In the Filipino language, kuwento means "story," but the concept itself encapsulates more than its literal meaning. Similar to talk story events in Hawaiian communities (Au & Jordan, 1981), kuwento serves as a tool to communicate everyday experiences within groups, especially among family and community members (Eugenio, 1981). It is an abstraction…

This practical handbook is designed to help anyone who is preparing to teach a world history course--or wants to teach it better. It opens with Peter Stearns's essay "Where Did World History Come From?" and closes with Jerry Bentley's annotated bibliographic guide to the essential content knowledge for teaching world history. In between,…

This paper discussed a study involving two groups of teacher candidates' implementations of a visual literacy curriculum in their preclinical field experience. The purpose was to explore whether the curriculum provided a viable way for them to implement Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in teaching their diverse learners, including students with…

On an earlier column titled "What I learned at the NCSS Annual Meeting," the author wrote about the Internet-oriented materials and resources featured at the 2006 NCSS convention in Washington, D.C. Having received many e-mails from readers telling him that they appreciated having the opportunity to see which companies, not-for-profit,…

The popularity of VHS and DVD over the past two decades has greatly expanded the influence of history movies, watched by millions of adolescents in homes and classrooms. This paper examines two secondary U.S. history teachers' instructional uses of history motion pictures in their classrooms. Ray used The Patriot (2000) to teach history as stories…

In recent years, the use of primary sources in the history and social studies classroom has been increasingly promoted as a necessary and welcome practice, one designed to improve the quality of history education and to encourage student interest and engagement. Although some K-12 educators have been wary of adopting the use of primary sources,…

The number of books published on the American Civil War has been remarkable. According to the 2002 edition of "The Civil War Desk Reference" by the Library of Congress," at least 50,000 books and pamphlets on the Civil War have been published since the 1860's." Consequently, history instructors have to confront the difficult task of selecting a…

In this article, the author describes her use of direct instruction to introduce the skill of determining source reliability in a fifth-grade unit on immigration in American history. She structures instruction to help students establish a thinking-skill strategy that results in not only an understanding of immigration in the late 1800s to early…

According to the California Department of Education's Curriculum Framework, the secondary curriculum for grades nine through twelve is geared toward students who are beginning "to develop [an] abstract understanding of historical causality--the often complex patterns of relationships between historical events, their multiple antecedents, and…

Preparing to teach a course outside one's field of specialty or even continental comfort zone provides a unique if somewhat daunting opportunity. With Western Civilization classes as the author's teaching experience for entry-level college courses, she approached teaching "The United States Since Reconstruction" with some trepidation. However,…

The purpose of this book is to make the teaching and learning of history a powerful and enjoyable experience in the classroom, changing the often-cited boring image of history for students and offering teachers an opportunity to go beyond the regular textbook. The book focuses on: (1) Varied active teaching ideas; (2) Ideas on how to get students…

The purpose of this article is to analyze teaching of modern history in Poland and the teachers' role in the process of democratization. Forty-eight high school history teachers responded to a questionnaire investigating the curricula, textbooks, supplemental teaching materials and methods of teaching. The results demonstrate that since 1989 these…

In this essay, the authors explore the structures, processes, and messages that accountability reforms communicate about the goals and means of coming to know history. In other words, how do existing history standards and formal curricula officialize certain orientations toward historical knowledge and traditions through which that knowledge is…

The French Revolution can be a difficult subject to teach. Students often struggle to relate to events that happened more than two hundred years ago in France. In this article, the author suggests three key causes for the failure of the revolution that social studies teachers can focus on when teaching this topic. He also provides several stories…