On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State University (KSU), killing four and wounding nine. Although this event marked a watershed moment in American culture and the start of a decline in activism related to the war in Vietnam, its place in higher education history is not well-understood. This paper traces the…

Primary Objective: This study examines student reaction to a unit of instruction teaching war through a more critical lens focusing on anti-war movements and how student sense of civic agency was impacted. Research Design: A design study that centered student voice on activism and experiences of a unit of instruction of the USA at war. Design…

When discussing college student voice, the historical narrative has generally focused on large-scale student activism as the definitive medium through which students expressed their beliefs. However, this inevitably leaves more subtle forms of student expression left uninterrogated, specifically in the South, and other areas of the country where…

Objective: The study examines how Korean American and immigrant youth interpret the Black-White binary in U.S. history and social studies curricula. Method: Task-based interviews were conducted with 23 Korean-heritage students from two Midwestern cities. The study used Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit) and sociocultural theory as frameworks for…

In the late 1970s Iranian student activists in the United States worked to educate the American public on the history of the US-Iranian relationship and the long-term consequences in Iran of the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that placed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the Iranian throne. The students directly challenged local and state governments to respect…

When teaching a course on American diversity, Jessica Lander realized that to understand the complexity of justice-related policies and events in U.S. history, students needed to relate personally. She had students write personal reflections on what it means to be American, which dealt with issues from immigration journeys, learning a new…

Highlighting the relationship between the racial slavery in the formation of U.S. colleges and universities and the archive of Black student revolt, this dissertation examines one of the longest and most violent Black student strikes in the history of postsecondary education--the San Francisco State College strike in 1968-1969. Rather than…

Purpose: This article explores the expressed thoughts and feelings of 24 research participants who processed and articulated their lived experiences. They each attended the same private, religious, historically, and predominantly White institution and participated in a three-credit course that covered the history of the Civil Rights Movement of…

This article describes two Socratic Seminar discussions, one focused on questioning just war and the other offering a perspective on how to end war. These discussions are the focus of this article because they show the complex and nuanced thinking and questioning students engaged in about what might constitute a just war (if anything) and how war…

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the need to understand teaching and learning not just as cognitive but also as affective experiences that are imbued with emotional complexity. There is also an emergent body of research on how to teach difficult knowledge of war. Joining this scholarship, this article presents research…

Text- and document-dependent courses like high school U.S. History require students to have strong content literacy and vocabulary skills. Traditionally, content-area courses neglect vocabulary skills and those that do address vocabulary often teach words in isolation without context. Students needing more content comprehension skills frequently…

A college class of non-science majors completed a metadata project in 15 weeks for a Women's History collection at a southern 4-year university. The class "First and Second Wave of Feminism" explored for the first time a scientific method of cataloguing while learning to promote, restore and preserve the history of women in the United…

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to explore to get an understanding of a social studies teacher's approach to media literacy including factors that inform her teaching and the students' understanding of her instructional practices. The participants of the study were one social studies' teacher and six students from her U.S. History…

Standardized testing is a top priority in schools, with conversations around teaching and learning reduced to raising student test scores. Often any other conversations about how schools should serve students are eliminated or pushed to the periphery. The central questions raised here are the following: how are student-teacher relationships…

Predominantly Black schools may struggle with ways to keep their students engaged. When Black students are not engaged in class, it could lead to low academic performance, which may reflect the lack of culturally relevant content in the curriculum. Student engagement is increasingly viewed as one of the keys to addressing problems such as low…