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…

Deliberation and inquiry can go hand-in-hand. Inquiry-based learning calls on teachers to facilitate student-led discovery, something that can only happen when students ask questions and weigh possible answers before settling on a plausible and evidentiary answer. Teaching through inquiry is about setting students up to wrestle with the issue at…

The field of education in America--oft-viewed as a catalyst for change and self-improvement--has a racist history, which is often undiscussed by teachers and likely unknown to students. This article guides high school students to explore how educational texts, tasks, and policies have been products and producers of racist ideas in the past and…

Years ago, it became established that the severity and length of the Great Depression were due largely to misguided Federal Reserve monetary policy and the resulting catastrophic bank failures. This result is confirmed by surveys of scholars in the area and books specifically written on economic history. Yet the leading textbooks used in high…

Political history lends itself to traditional patterns of teaching and learning in social studies such as students memorizing facts presented in lectures or textbooks. This article presents a recurring activity structure for teaching U.S. political history--Consensus Circle Presidential Rating (CCPR)--which requires students to read across…

Online educational marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT) have become popular among teachers, but the quality of materials offered is inconsistent. This descriptive study explored quality indicators for site materials. Examining a sample of TPT's 100 best-selling 11th-grade U.S. history activities, we compared overall quality scores…

Mexican American Studies (MAS) courses have been criticized for many years. Legislation in Arizona and Texas have attempted to ban the content. This article pushes back on this attempt of oppression and offers MAS teachers a framework to apply when teaching the content. Using a timeline to depict the years of attempts for Mexican American Studies…

Examining the political activism of high school students provides a window to fully understand the rich history and resistance of young people of color from South Central Los Angeles who blazed the trail in many crucial battles during the civil rights era. Researching John C. Fremont High School's history shows that the high school reflects a…

Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but U.S. public discourse around the issue remains mired in controversy, including in education. Our study leverages natural language processing methods to give a precise look into the extent to which climate change-related topics are covered in 30 of the most widely used high school history…

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…

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…

Social studies teachers have to create an environment where students are empowered to discuss contemporary issues, such as racism and social injustices. This means students are provided activities that allow them to develop historical empathy skills: perspective recognition, contextualization, and using evidence to make informed decisions. In this…

Online educational marketplaces have seen remarkable growth, but have had little empirical investigation of the quality of materials, particularly in social studies. This exploratory study examined characteristics and quality of secondary U.S. history resources on TeachersPayTeachers.com. Findings show that activities were esthetically…

Freedom for most of the 4 million enslaved Black Americans in the United States was not granted when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Freedom came about in numerous ways and at different times. The status of Maryland's enslaved population was not decided until October 1864, when a statewide referendum on a…

This paper uses the author's time as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies to Norway as an entrée into exploring human rights discourse and Human Rights Education in Norway, a country that is often thought of as one of the centers of human rights work in Europe--and appreciates this association. It begins by situating human rights in…