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…

In a time of unprecedented polarization in the United States, particularly concerning immigration, schools are uniquely positioned to help students understand the consequences of drastic policy changes. Beyond formal settings such as social studies classes, extracurricular activities may be important for fostering discussions about sociohistorical…

In a time of unprecedented polarization in the United States, particularly concerning immigration, schools are uniquely positioned to help students understand the consequences of drastic policy changes. Beyond formal settings such as social studies classes, extracurricular activities may be important for fostering discussions about sociohistorical…

Massachusetts is the least rural state in the US, and its existing rural communities are shrinking. This paper examines the historical processes of urbanization, specifically through industrialization that have come to dominate and erase rural communities in the state. The capitalist mindset behind industrialization has spread to education where…

Puzzled by the shrugs and unimaginative responses of his students when asked certain counterfactual questions, James Edward Carroll set out to explore what types of counterfactual questions would elicit sophisticated causal explanations. During his pursuit of the 'gold standard' of counterfactual reasoning, Carroll drew upon theories of academic…

A teacher describes how a team of educators from two elementary schools in Massachusetts used the Next Generation Science Standards to create a social history curriculum focused on depth--and story--instead of isolated facts.

This Proceedings document begins with the text of the keynote by Dr. Michelle Caswell, followed by seven papers, representing a sampling of the symposium presentations from the 2022 Digitizing Hidden Collections (DHC) Symposium, a capstone event for the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program. This program was funded by the…

First graders engaged in an extended historical inquiry. Close readings of secondary and primary sources evoked rich class discussion. Scaffolding directed students' scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps; they ably detected source and intent within the primary sources. Students articulated newly constructed understandings through…

Each year, colleges around the nation select a common reading book for their incoming students or, in the case of Olin College of Engineering, for the entire college community. In 2017, the institution selected "Hidden Figures" as a reading meant to provide a common intellectual experience, illustrate the vigor and breadth of the…

After three decades of scholarship describing why and how students ought to be taught to think historically, this study asks what happens when they are. Ten high school students from a school that incorporated historical thinking into all history coursework repeated the think-aloud task from Wineburg's 1991 study of the cognitive processes…

Serious history instruction in K-12 U.S. schools has been in decline for decades. History education in Massachusetts has, until now, fared somewhat better than in the nation at large. In 1993 the commonwealth enacted the Massachusetts Education Reform Act--a bipartisan plan to improve education--which mandated core standards and assessments in…

Compared to other groups of color, Asian Americans and their perspectives have rarely been given attention in curriculum studies. This article seeks to address the gap in the literature. It uses AsianCrit, a branch of critical race theory, as a theoretical lens to analyze and explicate common patterns across various states' scripting of Asian…

At one high school outside of Boston, most students look forward to their daily American history class. They love their teacher's regular pop culture references and arrive ready to participate in the lively and contentious debates. Yet, despite Almira's fondness for the teacher and deep commitment to academic success, this class causes her more…

In spite of the economic climate which has led to financial retrenchment in school districts, the Tsongas Industrial History Center (TIHC) in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was formed through a collaboration between the National Park Service Lowell National Historical Park and the University of Massachusetts Lowell Graduate School of Education,…

This article will analyze where the Amherst Project stood within the evolution of educational thinking since the early twentieth century and then show in detail how its activities developed fromits inception in 1959 to publication of the last pamphlet in 1972. The Amherst Project began among a group of instructors from Amherst High School and…