The authors of this article are two teacher educators who worked collaboratively to co-teach an interdisciplinary English and US history class to eleventh-grade students in an urban high school. They wanted to ensure the methods they were teaching preservice teachers were current and effective. The article discusses the foundational beliefs that…

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…

Social Studies can be understood, or theorized, in a number of different ways as a consequence of its history (Evans, 2004). This paper presents the findings of a research study of high school students' and teachers' conceptions of Social Studies in relation to four philosophical orientations, labeled the Classicist/Traditionalist, Essentialist,…

Building on previous research conducted over the past thirty years, this study attempts to inquire about students' attitudes towards social studies. Using a phenomenological research approach, two groups of eighth and eleventh grade students were interviewed. A total of forty-eight students were selected to participate in the study. With…