This article discusses values education in schools and offers pre-service teachers with an insight as to why values education should be incorporated in classroom teaching. The list of current values in the Australian Curriculum and the importance of values education are discussed. Suggestions are made on how to improve values education with a…

Grounded in theory and best-practices research, this practical text provides teachers with 40 strategies for using fiction and non-fiction trade books to teach in five key content areas: language arts and reading, social studies, mathematics, science, and the arts. Each strategy provides everything a teacher needs to get started: a classroom…

Schools as educational and instructional institutions are expected to be renewable ones where motivation is increased through establishing relationships between students' interests and needs, and subject matters of social studies lessons are derived from daily life and events. Finalizing any learning activity at school by realizing it as aimed and…

How can curriculum history be re-envisioned from a feminist, poststructuralist perspective? "Engendering Curriculum History" disrupts dominant notions of history as linear, as inevitable progress, and as embedded in the individual. This conversation requires a history that seeks "rememberance" not representation, "reflexivity" not linearity, and…

Global positioning systems (GPS) receivers and other geospatial tools can help teachers create engaging, hands-on activities in all content areas. This article provides a rationale for using geospatial technologies in the middle grades and describes classroom-tested activities in English language arts, science, mathematics, and social studies.…

Socioconstructivism has been established as a prominent and intriguing learning theory, and consequently, pedagogical practice. This study focused on the introduction of constructivist pedagogy to secondary social studies pre-service teachers. Students' engagement with each other and the course instructor was a primary concern to mitigate student…

In a national context of standards and high-stakes testing, concerns are emerging about challenges to the already tenuous position of the citizenship mission in the social studies curriculum. In this qualitative study, the authors administered a survey to social studies teachers in Ohio and conducted follow-up interviews focusing on the present…

What were you doing on September 11th? This seems like an obvious question to prompt conversations about the World Trade Center tragedy, but is it a good question to ask high school students a decade removed from the event? Many students now in high school were toddlers at the time. What do they really remember from that day? Are these memories…

This study examines teaching and learning economics and entrepreneurship through a student-run Montessori middle school store. By designing and managing a school store, students created a "community of practice" to learn economics concepts in their daily environment. Questions guiding this study were: (a) How do students' social-interactions in a…

Toulmin's model of argumentation, developed in 1958, has guided much argumentation research in education. However, argumentation theory in philosophy and cognitive science has advanced considerably since 1958. There are currently several alternative frameworks of argumentation that can be useful for both research and practice in education. These…

We present a project that used the Iowa Caucus, an American political tradition, to support English-language instruction in Belgium and Luxembourg. Educators acknowledge that the cultural dimension is critically important in the acquisition of foreign languages, yet questions remain about effective ways to incorporate it in the classroom. Begun as…

This article encourages elementary teachers to offer opportunities for their students to critically analyze maps as part of powerful geography instruction in order to help them become well-informed and civic-minded citizens. The article reviews challenges to powerful geography instruction, including traditional geography textbooks and pedagogy and…

The purpose of this study is to examine and analyze the historical development, status and purpose of the Turkish social studies curriculum in addition to understanding John Dewey's impact on the modernization of Turkish educational system. Document analysis as a qualitative research method is used in this study. The data were obtained from the…

In this article, I examine the potential for developing preservice social studies teachers' understanding of transformational resistance, Latin@ civil rights movements, and culturally sustaining pedagogy through a project using the film Precious Knowledge. This documentary depicts high school students in a Mexican American Studies (MAS) program…

The authors examined the role of an intervention designed to increase reading comprehension, reading self-efficacy beliefs, and engagement in social studies for middle school students of varying language backgrounds. Thirteen sixth- and seventh-grade teachers implemented the United States History for Engaged Reading (USHER) program with their…