Human acts are sometimes inspired by some desire for survival while on other occasions, however, by a move to show power over others. In this struggle, diverse forces tend to pull people in different directions, yet there is often a group that exhibits more power over the other, while the second group--those with less access to control--ends up…

It has been a concern among educators and academics that U.S. students suffer from a lack of knowledge about the world around them. This is reflected in low history scores, particularly in world history. The common explanation for this is that there is some systematic deficiency in American students, in that they either do not know the material or…

This paper starts from the assumption of the emergence of an educationalized culture over the last 200 years according to which perceived social problems are translated into educational challenges. As a result, both educational institutions and educational research grew, and educational policy resulted from negotiations between professionals,…

Ideology is embedded in children's books; it is an unavoidable and widespread occurrence (Apol, 1998; Hollindale, 1988/1992). Neutrally described as a vital system of beliefs of any culture, ideology is often examined with regard to its incorporation into plots, character portrayals, and images in literary texts for children. More importantly,…

The use of testimony in teaching about the Holocaust has long been a practice, relying on resources such as memoirs, diaries, and audio recordings. Having first-person accounts provides a window into the experience of those who lived the historical events that now fill the pages of text. As we mark the 70th Anniversary of the end of World War II…

Historically, AP Potential™ correlations and expectancy tables have been based on 10th-and 11th-grade PSAT/NMSQT® examinees and 11th-and 12th-grade AP® examinees for all subjects (Zhang, Patel, & Ewing,2014; Ewing, Camara, & Millsap, 2006; Camara & Millsap, 1998). However, a large number of students take AP European History and AP…

As much as the history and study of Africa have been incorporated into social studies curricula, Africa is still a region that is prone to misperceptions and misconceptions. Social studies teachers could provide students with an alternative image, but what if they only perpetuate misperceptions of Africa? This case study examines preservice…

Born-digital sources are, in fact, already old enough to fall into the domain of traditional, albeit recent, history. Bulletin Board Systems date from the 1980s. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) launched the first website and server in 1990. Websites and the new digital media are cultural artefacts. Archivists and librarians…

Year 9 think they know a lot about the First World War. After all, they read Michael Morpurgo's novel Private Peaceful in their English lessons all the way back in Year 7, they have seen Blackadder so many times they can recite it, and in the centenary year of the war's outbreak, they can hardly avoid it on television. But their view of the war…

Both the German and the international discourses on social pedagogy are shaped by a diachronic perspective on its history, which takes differing national developments as its starting point, and thus sees socio-pedagogical thinking as having its roots in particular nation states. In our article, however, we take a synchronic perspective to show,…

In this essay I explore problems of pedagogy related to Hans Krása's "Brundibár" by drawing heavily upon the thinking of two divergent theoretical perspectives regarding Holocaust testimony as advanced by Giorgio Agamben (2002) and Shoshana Felman (1992). I theorize that lodged within a space of difficult knowledge coalesced through…

This article addresses how we might teach for global citizenship in world history classrooms. Despite the name, secondary world history courses in the United States have not consistently focused on global interconnections, multiple perspectives, and inquiry into global issues. We explore why this might be, as well as suggest specific learning…

This article represents the third in a "ghost story" series by the same authors. Readers may recall that Mr. Bernanke was "visited" by the ghosts of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes in the March/April 2010 issue of "Social Education" as these two famous economists debated the economic recovery (see EJ878912). Mr.…

The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent contemporary high school world history textbooks portray Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Pizarro within the context of being "sacred," "profane," or someplace in between. To evaluate for existence of content bias this study employed qualitative…

The issues of premodern, modern, and postmodern can often confuse the social scientists because so much is drawn from modernism as the foundation of the social methodologies. Briefly, the author would like to differentiate the three modernism philosophies and indicate how a coalition of the three may apply to social sciences.