With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the…

Architecture can be a topic in high school community studies. A program in Boulder, Colorado, is described as a case study. Learning activities include walking tours, library and city archive research, and slide shows. Tips for teachers and an annotated bibliography are included. (Author/DB)

Presents six position statements for developing a multicultural arts curriculum. Suggests strategies for implementing curricula and resources for gathering community information. Provides examples of implementation, including a sample interview to use with artists and sample questions to ask students when analyzing works of art. (KM)

Considering that the lower ability student in the seventh and eighth grades faces problems of emotion, identity, and self-motivation, there is a need for a more activity-based, exploratory curriculum that gives students responsibility for their learning and living. An interdisciplinary local studies approach was adopted for this six-week unit…

Intended to help economics educators in grades K-12 foster in students the thinking skills and substantive economic knowledge necessary to become effective and participating citizens, this book is organized around four themes. Part I presents an introduction by Mark C. Schug and a section on "The Current Status of Economics in the K-12 Curriculum"…

This booklet discusses and offers solutions for some of the educational problems growing out of the diverse nature of schools in the United States. Chapter I describes the society as a multicultural one in which a wide discrepancy exists between ideals and practices. A multicultural society is made up of many groups with varying degrees of common…

This article focuses on open schools or schools without walls, those experiments within the public school system involving a reconceptualization of the role of the school in the educational process. A brief review of the free school movement (those experiments outside public schools) is also included. The stated goal of the open school is to help…

Published in 1915, the document was intended for use by high school civics teachers as they developed programs to help students gain a better understanding of the principles of social, civic, and governmental life. Due to the dated nature of the information, the document could currently be used as a reference in educational history. Prepared by a…

The creation of an 8th-grade American history course and the training of teachers for the course are the goals of this project. Primarily a course in national history, it uses local (Northampton, Mass.) events and people as a key to understanding the larger national picture. The course objectives were to enable students to analyze, interpret, and…

This book is designed to enhance a teacher's awareness of the possibilities that exist for teaching a broader and more worldly elementary curriculum. It is intended for use in pre-service training, especially social science methodology courses and in-service workshops, as well as for the professional growth of experienced personnel. Two basic…

This guide is intended to help social studies educators in Nova Scotia develop a junior-senior high school program for students who have had a history of learning difficulties and whose acquisition of skills has been slower than average. The first part of the guide contains a definition of the student for whom the program is intended, guidelines…

This guide is designed to aid social studies classroom teachers develop and implement programs using the community as a social sciences laboratory. The document describes how to prepare a social profile of the community. Based upon the Colorado System-Based Social Science Project which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the study…