Background: In England, the promotion of "national values" within the history curriculum has become an increasingly topical issue in the wake of recent debates about "Britishness" and community cohesion. However, despite the swathe of policy statements and pronouncements, there is little empirical evidence linking young…

"A People's History for the Classroom" helps teachers introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of U.S. history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. It includes a new introductory essay by veteran teacher Bill Bigelow on teaching strategies that align with Howard Zinn's "A People's…

This paper discussed a study involving two groups of teacher candidates' implementations of a visual literacy curriculum in their preclinical field experience. The purpose was to explore whether the curriculum provided a viable way for them to implement Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in teaching their diverse learners, including students with…

This Research Brief focuses on the qualifications of teachers in science and mathematics as well as history, in grades 7-12 for the 2003-04 school year. The subjects of science and mathematics were selected because of continuing concerns in the United States over the high need for individuals with advanced knowledge and skills in these subjects.…

Secondary school history textbooks in South Korea, Japan, and the United States have long struggled to give meaning and significance to the war waged on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953. Comparing commonly-used, contemporary history textbooks from each of these three nations, this analysis suggests that students on both sides of the…

Jon Carl's vision is simple: get students passionate about history by turning them into historians. To accomplish this, he created a class centered on documentary film-making. Students choose a topic, conduct research at local libraries, write a script, film video interviews, and create video segments of four to 15 minutes. District technology…

On an earlier column titled "What I learned at the NCSS Annual Meeting," the author wrote about the Internet-oriented materials and resources featured at the 2006 NCSS convention in Washington, D.C. Having received many e-mails from readers telling him that they appreciated having the opportunity to see which companies, not-for-profit,…

Although the Vietnam War ended more than thirty years ago, historians remain as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war. Mark Moyar maps the ongoing battle between "orthodox" and "revisionist" Vietnam War historians: the first group, those who depict Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should…

The national secondary review promises new possibilities for innovation in curriculum design and the learner experience in Key Stage Three. With its emphasis on flexible curriculum frameworks and active pupil learning, this may create new avenues for the promotion of a frequently neglected area of the secondary pupil experience--the creative…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and characterize current practice in secondary history education and its relationship to best practices. In this phenomenological study, the author examines the pedagogy of three high school history teachers and the extent to which their current methods exhibited recent thinking on best practices in…

Jennifer Dorman was in a fix. Teaching ninth-grade US history at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Dorman wanted to tap into her students' interest in creating "something of value not just for their teachers, but something they could share with other students and people." But that required something a conventional paper-based…

The popularity of VHS and DVD over the past two decades has greatly expanded the influence of history movies, watched by millions of adolescents in homes and classrooms. This paper examines two secondary U.S. history teachers' instructional uses of history motion pictures in their classrooms. Ray used The Patriot (2000) to teach history as stories…

Interdisciplinary work across the humanities and social sciences is moving beyond analysis of any one nation in isolation and instead placing urgent questions in the larger matrix of the Americas as a hemisphere. But little attention has been given to the overarching methodological, institutional, and pedagogical issues resulting from the growth…

This multiple case study examined the efforts of six elementary school teachers in their implementation of new instructional strategies in their fifth grade social studies classrooms following their participation in a weeklong Summer Institute focusing on American history. The study was guided by one grand tour question and one sub-tour question.…

This study emerges from a professional development workshop the authors conducted with elementary, middle, and high school teachers. The article highlights of responses of workshop participants, particularly their response that the law was about assimilation, in the context of "The General Allotment Act of 1887" and the Hopi Indian…