The Global Internet Video Classroom (GIVC) Project connected Chicago Civil Rights activists of the 1960s with Cape Town Anti-Apartheid activists of the 1960s in a classroom setting where learners from Cape Town and Chicago engaged activists in conversations about their motivation, principles, and strategies. The project was launched in order to…

Social studies teachers assess their students in a number of ways. Among these are formative assessments, authentic assessments, and summative low-level multiple-choice tests. Working with two classrooms of low-achieving U.S. history students, the authors compared student experiences in traditional units to those in units that integrated an…

This practitioner research study examined students at an ethnically and economically diverse high school and the impact of replacing the corporate-produced textbook with teacher-created reading packets and questions that asked students to take a critical stance on historical events in United States history. Using critical theories of education as…

The traditional approach to the education of newcomer students separates English language development from content instruction. It is assumed that English language proficiency is a prerequisite for subject-matter learning. The authors take the alternate view that the integration of historical thinking and digitized primary sources enhances English…

If we are to aim toward a genuine democracy, we must be willing to look at the uncomfortable topics that continue to sabotage what we aspire to as a society. This article aims to problematize the ways we conceive of and implement the social studies. To do so, I investigate the social studies in K-12 practice through critical theoretical lenses,…

This article investigates the underlying themes and principles that inform curriculum debate and how they are articulated in current school policy discussions. This topic is approached with the help of a case study covering the debate on which subjects should be mandatory for students at the upper secondary school curriculum in Sweden. The focus…

This case study focuses on the impact of historical film on 20 high school students using document surveys, group, and personal interviews. The study examined the impact that two films had on students' historical understanding, the students' awareness of this impact, and their use of the tools of historical inquiry. The results indicated film…

Humorist Josh Billings quipped, "About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment." Billings was harsh in his view of originality, but his critique reveals a tension faced by students every time they write a history paper. Research is the essence of any history paper. Especially in high school,…

This paper examines prospective history teachers' thinking about ethnic and cultural diversity and their experiences of learning to teach about history in multicultural classrooms. The paper reviews the findings of a follow-up study of 22 Finnish student teachers during their nine-month teacher education programme. The data consist of…

How can teachers effectively use documentary film to teach history, and toward what goals? This article addresses these important questions by: (1) exploring what we know about secondary teachers' practices with documentary film and secondary students' beliefs about documentary film as a source of knowledge about the past, (2) proposing a…

The Dutch are missing in any U.S. history textbook, in the content standards, and in the nationally endorsed curriculum. Outside of New York State history classes, there is almost no mention of the Dutch influence in early 17th-century America. Fleeting references to the Netherlands as a staging area for the Pilgrims' famous "Mayflower"…

Background: Despite the renewed interest in citizenship education, relatively little is known about effective ways to realize citizenship education in the classroom. In the literature on citizenship education, dialogue is considered to be a crucial element. However, there is very little, if any, empirical research into the different ways to…

The aim of this study was to examine differences in intrinsic motivation and perceived academic competence as well as in their association between 5th- and 6th-grade students with learning disabilities (LD) (n = 40) and their typically achieving peers. Participants were 980 Greek elementary students from the metropolitan area of Athens. As…

For many semesters, the author taught an introductory class titled "The Global Perspective: The World since World War II." In this article, she describes a successful approach she found for teaching first-year and non-major students to enjoy reading about the world and to appreciate a global perspective. She chose a source-based approach and she…

The utilization of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geobrowsers (Google Earth) have become increasingly prevalent in the study of genocide. These applications offer teachers and students the opportunity to analyze historical and contemporary genocidal acts from a critical geographic perspective in which the confluence of historical…