This paper explores how teachers with different teaching styles conceptualized and implemented a multimedia-supported problem-based inquiry (PBI) unit. We focus on how the teachers supported student thinking and examine underlying belief, knowledge, and dispositional factors that may account for differences in the teachers' practices. We…

Reflecting on the current debate on how to teach about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, this article examines Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know, one of the several publications produced by the Fordham Institute that…

This article discusses the relationship between teachers, classroom controversy and the media. It also features the story of Ayesha, who coincidentally is one of the authors of this article. Ayesha's story is a social studies teacher's bad dream featuring one of her worst fears: (1) public criticism; and (2) controversy over something that has…

In this study, I argue that American history textbooks present discrete, heroic, one-dimensional, and neatly packaged master narratives that deny students a complex, realistic, and rich understanding of people and events in American history. In making this argument, I examine the master narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., in high school history…

Changing demography and ensuing incidents of backlash, growing intolerance, and prejudice led a group of educators from seven different schools in two rural counties of northwestern Washington State to organize a National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored series of Holocaust education inservice workshops. The obstacles they overcame in…

Departing from a realistic classroom context, this study focuses on the relationship between students' perception of task demands and their learning performance. History teachers (N=20) and their 11th-grade students (N=375) rated the relative importance of sections of an instructional text on which teachers would be giving a test. In addition,…

In 1998 the American Historical Association began an ambitious project, "Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age," designed to allow groups of historians in different parts of the country to experiment with the use of computer-based technologies to enhance the teaching of undergraduate survey courses. It aimed to enable these historians…

In this article, the author looks closely at the recent history of the East African coast and the Swahili people who live there. In doing so he hopes to highlight the inadequacy of the area studies/continentalist approach to studying and teaching the Swahili and to propose a different way of considering their past. His contention is that one can…

The emerging sub-field of world history is all about connections and interactions. It challenges the received treatments of history which have focused on specific regions and civilizations as if they had been discrete realities unto themselves, and reminds people that nothing happens in a vacuum. But to date world historians have not taken this…

This article explores the possible contribution to Jewish education found in the resources of Judaica scholarship. It begins by exploring the complex and often uneasy connection between the world of the university and the world of education and then offers an alternative to this tension by suggesting ways that Jewish subject matter scholarship…

In this article, students learn math through boat-building and navigation, music through sea-shanty-singing, literature and history through the study of nautically themed writings, and physical education by rowing traditional dories at Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center. The school also teaches plenty of modern chemistry,…

The pedagogy of teacher education is an understudied area; this includes the teaching of educational history to education students. In this article I highlight the teaching of educational history and current issues in teacher education through the use of what I call historical and current case studies. I examine work done in a pilot study that…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

This paper describes a secondary social science methods course with a lab component that was planned collaboratively by representatives of Nebraska Wesleyan University (Lincoln, Nebraska) and a local high school. The lab component meant that a university instructor taught a high school social studies course for a semester. The advantages of the…

"Folksong in the Classroom" is designed to be used by teachers of history, literature, music, and the humanities to encourage the study of history through folk song. This volume focuses on the history of the American Revolution, using song and script to better understand the American Revolutionary War. A question and answer segment encourages…