and widely appreciated goals; effective criteria for the selection of important knowledge content; and an explicit and well-integrated explanatory base for authentic problem-solving related to the subject goals. The article shows that…

Preliminary efforts to examine teachers' online participation and depth of messages have tended to focus solely on message metrics (e.g., counting the number of messages). However, such efforts do not address online messages in relation to one another. Taking relations of messages into account is important as the messages are not individual online…

In fall 2007, the Department of History at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) began offering an undergraduate certificate of emphasis as well as a Master's degree in the field of Public History. Now entering the third year of existence, the program has a small but enthusiastic group of students involved and is continuing to build to the future.…

In this article, the authors describe three specific activities in which they have integrated mini-camcorders in their units on the American Revolution, Civil War, and Post-Reconstruction and Progressive eras that they believe provide outlets for creative middle school students and engage students in authentic intellectual work. The three…

The author is a master packer. Last summer, anticipating the thousand-mile drive from southern California to Colorado, he packed their Sienna so that everything had its logical place, from the DVDs to the audio books, from the beef jerky to the bottled Starbucks mocha. Of course, at first he had to explain to everyone else where things were, since…

A history teacher examines what is successful and not successful in group work in his high school classroom and gives concrete suggestions for improving group practice. Topics discussed include preparing students for group work, supporting collaboration, inviting critical analysis, and assessing both group and individual performance. (Contains 2…

The work of critical teacher education centers on making sure future teachers learn to be critically-oriented practitioners. In this article, I assert that this sort of learning must first begin with the critical teacher educators themselves, and that much of the most fruitful learning manifests itself in the teacher educator's compulsions.…

The purpose of this article is to explore three fifth grade students' misremembering of the beginnings of American history as a form of mediated action, active agents using cultural tools provided by a sociocultural setting to represent and interpret the past (Wertsch, 2000). Data come from a 10-month qualitative case study of history instruction…

This article discusses the increasing emphasis on using pictorial sources in teaching, learning and assessment in history and asserts that pedagogies for interpreting visual imagery need to be purposefully aligned in relation to the particular media or production contexts under study. Expecting students to be able to glean meaning from images…

Professor Howard Zinn was arguably America's best-known historian, despite the dismissive if not caustic response his book, "A People's History of the United States," elicited from historians. In Zinn's narrative the protagonists of history are "blacks, Indians, women, and working people of all kinds ... ordinary people trying to…

Thomas Jefferson has long fascinated Americans. Even though Jefferson biographer Merrill Peterson once termed Jefferson "impenetrable," a host of recent scholars have tried to penetrate the "inner Jefferson" in an attempt to make him "more vital to people." Trying to understand Jefferson, one could argue, is akin to trying to understand America,…

This paper is an academic observation of an Educational Multimedia Content development-training programme funded by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in Tanzania. This project focused on skills development in script writing and in radio and video programme development, aimed at transforming selected subjects from text to multimedia content. The…