Teachers in the secondary social studies classroom do not regularly take the time to practice structured reflection on their teaching methods. In our current standards-driven environment, social studies classrooms are often not seen as places of higher learning. To combat these stereotypes, the author presents a method for accomplishing reflection…

In 2001 the "American Annals of the Deaf" published reviews of all literacy-related articles (Moores and Miller, 2001) and all other instruction-related articles (Moores, Jatho, & Creech, 2001) covering 1996 to 2000 inclusively. Twenty articles dealing with literacy were identified. Despite the existence of excellent research on captioning, it…

The large percentages of teachers in the United States are white, middle class people who may not understand or identify their own cultural connections within the American culture, let alone elaborate their own ancestral cultural elements. Educators are expected to teach a diverse student population, and preservice teachers should be prepared to…

When teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms portray history as an immutable sequence of certain facts, dates, and events, young learners tend to view the past, and by extension the future, as something fixed and inevitable. Learning about the past through investigating biographies can help counter this tendency by teaching students to…

Working from the assumption that policies are a form of social practice instead of simply a mandate that is uniformly delivered and passively received, the authors describe a theory and practice of policy research from a six-month collective qualitative study of curricular change and high-stakes testing that raise questions about the relationships…

In the author's article in the 1988 premiere issue of "Social Studies and the Young Learner," he suggested that chain songs and rounds, simple folk and summer camp standards, could be easily transformed with lyrics (written by the teacher or students) that contained useful, purposeful social studies content. He argued then, and still does, that…

Teachers live for the "teachable moments"--those opportunities to connect their subject content to events taking place beyond the classroom. They can occur spontaneously, lucky occasions to bring the curriculum to life grabbed on the fly. In other instances, a teachable moment looms large. In hundreds of thousands of classrooms nationwide,…

The continued prominence of genocide and Holocaust education, along with the movement toward the affective in social studies curricula, the advent of the Internet, and continued scholarship in the field, has led to the availability of a staggering array of digital resources for teachers (D. S. Symer 2001). These resources have the potential to…

There is more to Black History Month than honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Black History Month is a time to honor the significant contributions of African-Americans throughout history. This article presents 20 super-achievers new generation of African-Americans heroes students should meet: (1) Kimberly Oliver; (2) John Lewis; (3) Rita Dove; (4)…

The purpose of this exploratory two-group pretest-posttest comparative survey study was to determine the effect of a team adviser-advisee academic, behavior, and character mentoring program on the achievement, school engagement, and behavior outcomes of eighth grade students determined to be above (n = 21) and below (n = 15) eligibility guidelines…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the instructional use of GPS through instructional geocaching activities engages students and promotes achievement in a middle school social studies classroom. The impact of instructional geocaching on addressing the needs of students with various learning styles was also examined. In addition, the…

Looking for social studies adventures to help students find connections to democratic citizenship? Look no further! This book provides just the answer teachers need for engaging students in field trips as researching learners with emphasis on interdisciplinary social studies plus skills in collecting and reporting data gathered from field…

The essays in this collection discuss multicultural issues in children's and adolescent literature, focusing particularly on African and African American cultures. They challenge everyone's understanding of what, in an age of globalization, multicultural texts really are. Cumulatively, these essays illustrate multicultural literature's power to…

The 2010 elections were good for Republicans in Ohio, who have traditionally supported the expansion of charter schools (and choice broadly). The authors were hopeful as lawmakers and the governor set about removing caps on charter schools, lifting the e-school moratorium, and suggesting other legislative changes that would improve charter quality…

This study explores the relationships between the frequency and identities of heroes as role models used in the social studies textbooks in teaching 20 core values and prospective teachers' preferences of heroes. The findings indicated that there are striking similarities and differences between these two variables. For gender variable, 97.4% of…