The authors of this article examine several controversial U.S. monuments and offer teachers a rationale, resources, and suggested activities for incorporating these historical monuments into classroom instruction. The authors discuss why controversial issues should be discussed in the social studies classroom through the critical examination of…

This article reports on an investigation to explore the possibility that ideology might be expressed in the treatment of corporate influence on federal government by social studies textbooks. Two textbooks were examined in the study--United States history and American government. Corporate influence involves activities that affect election and…

Framing history/social studies textbooks as a social construction designed to create a public memory of a national history and history of the Other, we investigated how U.S. history is represented in South Korea's social studies textbooks and what images and ideas of the United States are encouraged for South Korean students to take. To answer…

To prepare students for participation in a pluralistic, democratic society, history curriculum should help them develop mature ideas about why multiple accounts of the same events exist. But how can we know if we are successful? In this article, we describe work on the design, validation, and piloting of a paper-and-pencil instrument called the…

The emergence of digital technology provides new opportunities for teaching and learning in the history classroom. However, these new opportunities often require new skills to be learned by teachers and students alike. This article focuses on one such digitally oriented strategy, desktop documentary making, which empowers students to easily make…

This manuscript, written with the educator in mind, describes the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) program, a twenty-week after-school history program that engaged urban students in history by immersing them in aspects of the historical process. Throughout the program, a group of Black male high school students were apprenticed as historical…

Museums are important venues for engaging history students in the habits of free-choice and lifelong learning. Although these sound like the pedagogical buzzwords du jour, both concepts are ones that educators today--including college professors and lecturers--should be adding to their teaching vocabulary. Unfortunately, while literature on these…

The 150th anniversary of the American Civil War has brought renewed interest in the war itself and in how social studies educators teach the Civil War in their U.S. history courses. The authors encourage teachers to use social history as a vehicle to engage their students in a more complete examination of the war and to foster a deeper…

This article presents an approach that teachers can use to strengthen students' ability to make sense of the past at museums. Specifically, we propose a photography exercise to help students to learn from museums and to view museums critically, weighing both the objective realities and subjective interpretations offered by museums. To get the most…

This article describes how elementary preservice teachers used four documentary films to think historically about the United States Civil Rights Movement. The author situates the descriptive case study within research about historical thinking and documentary film, identifying the need for using documentary film to think historically in the…

The author argues that in order to create space for authentic multicultural engagement in the face of Eurocentric norms, teachers should form discussion groups that follow five basic guidelines: engage, don't enrage; be comfortable with negative emotion; watch for and change unproductive language; talk about everything; and engage in classroom…

This article examined the value of using nonfiction graphic novels as historical narratives in the social studies curriculum. Preservice teachers evaluated several graphic novels and identified attributes of graphic novels that could contribute to students' development of historical thinking and understanding of multiple perspectives. Despite the…

In the age of accountability, there is increased pressure to deliver high-quality education in a limited time period is greater than ever before. Teachers are often left to struggle with issue of determining what knowledge is necessary, and to what depth it may be explored in the classroom. There is a need for strategies to both incorporate the…

The question "what if?" has been asked by historians for generations. This article explains how history teachers can use students' own what-if questions to enhance their historical knowledge and understanding by offering educators a step-by-step plan for utilizing counterfactual history into their classrooms. Additionally, the author offers a…

Students in this post-industrial technological age require opportunities for the acquisition of new skills, especially in the marketplace of innovation. A pedagogical strategy that is becoming more and more popular within social studies classrooms is the use of computer and video games as enhancements to everyday lesson plans. Computer/video games…