Based on the potential of educational materials to forge and shape the collective memory, this article analyses the representations of the Francoist Hunger Years (1939-1952) in recent history textbooks for secondary schools by a wide range of publishers. The main thesis of the paper is that while there are textbooks that provide a complex…

In 2005, Kitson and McCully introduced the 'risk-taking' continuum, representing the multiple ways in which teachers in post-conflict societies deal with the history of conflict in the classroom. 'Avoiders', at one extreme, refrain from teaching the violent past, while at the other extreme 'risk-takers' analyse multiple perspectives on what…

The study investigates upper secondary school students' use of counterfactual reasoning when engaging in a task concerning historical explanation. The study analyses student answers to a prompt asking them to evaluate the causal importance of a historical actor for a historical event, aiming to characterize the counterfactuals used, as well as…

This paper focuses on the development of history teaching in West Germany from the 1970s onwards. When in the early 1970s the relevance of history -- both as an academic discipline and as a school subject -- was challenged, this led to fierce debates as a multitude of new concepts were being developed. One of these was Annette Kuhn's revolutionary…

The Holocaust was one of the most significant events of contemporary history and still has great relevance for current times. This paper analyses the portrayal of the Holocaust in secondary education history textbooks in Spain. As this type of research has grown in the international arena, the need to review critically this event in Spanish…

Due to its direct approach and its detailed analysis of race, the "A More Perfect Union" (AMPU) speech makes for a likely primary source to be included in a lesson addressing Obama's racial significance. As social studies teacher-educators who draw from critical perspectives on race and racism, the authors hope to see Obama's speech used…

Disciplinary literacy encompasses not only the ability to read the texts of a discipline, but also to engage in the practices and discourse of that discipline. At the center of the discipline of history is inquiry. For these students to move from their ninth grade expectations about history toward the authentic discipline of history, they would…

Although geographically rooted in the Southern United States, the U.S. poultry industry is best understood in a transnational, or even global, perspective that can be difficult to address in regionally bounded courses. In intellectual terms, the topic straddles a number of historiographic subfields that have steadily grown in recent decades. These…

Most people are familiar with television quiz shows that use such technologies as Audience Response Systems (ARS) and keypads known as "clickers." A similar technology has been available for teachers. Inserting questions into a PowerPoint presentation or running free-standing software, the class is asked to consider a question and select…

Using a multiple case study design, I examine how public high school students (n = 17) make sense of narratives about defining events with which they have specific heritage connections. Focusing on 3 groups of students (Hmong, Chinese, and Jewish) studying 3 heritage events (respectively, the Vietnam War, Modern China, and the Holocaust), this…

Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of…

Paula Worth was searching not only for a rigorous question, capable of engendering genuine debate, but also for an engaging and enjoyable activity that would secure GCSE students' substantive knowledge. The answer--or rather the question--lay in counterfactual thinking: a carefully crafted game that she devised, based on the structure of a game by…

The Office of Shared Accountability (OSA) in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools (MCPS) examined academic performance of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students in U.S. History and Modern World History courses, as well as the course sequence in ESOL U.S. History and Modern World History. In MCPS, students who are not ESOL…

Although the history of history education is an under-researched topic worldwide, the international literature about history education contains a clear image of the historical development of the school subject. This image basically consists of a sharp dichotomy between traditional history education, which was largely insensitive to topical affairs…

Teaching history should not be reciting an endless list of dead men, entombed between the covers of a textbook. Instead, "Breaking Away from the Textbook" offers a fascinating journey through world history. Not a comprehensive, theory-heavy guide, this book focuses on active classroom activities, methods for students to grapple with humanity's…