In this paper the author questions whether teachers should be held accountable in social studies. Accountability is viewed by the majority of educators as having its own merit due in part, perhaps, to recent emphasis placed on behavioral objectives and the way in which these objectives allow for performance measurement. Care must be taken that…

Describes the National Teacher of the Year awards program and presents the 1988 winner, Terry Weeks. Weeks, a middle school teacher from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and a member of the National Council for the Social Studies, explains his philosophy of teaching and describes some of his unique classroom strategies. (GEA)

Examines the costs of protectionism and the benefits of specialization and trade and concludes that current popular support for protectionist policies suggests a poor performance by social studies educators. (GEA)

This article reports the results of a 1985 survey (n=204) of Indiana teachers' environmental knowledge and attitudes. Twenty-six of the respondents were social studies teachers. Results showed that the social studies teachers were only marginally literate regarding their physical environment and related energy/environmental problems. Included are…

We cannot assume that youngsters will be drawn to a study of the past on their own initiative, and the public education system has dismissed the study of history as irrelevant. Native-born Americans cannot gain the same insights through osmosis that foreign-born citizens acquire through supervised study. (MT)

The case is made for the jurisprudential approach to social studies, which focuses on the analysis of public issues, as appropriate for gifted students. Case studies illustrate the approach's emphasis on decision making (and its natural concomitants of disagreement and value conflict) as a central component of democratic citizenship. (CL)

This study asks, To what degree has the Civitas: An International Civic Education Exchange Program in Bosnia and Herzegovina been effective in creating or promoting attitudes and values that serve to strengthen support for democratic institutions and processes among Bosnia and Herzegovina school children? To answer this question, an empirical…

The hypothesis developed is that social studies educators fail to adopt and use the inquiry methods that are expected of their students. This seeming reluctance of educators to initiate research in the field of social studies education weakens the new social studies movement. Research needs are cited. (SM)

Concepts must not only be learned in an inquiry-conceptual program; they must also be put to use in observing, classifying, generalizing, and other processes. Both analytic (general) and integrative (particular) concepts should be used as needed in a given study or inquiry. (CK)

Use of science fiction in the teaching of social studies can stimulate interest on the part of the student and thereby aid learning. (CK)

The purpose of this article is to try to clarify the idea of social participation by giving some illustration of how it can be developed tn elementary classrooms. (Author)