Kentucky's elementary social studies curriculum includes introductory knowledge in state and national history, providing an opportunity for teachers to include instruction on the influence of slavery on society before and after the Civil War, and sometimes on current events. For example, following the violent events in 2017 in Charlottesville,…

This article reports on Year 2 of a three-year project to assess historic site-based teacher professional development programs. The intended focus was assessing pre-post Q-sorts and interviews of 29 teachers regarding how they see their work at historic sites affecting their professional development. However, data analysis revealed exceptionally…

Despite decades of formal work with teachers, little is known about what they gain from professional development at and with historic sites. This article presents the first data-set from a 3-year Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant project designed to develop a broad-based assessment for understanding what teachers…

In collaboration with historic sites in Washington, DC, that have shared commitments to place-based and experiential learning, Ford's Theatre teaches K-12 educators about Civil War history through engagements with places, artifacts, stories, and enduring conflicts that can be made relevant to students' lives. In this article, we provide program…

History labs invite students to examine primary and secondary source documents related to an essential question. The sources used in a history lab should represent multiple perspectives so that students are aware of the varying accounts of and opinions about historic events. By being exposed to multiple perspectives, students also learn about…

This article discusses the Pleasant Valley School, located in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which is now a living history project where contemporary 4th grade students throughout Oklahoma have the opportunity to spend a day as students did in a turn of the century one-room schoolhouse, complete with coal heating, ink wells, and "McGuffey…

Since any good citizen wants to know how his Government works, as an initial experience it is necessary to become acquainted with the setting--Washington, D. C. This bulletin serves as in introduction to the Capital. It provides an historical and a present-day background for appreciating the city. What kind of a community is Washington? Why does…

The "International Society for the Social Studies Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. It contains the following papers: (1) Teacher Perceptions of Authentic Pedagogy: A Case Study of Professional Development in an African American High School's…