Basic writing, which developed as a field within the larger discipline of rhetoric and composition, has a tumultuous past and an uncertain future. What began as an academic response to a perceived literacy crisis with the rise of open admissions in the late 1960s has continued to grow and reinvent its structures, theories, and practices as new…

Advocating for the laboratory method was a distinguishing feature of textbooks as "physics" displaced "natural philosophy" in American schools during the second half of the nineteenth century as the dominant tradition of teaching physical science. This dissertation examines digital editions of textbooks in common use during the…

In light of the recently published Common Core State Standards Initiative, public school curriculum has once again come under scrutiny. While curriculum debates have taken place since the very beginnings of public schooling in the United States, too few have taken more than a passing notice of the textbooks that, in many cases, comprise the…

As journalism educators wrestle to keep programs up-to-date in an evolving news landscape, there is value in understanding how education in an early form of multimedia journalism--photography--came to be. Little attention has been paid to the intersection of journalism education and photojournalism. This subject furnishes a unique perspective on…

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mary Sheldon Barnes emerged as a leading historical methods professor and history textbook author. Although men dominated the field, she wrote several articles and books alone or with her husband Earl Barnes about primary source materials and teaching. She lived during an era in United States history…

This dissertation traces the history of mathematics education in Palestine Hebrew secondary schools from the foundation of the first Hebrew secondary school in 1905 until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The study draws on primary sources from archives in Israel and analyzes curricula, textbooks, student notebooks, and…

In this historical dissertation, I examined the process of curriculum development in the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) in the United States during the period 1959-1963. The presentation of evolution in the high school texts was based on a more robust form of Darwinian evolution which developed during the 1930s and 1940s called…

In my three-article dissertation, "Concerning the Other: Empathic Discourse in Worldwide, National, and Student-Authored Textbook Historical Narratives," I explore how textbook authors empathize with marginalized groups. My data includes approximately 1,000 textbooks published from 1910 to 2010 from over 100 countries around the world,…

Math education is as important today as it was 100 years ago when the early 20th century was transforming from the old world into an era of factories, airplanes, atomic energy, and medical breakthroughs. Educational leaders of the era were wrestling with how long children should stay in school, meeting the diverse needs of an influx of immigrants,…

Ecological ideas have been manifested in diverse ways in American high schools since the early twentieth century. Core scientific concepts in ecology--the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment--include adaptations, plant succession, ecosystem ecology, and population ecology. This dissertation argues, however, that there…

Al-Kashi's 1427 "Key to Arithmetic" had important use over several hundred years in mathematics teaching in Medieval Islam throughout the time of the Ottoman Empire. Its pedagogical features have never been studied before. In this dissertation I have made a close pedagogical analysis of these features and discovered several teaching…

This dissertation research combines archival data and historical methods and analyzes how schooling and education in Greece between 1834 and 1913 sought to shape a Greek national identity. The goal of this project is to present a historical analysis, that has thus far been absent from scholarship on the subject, and to convey how the adoption of a…

Education in a free society requires that students are provided with a provocative and thoughtful curriculum and learning materials that will prepare them to function as productive adult citizens in a diverse and changing world. Textbooks and curricular materials that engage the rising generation in the study of social ideas, problems, and issues…