This article explores how primary sources can be used to teach students about race and racism. Researchers co-taught a general education class on Critical Race Theory and utilized a combination of primary and secondary sources. This article includes a review of relevant literature that informed the development of this class and one major…

Narrating history is perpetually contested, shaping and reshaping how nations and people understand both their pasts and the current moment. Measuring and evaluating the scope of histories is methodologically challenging. In this paper we provide a general approach and a specific method to measure historical recall. Operationalizing historical…

Social studies teachers have to create an environment where students are empowered to discuss contemporary issues, such as racism and social injustices. This means students are provided activities that allow them to develop historical empathy skills: perspective recognition, contextualization, and using evidence to make informed decisions. In this…

Public administration has a long tradition of close connections to the field of political science. As the field of public administration evolved from a basic politics administration dichotomy, it became evident that the distinction between politics and administration was nebulous at best. As such, public affairs students need exposure to, and…

This study explores how undergraduates, as historical thinkers, learn to interact with history and construct their understanding of the past, and examines the role that primary and secondary sources play in narrative construction and revision. Using the African American civil rights movement as a content focus, participants used images to create…

This article shares a critical content analysis of 36 highly rated curricular units found on the website TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) focused on the teaching of American symbols. Lessons and curricular resources focused on American symbols, such as the United States Flag, Statue of Liberty, and Liberty Bell, remain prominent in the elementary…

Nearly 20 years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, PA there is a yearly ritual in a majority of US Schools. On the anniversary each year, teachers and students across the US learn about the attacks and memorialize the events. In many classrooms this is done through witnessing the events…

This study investigates how 19 third-grade students developed their understandings of enslavement during a six-week social studies inquiry. Using Teaching Tolerance's key concepts as my analytic framework, I analyzed the students' pre- and post-concept maps and classwork to understand their learning. The findings show that students conceptualized…

After three decades of scholarship describing why and how students ought to be taught to think historically, this study asks what happens when they are. Ten high school students from a school that incorporated historical thinking into all history coursework repeated the think-aloud task from Wineburg's 1991 study of the cognitive processes…

Children's literature provides elementary teachers and students the opportunity to critically engage in the world around them. However, too often teachers choose not to engage students in discussions of complex social issues out of a sense of fear or discomfort. In this paper, we explore the reflections of 11 teachers who chose to engage their…

This qualitative case study addresses the need for pedagogical approaches to working with open educational resources (OER). Drawing on a mix of historical thinking heuristics and case analysis approaches, a blended pedagogical strategy and primary source database were designed to build student understanding of historical records with transfer of…

Oral histories are a powerful pedagogical tool in developing historical understanding and important learning skills simultaneously. Teachers use firsthand accounts of historical time periods and/or events to help develop students' sense of history. In addition to gaining historical understanding, students are able to bring history alive by…

A. Philip Randolph, the national president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was one of the driving forces behind the March on Washington Movement in 1941. In frustration over the federal government's lack of support for opportunities in the booming war industries and equality in the military, Randolph had begun to organize the March…

In light of increasing mandates to incorporate close reading of primary source historical documents at the elementary level, this study explored the reading difficulty level of the US Constitution with preservice elementary teachers using a traditional cloze assessment procedure. While best practice pedagogy of social studies has long included…

Scholars often define historical reasoning as constructing defensible interpretations of past events. Drawing on critical theory, this article suggests that it also entails consciously framing one's topic of inquiry. The article examines an instructional unit that aimed to foster this expanded view of historiography. Forty students, ages 14-15,…