Many of the history courses community college students take are fairly broad and ostensibly generic surveys of world, Western European, or American history. This chapter discusses an array of innovative practices that enable students to better appreciate how studying history can help them master the challenges--and reap the benefits--of a liberal…

From handwritten letters of the American Revolution to typed emails from Iraq and Afghanistan, correspondence from U.S. troops offers students deep insight into the specific conflicts and experiences of soldiers. Over 100,000 correspondences have been donated to the Legacy Project, a national initiative launched in 1998 to preserve war letters by…

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial was established in 2007 to serve, in part, as an organization devoted to educating young people and visitors to the memorial in an effort to ensure that the lessons, legacy, and sacrifices of World War II not be forgotten. After 32 years of teaching history at West Springfield High School in…

This paper analyses school history writing in a specific context: Belarus--a post-totalitarian and authoritarian state. School history teaching has always been a powerful instrument for transmitting national identity and legitimising political structures, and political authorities tend to control it. Perestroika marked the beginning of a new…

The potential of video games for teaching history is receiving increasing recognition. However, the greatest emphasis is on their use as tools in secondary education. The few studies focusing on undergraduate education demonstrate the use of games to create an immersive historical experience with counterfactual options. While exploring these…

This essay addresses the challenges of teaching to myths and misperceptions through a discussion of two books that the author uses to frame her course on the history of women and gender in the modern Middle East: (1) Geraldine Brooks' "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women" (1995); and (2) Heather Raffo's "9 Parts…

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the United States assigned Indian Agents--non-Native employees of the federal government--to coordinate intergovernmental efforts, to encourage the assimilation of Native peoples into European-American society, and to serve as advocates for individual tribes. Although Indian Agents no longer exist in an official…

Described by the author Monica Ali as a building that 'sparks the imagination and sparks conversations', 19 Princelet Street, now a Museum of Diversity and Immigration, captivated the imagination of teacher David Waters. He was struck by the building's potential not merely for exploring the diverse histories of migrant communities in London, but…

The purpose of this article is twofold. At a narrative level, it seeks to expand the thematic coverage of recent scholarship on educational transfer to include the mobility of a specific paradigm of history teaching across borders in Europe. At a theoretical level, the article focuses on the borders of intergovernmental and nongovernmental…

Key terms and concepts are crucial tools in teaching and learning in the disciplines. Different linguistic traditions approach such tools in diverse ways. This paper offers an initial contribution by a monolingual Anglophone history educator in dialogue with German history educators. It presents three different scenarios for the potential of…

Public and policy discourse about the content of history curricula is frequently contested, but the voice of history teachers is often absent from such debate. Drawing on a large-scale online survey of history teachers in England, this paper explores their responses to major curriculum reforms proposed by the Coalition government in February 2013.…

This paper presents web research strategies for teachers and students to use in building Dramatic Event, Historical Biography, and Influential Literature wiki pages for history/social studies learning. Dramatic Events refer to milestone or turning point moments in history. Historical Biographies and Influential Literature pages feature…

The article examines a mainstream curricular unit on the Haitian Revolution, centered on a culminating role-play activity. Cultural studies, subaltern studies, and hermeneutics are applied as theoretical frameworks to read the curriculum unit and its activities. These theoretical lenses sharpen an understanding of what it means to experience…

Current research into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) has neglected the potential of using learner comments for discipline-specific analysis. This article explores how MOOCs, within the historical discipline, can be used to generate, investigate, and document personal narratives, and argues that they serve as a rich platform for historical…

Relevance: The relevance of the problem under investigation is caused by the fact that the problem of the formation of the professional and didactic culture of future teachers has not been sufficiently elaborated. The purpose of the article: The article aims to the solution of the problem of improving the content of future teachers' training with…