Students often bring considerable prior information about the Holocaust to their study of the event, with much of that knowledge being inaccurate or incomplete. In addition, the Shoah's complexity necessitates that teachers establish a well-defined framework as they introduce the topic to their students. This article outlines an opening lesson for…

Literature on teacher education and encounters with race highlight some of the difficulties that teacher candidates face when they confront their own racialized subjectivities. However, many of these projects focus exclusively on Whiteness studies, explicating how White teacher candidates come to witness their own racialized Whiteness in relation…

The personal experiences and values of individual teachers can tend to restrict the ability to promote a "global perspective" in the social studies, the subject area most suited to that concept. One antidote to this instructional myopia is the prospect of overseas travel, in the form of study tours, the type of which have been shown to…

In this essay I explain the basic tenets of postcolonial theory and its possible implications for teaching social studies and global issues in American high schools. The use of this theory is becoming increasingly significant, given the growing Islamophobia and Orientalism in the United States, the ongoing uprisings in the Middle East, and the…

Current Norwegian curricular guidelines oblige schools to educate citizens with a critical perspective on society. From a discourse theoretical perspective, this obligation implies that various school subjects, and in particular social studies, offer discourses on social issues that allow for different points of view and critical evaluation.…

This study was conducted to reveal the perceptions of history, geography and social studies teachers giving the social studies lesson at primary schools in Turkey and Afghanistan towards the social studies lesson. The working group of the study involves history, geography and social studies teachers rendering service in Tokat and Kayseri provinces…

This article analyses the impact of a constructivist approach to learning in Jordan, where a traditional context of passive/receptive philosophy of teaching prevails. Student teachers were introduced to journal writing. It was expected that their experiences with journal writing would afford them a better understanding of how it would affect their…

This article reports on an interpretive qualitative study conducted at a public university in Bogotá with 26 pre-service social studies teachers. It is focused on unveiling which ideologies are discovered when they construct the meaning of texts through text-based tasks in an English as a foreign language class. The data were collected by using…

This article describes a research study on the appropriateness for social studies classrooms of "CNN Student News," a free online news program specifically aimed at middle and high school students. The author conducted a content analysis of "CNN Student News" during October 2012 and evaluated the program's content for…

On Tuesday, November 8, 1864, voters in 25 states--including Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada for the first time--cast their ballots for president of the United States; voters in the 11 states that had seceded did not participate. Incumbent Abraham Lincoln ran as the Republican nominee (called the National Union Party in the 1864 election), and…

This eighth-grade social studies teacher tells the story of how he began to flip his classroom so that students watched videos at home and had more time for discussion in class. He explains the benefits of this teaching approach, discusses the challenges he encountered, and describes how he solved them.

Martorella's "sleeping giant" is awakening via geospatial tools. As this technology is adopted, it will transform the history curriculum in three ways: deepening curricular content, making conceptual frameworks more prominent, and increasing connections to local history. These changes may not be profound and they may not be sudden,…

This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism shapes place in the social studies curriculum, producing understandings of land and citizenship in educational settings. To do this, the author uses the emergent framework of land education to move forward the important projects of place-based education, especially its potential for…

In this study is intended to investigate prospective social studies teachers' role model preferences and the reflections of these preferences to their daily lives. This study was designed as a qualitative study in the form of descriptive model. The participants consisted of 306 prospective social studies teachers enrolled in nine different state…

Background: Much research has been done on the factors that influence teachers' work. Yet, the nature and scope of those factors, and their impact on teachers, remain unclear. Indeed, different literature bases on teachers' work present different and often contradictory conclusions. For example, some researchers claim that mandated accountability…