Aware both that causation is the bread and butter of the historian's craft, and that trainee teachers find it far harder to teach well than they anticipate, Alex Ford sought to get to the heart of the problem with causation, especially at GCSE. When teaching to a specification and mark scheme, both of which reward poorly substantiated causal…

Teaching a civil rights unit in the upper elementary grades can be difficult. Educators must sort through multiple resources, determine the quality and developmental appropriateness of the materials, synthesize and organize the resources into meaningful lessons, and teach the unit in the midst of pressures to minimize or eliminate social studies…

Innovation and invention drive the world forward and thrive off a free market that rewards individuals and companies that can tap into supply and demand. During tragedy, especially wartime, this can take a dark turn when the triumph of invention and profit is gained from human tragedy. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) saw warfare…

History done well is culturally relevant. In part due to the shifting demographics on college campuses, and in part due to the modern cultural and political climate, history professors have enhanced their approaches to make their once-lecture-heavy survey courses more culturally relevant to their students. In this article, Summer Cherland…

The following paper considers how integrating Holocaust graphic novels that prominently feature non-Jewish characters can be effective in introducing Jewish students to new perspectives on contemporary understandings of the Holocaust. Drawing on the results of recent studies about rising anti-Semitism and Jews' concerns for their safety, feelings…

Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others' efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction. Their…

Jacob Olivey wanted Year 8 to know that ordinary people in the nineteenth century constructed their own identities. In this reflection on how his practice developed in his training year, Olivey illustrates the importance of using historical scholarship in choosing foundational knowledge to teach. He shows how he used that scholarship to shape and…

David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students…

The fourth grade represents the first year of study of the discipline History for students in pre-university education. Before being a matter of civics, the European identity is a historically grounded construct; therefore, we naturally wondered whether the issue that we have not only an ethnic or national identity, but also a European one is,…

Michael Pitblado and Agnieszka Chalas, history teacher and art teacher respectively, describe how and why they responded to a call by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to engage students with difficult aspects of Canada's past, including the forced cultural assimilation of Indigenous peoples through the Indian Residential School System.…

The centennial of the First World War has offered instructors across the humanities an exciting opportunity to enhance students' disciplinary expertise while reflecting on the significance of an event that continues to shape the world today. Drawing on established courses on the history and literature of the war, respectively, the authors designed…

Despite claims to the contrary, K-12 educators are applying the racial prejudice of critical race theory (CRT) to school lessons. In recent months, parents and policymakers around the country have objected to CRT's mischaracterization of American history in the academic subjects of history and civics. Critical race theorists, however, have also…

Influenced by her own experiences, preliminary research, and recent political events, Teni Oladehin sought to thoroughly review how Black history was introduced to her students at Key Stage 3. In particular, she aimed to introduce Black history with an 'authentic' narrative which brought Black agency into the foreground. In this article, Oladehin…

Catherine Priggs and her history department colleagues were increasingly concerned that their curriculum was too narrow. They feared that major areas of history were being left out and that many of their own pupils were not seeing themselves, in their various ethnic, cultural and world identities, in the past. Priggs and colleagues decided that a…

Particularly for Americans, patriotic history is a kind of glue for an extraordinarily diverse republic. Civic education requires students engage with their history--not only to know whence conventions, principles, and laws have come, but also to develop an attachment to them. This article looks at how American history should educate, but also…