A limited body of research examines the extent to which social studies teachers are actually utilizing primary sources that are accessible in traditional classroom-based formats versus web-based formats. This paper initiates an exploration of this gap in the literature by reporting on the result of a survey of secondary social studies teachers,…

In this article, the author reviews his unsuccessful and successful strategies for teaching research and analytical skills, which illustrate changes in his assumptions about and attitude toward teaching. Older and perhaps wiser as well, the author no longer assumes that students already know how to do what teachers expect them to be able to do by…

Many science teachers recognize that teaching aspects of the history of science helps students learn science content and the nature of science (NOS). The use of history can potentially humanize science, help students refine their critical thinking skills, promote a deeper understanding of scientific concepts, and address common student…

This paper explores how teachers with different teaching styles conceptualized and implemented a multimedia-supported problem-based inquiry (PBI) unit. We focus on how the teachers supported student thinking and examine underlying belief, knowledge, and dispositional factors that may account for differences in the teachers' practices. We…

Reflecting on the current debate on how to teach about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, this article examines Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know, one of the several publications produced by the Fordham Institute that…

This article discusses the relationship between teachers, classroom controversy and the media. It also features the story of Ayesha, who coincidentally is one of the authors of this article. Ayesha's story is a social studies teacher's bad dream featuring one of her worst fears: (1) public criticism; and (2) controversy over something that has…

In this study, I argue that American history textbooks present discrete, heroic, one-dimensional, and neatly packaged master narratives that deny students a complex, realistic, and rich understanding of people and events in American history. In making this argument, I examine the master narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., in high school history…

Changing demography and ensuing incidents of backlash, growing intolerance, and prejudice led a group of educators from seven different schools in two rural counties of northwestern Washington State to organize a National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored series of Holocaust education inservice workshops. The obstacles they overcame in…

Departing from a realistic classroom context, this study focuses on the relationship between students' perception of task demands and their learning performance. History teachers (N=20) and their 11th-grade students (N=375) rated the relative importance of sections of an instructional text on which teachers would be giving a test. In addition,…

In 1998 the American Historical Association began an ambitious project, "Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age," designed to allow groups of historians in different parts of the country to experiment with the use of computer-based technologies to enhance the teaching of undergraduate survey courses. It aimed to enable these historians…

In this article, the author looks closely at the recent history of the East African coast and the Swahili people who live there. In doing so he hopes to highlight the inadequacy of the area studies/continentalist approach to studying and teaching the Swahili and to propose a different way of considering their past. His contention is that one can…

The emerging sub-field of world history is all about connections and interactions. It challenges the received treatments of history which have focused on specific regions and civilizations as if they had been discrete realities unto themselves, and reminds people that nothing happens in a vacuum. But to date world historians have not taken this…

This article explores the possible contribution to Jewish education found in the resources of Judaica scholarship. It begins by exploring the complex and often uneasy connection between the world of the university and the world of education and then offers an alternative to this tension by suggesting ways that Jewish subject matter scholarship…

In this article, students learn math through boat-building and navigation, music through sea-shanty-singing, literature and history through the study of nautically themed writings, and physical education by rowing traditional dories at Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center. The school also teaches plenty of modern chemistry,…

The pedagogy of teacher education is an understudied area; this includes the teaching of educational history to education students. In this article I highlight the teaching of educational history and current issues in teacher education through the use of what I call historical and current case studies. I examine work done in a pilot study that…