This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with…

This article explores the development of utilizing music as a Personal Practical Theory (PPT) in the teaching of English and history. Specifically, the authors explore the nature of PPT's, the benefits of utilizing music, and the process through which teachers begin using a new approach in their pedagogy. Unique contributions are the application…

Today's students grow up in a technological milieu of hand-held computers with high storage capacities, internet access, and the ability to shoot high definition photographs and video. As such, they are empowered to construct representations of the past virtually "on the run." In this article, the authors investigated the historical "and"…

In 2006, the Japanese American National Museum funded a three year curriculum development project entitled "Enduring Communities: Japanese Americans in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah." As a member of the team of teachers from New Mexico, I used this experience to study my process of developing meaningful content and…

This article presents findings of small-scale in-depth qualitative research into the perspectives on history amongst adolescent children of minority ethnic backgrounds living in inner-cities in England. The research aimed to elicit, first, the narratives of British history that children from minority ethnic backgrounds hold; and, second, the…

This article reports that a number of history and social studies teachers have found that because of the parallels they're able to draw between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression, their students are seeing that history is relevant. They're engaging more deeply in history lessons than they have in previous years. The teachers say…

In recent years, the curriculum programs have been changed dramatically in Turkey, as part of a comprehensive reform initiative. The history curriculum for secondary schools was subjected to this transformation as well. This study examines the curriculum reform in terms of teacher autonomy, a key-concept for the comprehension and improvement of…

This article describes an attempt to bring disciplinary historical inquiry into the social studies classroom. This work emerges from a five-school 6-month intervention in San Francisco, "Reading like a Historian", which found main effects for student learning across four quantitative measures: historical thinking, factual knowledge,…

The key objective of this investigation was to uncover attitudes and pedagogical comparisons of a sampling of secondary social studies teachers in three schools in eastern Ontario, Canada. The researchers sought to gain insight into how historical and current United States (US) policies are addressed in the provincial curriculum. Moreover,…

This study reports the results of a case study of four teachers' beliefs about the nature of historical empathy and their means of cultivating such empathy in secondary school classrooms. The results of multiple interviews and lesson observations of history teachers in England suggest that teachers conceptualize empathy in bounded but not…

The philosophical background of the subject history in secondary education has been mainly addressed through research based on "obvious" source types (curricula, discussions in committees or journals, ...). This article proposes a narrative method of analysing history textbooks in order to study the underlining historical philosophy of…

Basic reading comprehension and summary tend to be the focus in social studies and history classrooms, if reading and writing are included at all. But such a focus inhibits a conception of history as an interpretive discipline grounded in evidence that is analyzed, not simply accepted. Understanding the past is impossible without such historical…

This document presents the proceedings of the 19th Annual Research Forum held June 26, 2014, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 17 action research papers: (1) Using Voices to Change Minds: Oral Performance and Poetry in the English Classroom (Erika Bunpermkoon), (2) Imagining Audiences: The Use…

This contribution reflects empirical data arising from a study based on the testimony of 1523 students referring to the time when they studied history in secondary school. It forms part of an on-going inter-disciplinary research project. By means of open activities, information was compiled on the History classes received by students studying…

Notwithstanding all the studies and data on schooling today, one has to go back more than a decade--to the 1998 Public Agenda study "A Lot to Be Thankful For"--for a serious attempt to examine what parents think public schools should teach children about citizenship. The annual Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll on schooling has not asked…