Explores the teaching of gender history within secondary education, focusing on the creation and development of a course on gender taught at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Addresses why teenage students are resistant to seeing the effects of gender. (CMK)

Explores what assumptions, specifically cultural memories and identity components, students bring with them into a world history course. Focuses on such topics as "Western" values and the two possible candidates of memory issues in world history (gender and idea of "modern"). (CMK)

The author's ninth grade world history students communicated the connection they felt to three women whose stories they evaluated in class. The women represented ordinary people living during time periods being studied, and their personal stories demonstrated how the political, economic and cultural events had an impact on people in unique and…

Recent research emphasizes the context-specific nature of professional knowledge and expertise, implying that developing novel practices in authentic environments is a prerequisite for teachers' professional development. The aim of this study was to find out how teachers develop their practical knowledge and expertise through shared planning and…

In this paper, we address the issue of how teachers select primary and secondary texts for classroom use by focusing on two New York state middle school history teachers. Our field studies show that, although they teach diverse groups of students, each teacher chooses a wide variety of sources to develop classroom units and test preparation…

The objective of this historical analysis is to determine the origins of the American elementary history/social studies curriculum and to determine how nationalism affected the curriculum as it progressed in the early twentieth century. The Committee of Eight (Co8), established by the American Historical Association in 1905, created the first…

College and university professors in large part do not make connections between their disciplines and the culture of their students. Research has found culturally relevant curricula and pedagogy to be effective in helping to increase the academic achievement of students (Au, 1981; Bell & Clark, 1998; Cazden & John, 1971; John, 1972;…

This article draws upon writings by social studies educators and historians to articulate a new approach to training history teachers. We argue that the divide between advocates of historical thinking and of historical content can be overcome through a better understanding of what it means to know history. By examining the nature of the historical…

Improving critical thinking--defined by one expert as "reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do"--has been a frequent topic in the writing of history educators at least since the early 1970s. Attitudes and interests do support higher-level thinking and, most importantly, knowledge used in carrying it out…

Proving history's relevance to students is a daunting task that social studies educators face everyday as they create lesson plans that they hope will spark their students' interest in learning about the past. Few educators would argue that demonstrating the relevance of the objectives toward which they are teaching is an unnecessary duty. Perhaps…

State and national social studies standards have laid out what young people need to know about history, government, and other social studies subjects, but they do not provide information on what young people actually know and believe about a subject. The perspectives or frameworks of knowledge and beliefs that young people bring to their social…

The teaching of American history is not neutral; teachers and textbooks often define what is important and what is not. It is through this historical subjectivity that stereotypes and biases emerge and ultimately persist. With relevance to African Americans and American Indians, such stereotypes can be culturally, politically and economically…

Seventy 8th-grade students (including talented writers, those with average ability, and students in need of special education services) participated in an integrated social studies and language arts unit designed to promote historical understandings and argumentative writing skills. The historical reasoning instruction lasted 12 days, and the…

This article sketches out a comprehensive approach for preparing history teachers. It argues that grounding in historical content knowledge is necessary for success in the classroom, but such grounding is not enough to ensure that success. For beginning teachers, the problem is not merely acquiring content knowledge but acquiring it in ways that…

This study was aimed at finding effective ways of organising peer assessment of written assignments in the context of teaching history at university level. To discover features yielding optimal results, several peer assessment designs were developed, implemented in courses and their learning outcomes evaluated. Outcomes were defined in terms of…