Struck by their sixth-form students' self-doubt when asked to make an historical claim, teachers Carina Ancell and Alan Kunna went in search of ways to build their students' confidence. A fruitful discussion with university lecturers Toby Green and Chris Dillon, about the challenges faced by first-year undergraduates in seminar discussion, led to…

Cutting-edge data science techniques can shed new light on fundamental questions in educational research. We apply techniques from natural language processing (lexicons, word embeddings, topic models) to 15 U.S. history textbooks widely used in Texas between 2015 and 2017, studying their depiction of historically marginalized groups. We find that…

A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that many history teachers avoid or minimize conversations about race for fear they will trigger "racialized conflict." This silence should raise alarms, as we know that race and racism permeate the lived experiences of teachers and students and inevitably surface in historical…

Anti-immigrant sentiment, policy, and practice are deeply rooted in the US tradition. Because of this, a series of laws have been passed to restrict immigration, which has resulted in millions of children and families being designated as "undocumented". These individuals reside in the US, yet do not receive the same protections as…

Why do we teach U.S. history and government to students? The answer is simple: to prepare students for engaged and informed citizenry, the essential ingredient for preserving the American republic. Unfortunately, ACTA's most recent "What Will They Learn?"® survey of the core curricula at over 1,100 colleges and universities found that…

A set of questions developed as an analytical tool can energize and deepen student investigations of historical maps.

This article traces how Mexican American Studies (MAS) scholar activists led and supported a statewide movement for MAS in Texas. As a Xicana feminist scholar activist, Saldan~a draws from her retrospective memory and personal archive of organizational notes, movement documents, personal testimonies before the State Board of Education, and photos,…

This case study discusses the development of a community-engaged undergraduate history course on the 1960s at Johns Hopkins University. It speaks to the specific limitations of contingent faculty and the challenges of bridging historically deep divides between a predominantly White institution (PWI) and many surrounding communities. It focuses on…

This article witnesses a field trip of a group of English learners and the instructor at a historical site in the United States of America. The purpose of this trip explores a question, "What does 'social justice' look like in the United States?" Drawing from the nepantlerx concept, the author describes a conversation between the…

This Proceedings document begins with the text of the keynote by Dr. Michelle Caswell, followed by seven papers, representing a sampling of the symposium presentations from the 2022 Digitizing Hidden Collections (DHC) Symposium, a capstone event for the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program. This program was funded by the…

This paper follows one small, Christian university's five-year experience with student charity date auctions. The contemporary re-emergence of date auctions represents a backlash against gender and racial progress. Student leaders believe that in a post-racial and post-sexist society, race and gender are decontextualised neutral elements of…

During the Great War, the Commission for Training Camp Activities (CTCA) pioneered a program in which civilian song leaders were assigned to camps throughout the United States. These men (and a few women) were instructed to organize regular community singing, train officers as song leaders, and cultivate musical talent among the soldiers. They…

Demographic trends in Texas continue to change and diversify the population; however, despite this trend, school districts and state officials continue to maintain a curriculum that is not relevant to this diverse population. Furthermore, studies show that Hispanic students, who represent 45% of the students in Texas public schools, have little…

This action research study evaluates the impact of the literacy intervention, Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), on students' comprehension of social studies texts in secondary classrooms at a high school in East Tennessee, and their perceptions of the intervention as an activity for learning. The identified problem of practice this study…

Regular incidents of police brutality towards African Americans, who continue to experience high poverty and incarceration rates, illustrate that the tragic and divisive effects of racism are still present, even 150 years after slavery in the United States was officially ended. In fact, ongoing struggles for racial justice in the United States and…