In the United States of America, democratic education has evolved philosophically over 200 years from Jeffersonian ideas of educated citizenry to Deweyan principles of democracy as a "mode of associated living." In contemporary society, Dianna Hess has written about democratic education as a process of deliberative democracy. Yet the…

Following the American Civil War, several school music series were published to serve the needs of graded schools. These gradually became more popular than the single-volume songbooks previously used in public schools. Yet, school songbooks by Ransom Hubbard Randall and other authors continued to be used in the public schools as late as the 1920s.…

There is a renewed interest for the use of inquiry in social studies classrooms; though, research has long shown numerous benefits. This lesson seeks to utilize the inquiry method to invigorate the social studies curriculum as well as explore a controversial topic of gender equality in historic representation. Women are often underrepresented in…

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote--college students--would cast their ballots was a…

The author argues that, in the early 1920s, many urban White Americans saw in the Arctic an escape from a world of rapidly expanding technology and became captivated by images of Inuit communities. To pass down an antimodernist form of imperialism to children of the period, educators used lead ethnographic "Escimo" figurines, which…

The author examines the therapeutic value of puzzles for adults during two major crises in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Each period saw a huge surge in jigsaw puzzling throughout the country, she finds, and in both cases people turned to home-based leisure activities, either for…

In this article, the authors discuss a month-long research study where sixth grade students researched three women for the half-century after the U.S. Civil War War that worked to change their respective communities to address public issues: Jane Addams, Clara Lemlich, and Ida B. Wells. The sixth graders read a picture book for each of the three…

In 2017, the Oregon Legislature enacted Senate Bill 13, known as Tribal History/Shared History. This bill was the culmination of decades of organizing and curriculum work by the nine federally recognized Tribes within Oregon. The law directs the Oregon Department of Education to develop a K-12 Native American curriculum in partnership with Oregon…

The author provided a brief exploration into the origins of racial/ethnic categories and facilitated a linkage between a colonial past and the present. She encouraged educational researchers and practitioners to adopt an understanding of Latinidad beyond a pan-ethnic model of identity by making critical colonial connections. She underscored how…

Immersion into fiction is associated with many educational and social benefits. The current study compared read-alouds of a historical fiction novel and a nonfiction textbook to determine whether differences were observed in student's transportation, content learning, and socio-emotional development. In all, 41 students between the ages of 9 and…

For most undergraduate students, history prior to college has been dominated by learning through a settler colonialism lens. Settler colonialism embodies the typical United States, master, or traditional narrative. It erases marginalized perspectives, histories, culture, and identity in favor of the white settler perspective. By overlooking the…

Instructors of Language Arts, History, and Social Studies in the United States are tasked with helping their pupils compare perspectives across time and space. They must teach students how to locate and contextualize varied source materials--and help them develop research, writing, and citing strategies in the process. Standards of learning across…

How much should student effort matter in their course grades? How much does student effort actually matter? What is the link between student effort and student performance, especially when the effort is not specifically focused on a specific performance metric? This paper examines these questions normatively as well as by analyzing student data…

This paper makes the case for why anti-racism pedagogy should be included and identified as anti-racism in political science courses and provides and evaluates an example of anti-racism pedagogy in an American Political Thought course. In addition, I address critics of anti-racism and ways of addressing those critics in the classroom. In…

This essay offers a review of the ways that North American historians have approached the history of epidemics in education to date and it identifies a few key historiographical trends and research questions raised by American and Canadian work. The history of epidemics in education is located at the intersection of three vibrant fields of study:…