In this paper we aim to describe how secondary school teachers explain multicausal historical events. To that end, we recorded and analyzed seven classes on "The discovery and colonization of America". The results show that secondary school teachers do not simply deal with history as a catalog of actions, characters and dates. On the contrary,…

Robin Whitburn and Sharon Yemoh describe the design of a school-generated GCSE course on the challenges that British people faced in forging a multicultural society in post-imperial Britain. Drawing on their own research into their students' experience, they build a discipline-based case for teaching about socio-political communal struggles…

Many scholars have argued that history education during the antebellum period in the United States supported conservative values and sought to produce close-minded citizens. History textbooks of that era, they frequently posit, cast Americans as God's chosen people and present the past in a style that reaffirms established social conventions. Ruth…

For years, educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. The common core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction. A study of one such approach suggests that it can yield a triple…

Holocaust education in Slovakia stands at the confluence of diverse discourses of state and supra-national legitimation. Principles of national self-determination, minority rights, and political ideologies inform and lend credence to how Slovaks' national and state identities are narrated in Slovak history textbooks. For small nation-states with…

This article reports the investigation of change in preservice teachers' conceptions of effective history teaching across a secondary history methods course in a postgraduate diploma of education program. Using concept mapping to plot shifts in their expressed reflections, data were obtained that indicate personal constructs of effective history…

Most history teachers will, at some point, recognise the tension between teaching an engaging history course while at the same time meeting the requirements of an exam specification. Mark Fowle and Ben Egelnick reflect here on how they approached teaching a formal requirement of an exam specification. Rather than see "controlled…

It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In this article Andrew Preston reports how his school has worked…

This article is a case study of the relation between urban schooling and university education, using two main sources. Data on the schools attended by history students at Edinburgh University between 1899 and 1933 illustrate the diversity and social ranking of schools in the city. New higher grade schools had a key role in increasing access to…

Drawing on my work in the U.S., I briefly discuss four related hallmarks of teaching for social justice in diverse classrooms, supported by research on their impact on students. They include explicitly recognizing and working with students' culture as a basis for learning, teaching key concepts in the curriculum through content and examples drawn…

The author is always looking for material to use in her campaign to end the educational "back-atcha" cycle. It is a multi-generational process, wherein unsophisticated fact-centered high school instruction turns out students resilient against understanding historical discipline despite their college courses; these students then go on to…

This document presents the proceedings of the 21st Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2016, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 11 action research papers: The Use of Mexican Folk Art to Develop Oral and Written Language Ability and Cultural Awareness in the Secondary Spanish Classroom (Antonio…

This paper reports on a study exploring teacher learning of subject content knowledge (SCK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in four subject departments of secondary schools in England. The research design employed interview and observation. This paper focuses on characterising the cultures of the subject departments from the participants'…

The authors present a case study of a world history teacher's mediation of her students' world historical thinking and writing through unit-level cognitive tools. They analyze both scaffolding and disciplinary tools that the teacher constructed for her students in order to improve their world historical thinking, and the degree to which the…

This article is devoted to the topic of teaching a geographical component in World History curriculum in American public high schools. Despite the fact that the federal legislation entitled "No Child Left Behind" (2001) declared geography as a "core" academic subject, geography was the only subject dropped from federal funding.…