In this collection, scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia examine the concepts of villainification and anti-villainification in social studies curriculum and popular culture, as well as within broader sociocultural contexts. Villainification is the process of identifying an individual or a small group of individuals as the sole…

High school social studies teachers play an important role in fostering the civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students need to thrive after graduation. These efforts can also help counter Truth Decay--the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life. Although several factors, such as state standards and assessments,…

This article argues that in divided societies, civic education fails to fulfill one of its most important social role: creating a more inclusive society that allows a democratic dialogue to flow across different ideological, religious, and cultural communities. This failure is grounded in two main reasons. First, civics teachers are socially and…

University of the Pacific is a private, comprehensive university with a College of Arts and Sciences and six professional schools, and with a population of more than four thousand students on its main campus in the ethnically diverse central valley city of Stockton, California. The signature component of Pacific's general education program is the…

Canada prides itself on being an inclusive country. Immigrants from all over the world arrive in Canada's cities with their families because they feel welcome and safe. According to research, engagement towards social inclusion increased among Canadians during the last 30 last years. These changing values resulted in the creation of official…

During the decade that followed World War II, social studies education in the United States was affected by many societal changes, particularly the new socio-political climate and a widespread discontent with the state of postwar public education. By the mid 1950s there was a crisis atmosphere regarding U.S. education contributed to by limited…