The purpose of this article is to provide further insight into how local history can enhance a history curriculum. However, rather than focus on the exceptional, it will use things found in suburban communities to show how suburbs can inform wider understanding of American history and culture. It is intended to help teachers in suburban areas use…

The approaching bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has stimulated debate about how it should be commemorated. This article reports a collaboration between the Waterloo200 Committee and Tom Wheeley, history teacher, to create a lesson sequence analysing the causes, consequences and significance of the battle. The article adds to a long-standing…

Bridging a twenty-year gap in their practice, Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell bring out the similarities in their use of timelines in their planning, teaching and assessment. What they also have in common is the fact that their experimentation with timelines as a way of strengthening cumulative knowledge emerged in remarkably similar policy…

Service-learning as a pedagogical approach has become a popular trend in undergraduate teaching. according to Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher, service-learning is a "course-based, credit-bearing educational experience that allows students to (a) participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs and (b)…

An act of atrocity is an act of violence that is perceived to exceed the boundaries of what a legitimate punitive measure--either against an individual or a collective group of people-would be for retribution for the unjust infliction of an injury. Atrocities are enacted, experienced, witnessed, and translated. They take multiple forms. What makes…

A slavery simulation that took place as part of a field trip for students of a Hartford junior high academy led a father to file a human rights suit against the school district, and for one official to comment that simulations of complex and tragic human phenomena have "no place in an educational system." In light of these conclusions,…

Egyptian history textbooks are examined through the prism of historical thinking dimensions and skills, utilizing a critical discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on how the textbooks portray two historically significant events: the advent of Christianity (ca. 33 CE) and Islam (ca. 641 CE) to Egypt. It reveals that the historical narrative…

As state boards of education and other state policymakers consider the future of schools, sorting fad technology from technology that accelerates learning is key. Virtual reality (VR) is one such technology with promise that seems unlikely to fizzle. Hailed as potentially transformative for education and still in the early stages of application,…

African American history is often taught poorly in high school U.S. history courses. However, we know little about how Black students perceive and experience this situation. I use a refined racial socialization framework and interview data with 32 Black college students in the Northeast to investigate how familial racial socialization shapes their…

The emphasis on the power of secure substantive knowledge reflected in recent curriculum reforms has prompted considerable interest in strategies to help students retain and deploy such knowledge effectively. One strategy that has been strongly endorsed by some cognitive psychologists is regular testing; an idea that Nick Dennis set out to test…

This article describes a high-impact learning project that combines geography, history, and ethnic studies. It describes the construction of the course, student outcomes, and the final and publicly presented collaborative project: the Social Justice Tour of Corvallis. Based on work in a small largely white town, this project presents a…

To explore questions in history and to construct historical narratives, historians work with evidence from the past. This approach to teaching history (inquiry involving the use of evidence) is an accepted part of the research on history teaching and is promoted widely in standards frameworks and practitioner publications as "good history…

This article focuses on how history as a concept is understood by first-year BA Education students. Students were asked to respond to the following questions: 'what is history?', 'what is history to you?' and 'who writes history?' Verbal and written consent was obtained from the students to participate in the study. Their answers demonstrated a…

Within the context of a first-person account of pedagogical growth, a social studies methods professor describes three pragmatic ways to bring literacy-based instruction into a history class. The three ideas are supported by current research on content-area and disciplinary literacy, and the rationales for increasing student engagement and…

Helping struggling readers to learn history content in middle school can be difficult due to heavy reading demands. In this study, researchers taught poor readers with and without disabilities in eighth grade to generate main idea statements; create, compare, and contrast paragraphs; and identify cause and effect relations, along with relevant…