This article offers a discourse analysis comparing selected articles in the national press over the consultative period for Phase 1 subjects in the new Australian Curriculum, with rationales prefacing official Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority documents. It traces how various versions of Australia, its…

This article has a dual purpose. The first is to pay tribute to the work of Richard Selleck and Geoffrey Sherington; the second to argue that historians of education can make substantial contributions to current and future educational policy and practice by identifying what Ravitch has called "time-tested truths". The nature and purpose…

This article reports on a study that repositioned elementary students in new roles as active, critical participants in historical inquiry--roles that required a more mature epistemic stance. It reports 5th-grade students' responses to instructional methods intended to help them understand the nature of historical knowledge, appreciate the…

For educational historians involved in the representation of Indigenous contexts and peoples, what is the relevance of ethnohistory as a discipline or methodology, and what is lost or gained in using it? This article reviews ethnohistorical literature, and brings it in conversation with literature by Indigenous scholars on research methodologies,…

To prepare students for participation in a pluralistic, democratic society, history curriculum should help them develop mature ideas about why multiple accounts of the same events exist. But how can we know if we are successful? In this article, we describe work on the design, validation, and piloting of a paper-and-pencil instrument called the…

Recent surveys of feminist rhetorical historiography by Royster and Kirsch, Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Holt-Underwood, K. J. Rawson, Kathleen J. Ryan, and Jessica Enoch reveal that very few feminist historiographers have taken up digital methodologies or engaged digital humanist conversations. Thus while digital feminist scholars have…

In this article, I explore the history of a higher education writing community from its establishment in 2005 to the present day. In order to provide a model of community development which may be generalizable, this inherently "partial" and "prejudiced" Autoethnographic account is framed by themes taken from three of the novels of Jane Austen…

In the eighteenth century there were enough printed sources and archival materials to challenge or even overwhelm historians of that day. Two productive editors of lexicons and information management were Christian Gottlieb Jocher, who taught history at the University of Leipzig and became the chief librarian at his university, and Johann Heinrich…

Using history of mathematics for studying concepts, methods, problems and other internal features of the discipline may give rise to a certain tension between descriptive adequacy and educational demands. Other than historians, educators are concerned with mathematics as a "normatively defined" discipline. Teaching cannot but be based on a…

As part of a U.S. Department of Education grant to expand Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Albright College, the authors of this article, one a historian and one an artist, teamed up to teach a course called Revolutions: Art and Revolution in Latin America. In the class, they proposed to combine a studio art printmaking class with Latin…

For the author, teaching history has become a double challenge: to help students understand both "History" (the narrative crafted by the historian, based on documentation, supported by previous scholarship, and bound together through logical argument) and "history" (the real events that occupied real lives that are largely hidden from the…

Teachers can engage students in historical thinking by intentionally structuring close reading tasks. This article provides a practical and theoretical examination of the learning and teaching during a 30-minute social studies class in which students studied colonization by reading a primary source text from the Jamestown Colony. Students used…

In April 2011, Congress slashed funding for a majority of programs tied to education. Several programs related to professional development for teachers did not survive. While cut severely--from $119 million in Fiscal Year 2010 to $46 million (a loss of $73 million or 61% of its funding)--Teaching American History (TAH) grants lived, albeit by…

Science educators, historians of science and their students often share a curiosity about historical instruments as a tangible link between past and present practices in the sciences. We less often integrate instruments into our research and pedagogy, considering artefact study as the domain of museum specialists. We argue here that scholars and…

This article provides a review of effective and reform-based approaches to instruction that focus on teaching and learning of history for students with LD. Historical thinking goals, such as learning to think like a historian, to develop contextualized understandings, and to apply domain-specific approaches when reading and writing with primary…