Today's schools and teachers are challenged with meeting the demands of specific content standards, high stakes assessment, and developing students from diverse backgrounds to be capable of competing in a global market. These twenty-first century students must not only possess critical thinking skills and the ability to process information, but…

In the past decade, there have been growing efforts to improve and enhance the delivery of social studies content in the classroom through arts integration. Some educators have used music as a method for teaching social studies and found that interdisciplinary work increases students' understanding of history and different cultures. This article…

In the age of standardized testing, science and social studies are not given the same priority as mathematics and reading in the curriculum of United States schools. High stakes testing is viewed as having heavily biased schools toward teaching tested subjects and away from less frequently tested subjects. This paper is premised on the notion that…

Art enriches, beautifies, and entertains, but more importantly it builds understanding, innovation, and mutual responsibility. Yet, so often with tight school budgets, the first programs to be down-sized or deleted are the art and music programs. But there is good news. Recently, the Boston public schools received a grant of $750,000 from the…

A continued increase in US disaster losses suggests that there is still much to be learned about hazards. Hazards education, therefore, remains an important facet of preparedness. This paper investigates the science and social studies academic standards for 10 Southeast states to reveal the extent to which hazard topics are covered in grades K-12.…

Because art is a reflection of cultural heritage, a natural affinity exists between art and social studies. In Jacob Lawrence's "The Migration Series," art serves as narrative history, with visual images telling the story of the Great Migration, a movement of African American people from the South to the North around World War I. Social studies…

The authors explore the extent to which a mature professional development school (PDS) partnership at Kansas State University (KSU) helps link the disparate parts of the social studies education community. The authors initially identify and describe the divisions or "gulfs" that commonly plague social studies education, such as the gulfs…