A key component of current British military education is the battlefield tour and staff ride. These tours allow students to visit the location of military events, most commonly the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars in northern Europe, to facilitate their understanding of military history and draw contemporary parallels from the…

Closing the "breach" or "distance" between teachers and historians has become a focus in teacher education and has gained greater prominence in the research on preservice teachers. Overall, most educational researchers now believe that a definition of historical knowledge includes not only a basic understanding of the facts, but also an…

In this article, the author looks back at the time Charlotte Crabtree, longtime Professor of Education at UCLA with a special interest in elementary history-social studies curriculum, asked him to join her in applying for a million dollar grant to be awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), chaired by Lynne Cheney. Crabtree had…

One of the key components of Social Studies has always been history, yet many of us seldom explore what we mean by history. This paper delves into the meaning of history through an examination of Collingwood's work and a discussion of how we can incorporate twentieth century thought into his work. This paper aims, in Collingwood's words, to…

This essay is based on the author's presentation at the Wachman Center's July 26-27, 2008 history institute, co-sponsored and hosted by the Cantigny First Division Foundation of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. For multiple reasons, one can say that the frontier wars are the most complex and difficult of all the nation's wars to teach. The…

Determining how to teach about rescue during the Holocaust presents many dilemmas to teachers as they plan Holocaust curricula. Rescue is often overemphasized, and faulty perspectives about rescuers and their actions may cause students to develop distorted views about this aspect of Holocaust history. This article explores several factors that…

It is ironic that visuals are so integrated into postmodern American culture, and yet history instructors still seem so uncomfortable with them, evidently preferring written texts over visual ones. Historians who advocate the analysis of images speak clearly, loudly, and uniformly on one point: they urge instructors to move beyond using images…

The Observation/Inference (OI) Chart is a strategy that can help students learn to make observations and inferences when reading nontraditional texts such as artifacts, paintings or movies. Nontraditional texts can be highly engaging and provide authentic thinking experiences for students, but they can also be difficult to comprehend. Teachers can…

The purpose of this article is to explore the meanings and implications of dangerous memories in two different sites of past traumatic memories: one in Israel and the other in Cyprus. Dangerous memories are defined as those memories that are disruptive to the status quo, that is, the hegemonic culture of strengthening and perpetuating existing…

This article investigates if WebQuests have been an effective instructional tool for teaching Social Sciences subjects. In order to obtain an answer to this question, a review of scholarly literature from 1995 to the present has been undertaken and action research in 8th grade U.S. history course was conducted. The literature investigation has…

The hurried pace of the modern classroom does not permit formative feedback on writing assignments at the frequency or quality recommended by the research literature. One solution for increasing individual feedback to students is to incorporate some form of computer-generated assessment. This study explores the use of automated assessment of…

This article focuses on describing the interplay between teaching and learning practices in Higher Education and the disciplinary context of such practices. In particular, it aims to address the question of how course design, teaching, and learning activities take place within a particular academic culture and how those activities mutually shape…

In spite of calls for increased literacy instruction in secondary content classes, there appears to be little change in practice. One reason for this may be that content area literacy courses inadequately prepared teachers to teach literacy skills specific to their content area. This article describes a program that embeds content area literacy…

The "fingerpost" is that ubiquitous hand with one extended finger long seen in public places, accompanied by directions such as "to the ladies' toilets" or "exit this way." More recently, that same finger has been widely adopted in electronic media, for the purpose of leading people simply and intuitively to a…

Teaching an introductory survey course in a typical lecture hall presents a series of related obstacles. The large number of students, the size of the room, and the fixed nature of the seating tend to maximize the distance between instructor and students. That distance then grants enrolled students enough anonymity to skip class too frequently and…