An examination of six urban Canadian school districts' policies and co-curricular programs for safe and inclusive schools shows contrasting implicit patterns of citizenship education. Peacekeeping-oriented districts relied heavily on standardized control and exclusion to achieve school safety and allocated few resources to affirming diversity.…

How do meetings in elementary classrooms influence student attitudes and behaviors, both individually and collectively? Can regular opportunities to participate in collective problem solving educate students for peacemaking and alter the social dynamic of the classroom? As an experienced teacher who previously studied class meetings in a private…

A suburban New Jersey high school's inclusion of Paul Robeson as a case study in peacebuilding citizenship education is profiled. Instructional approaches as well as student responses are described, highlighting the ways in which Robeson's life history intersected with core curriculum themes in U.S. and world history. Evidence from student work…

In this article, the author discusses his "History of the Vietnam War" course, which takes oral history as the core of its curriculum. This oral history focuses on personal lives and stories that can bring history to life. The components of the course are as follows: (1) overview of the History of the Vietnam War; (2) email interviews; and (3)…

The call for support of beginning teachers has ebbed and flowed over the years with the tide of educational reform. Recently, the call has taken on a more urgent and distinct tenor, focusing on specialized support for secondary teachers. This paper reviews social studies education literature in view of making the case for specialized support…

Although multicultural citizenship education has been theorized as a goal of social studies, there is a paucity of empirical research to illustrate what actually occurs in diverse schools and classrooms. In this study, I explore two teachers' efforts to integrate multicultural content into the implemented social studies curriculum. Although the…

This study examines the influence of a dramatic art-based history program for fifth-grade students on both their learning and enjoyment of history. The program, called "Performing History," reflects theories of effective use of drama in the classroom as well as successful ways to teach history. The program presents historical information as part…

A limited body of research examines the extent to which social studies teachers are actually utilizing primary sources that are accessible in traditional classroom-based formats versus web-based formats. This paper initiates an exploration of this gap in the literature by reporting on the result of a survey of secondary social studies teachers,…

This study examined the actual use of computer technology by four beginning social studies teachers in their history courses during their first year in the classroom. Specifically, it involved an assessment of their efforts to use computer technology to teach their students about historical thinking and historical inquiry, in particular the…

A quantitative content analysis of three widely adopted high school civics textbooks revealed that concepts associated with traditional liberalism--citizens' rights and freedoms--far outnumber concepts associated with classical republicanism or communitarianism (e.g., civic virtue, the reciprocal relation between citizens' rights and their…

Students' ignorance of civics is often viewed with alarm, as in interpretations of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); yet adults' incomplete knowledge of government is considered by many to be reasonable and acceptable. We show that aggregate distributions of political knowledge are actually quite similar for students and…

This paper explores whether a scaffolded, multimedia learning environment might mitigate obstacles that dissuade teachers from implementing problem-based practices. We present a longitudinal analysis of one expository-oriented teacher's experience with such an environment and examine underlying belief, knowledge, and dispositional factors that may…

This article examines debates over teaching Australian history in schools and notes a pervasive anxiety about what "our children" should know. The article sketches some of these debates, and while noting the politics of history teaching both in Australia and abroad, argues that its heavily politicized discourse has been further intensified by an…

The events of September 11, 2001, provoked an awakening of patriotic sentiment in Americans from all walks of life. Reflecting representation from the most diverse of political, social, and economic quarters, this patriotic movement included most everyone from across the spectrum, from politicians, religious leaders, and teachers on the one hand,…

In efforts to create "good" and "responsible" citizens, social educators have sought solutions (assimilation, acculturation, etc.) to the "problem" of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in U.S. society (Houser & Kuzmic, 2001). The "greater good" of this neo-colonial endeavor often focuses on maintaining the privileges of the white, upper…