This article explores the discourse on Black Founding Fathers through Glenn Beck's television show, "Founders' Fridays". According to Beck, this 2010 summer television special was an opportunity to present Black American history in a more nuanced and truthful way. The theoretical framework, silencing the past, is used to…

The author seeks to revitalize the interests of social educators in the value of using critical, postmodern discourses for rich comprehension of and productive scholarly research in our field. These discourses (a) challenge existing understanding within social education and the knowledge and knower they help produce; and (b) imagine more complex,…

Globalization has unleashed profound changes in education. These include positivistic international school comparisons, a singular focus on schools as drivers of economic development, and the adoption of neoliberal market principles in school. These changes, however, generally go unexamined within the field and literature of global education.…

The article describes the work of critical special education scholars and teacher educators in the field of Disability Studies who challenge the fundamental assumptions on which special education is founded, illustrating implications for all educators. A brief history of the field acknowledges the enormity of the institutionalization of special…

This article draws on research in the fields of visual culture and critical media literacy to establish a rationale for utilizing popular culture in social studies classroom instruction. One reality television show, CBS's "The Amazing Race", introduces viewers to diverse people and places. Although the decision to use this show to support social…

Arthur E. Morgan and other self-made business leaders opened Moraine Park School in 1917 to provide a form of character training that they feared had ended in the United States. These men believed that young people gained the best social education when they had to run their own companies because such opportunities enabled students to acquire the…

Numerous critics of the social studies have argued that the four-year pattern of chronological history courses in place in most U.S. schools was suddenly and pervasively replaced by interdisciplinary courses recommended by the NEA Committee on Social Studies report in 1916. In this historical study, the author challenges this view. By drawing upon…

Home geography was the principal means by which primary students in the United States learned about the social world from the 1890s through the 1920s. This subject was rooted in the German subject of Heimatkunde, and it reflected the changing nature of the academic discipline of geography in the late nineteenth century. Its content focused on…

This document-based historical study explores the nature of the Jewish social studies curriculum in American Jewish schools in the early 20th century (c.1910-1940), a period of significant growth and reform in the modern American Jewish education enterprise. "Jewish social studies" refers to school programs in which Jewish history, Jewish…

This article describes the findings of a five-year longitudinal study examining 23 elementary teachers' use of technology in the classroom. Specifically, it describes how these teachers' experiences in a technology-enriched elementary social studies methods course, taken in the fall of 2000, have affected their attitudes towards and use of…

This article explores the impact of social class setting on the instructional decisions made by four high school social studies teachers in utilizing computers in their classrooms. First, teachers in different settings had dissimilar views of the educational futures of their students. Second, the students with the highest and lowest social class…

This paper argues for civic education that helps students recognize that reasonable people will disagree about the best ways to live, and that this recognition should frequently impel us toward compromise and accommodation in the public square. Fostering this virtue of reasonable disagreement will require a concerted curricular effort toward…

This article describes and defends a revision of the traditional elementary social studies curriculum rationale. It calls for retaining most of the same topics, but developing them more coherently and shifting emphasis from the expanding communities sequence to introducing students to the fundamentals of the human condition as the primary…

Educators across academic environments seek to prepare students for participation in the development of a more just and caring society and world. In this paper, I explore the value of "art" and "aesthetics," broadly defined, as means of addressing these issues through citizenship education. After a brief historical review of the social studies, I…

Over the past decade and a half, states in all regions of the United States have formed Holocaust councils, advisory groups, and other agencies for the purpose of developing educational programs in response to a growing interest in the Holocaust. Some states have called upon educators and Holocaust agencies within the state to develop curricula…