This paper is a complete student-led, student-edited collective writing project (CWP) conducted virtually in Spring 2022 throughout the course Knowledge Socialism taught by professor Michael Peters for the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal university. The CWP involves 4 international, 5 domestic Ph.D. students, and 2 senior Western scholars as…

Some historians still hold back from assigning literature out of concern for historical accuracy, but using fiction and popular culture is no longer unusual and, if anything, using novels may be seen as outdated in some circles. The author suggests that one way to reinvigorate the use of the novel when teaching history is to center a class on only…

Bourgeois-based approaches to 'critical thinking' are failing to help students develop self-reflexivity and the capacity to think critically about the world. This circumstance has led some Marxist authors to claim that dialectics is the real form of critical thinking, so it should be introduced into teaching/learning activities. This advocacy for…

Teaching economic history requires the study of how to combine the economists' modeling and statistical methods with the methods used by historians and the other social sciences. It often involves learning how to search for quantitative data from a variety of sources and then building panel datasets that match the data found with existing…

One of the critical issues facing Historians today has been the emergence of Strong State regimes and the politicized pseudo history they produce in countries claiming to adhere to democratic norms. The attack on the Capital of the United States was based on a series of lies about voter fraud supported by President Donald Trump and members of…

In the university system today, co-research may be a decolonising strategy. We evaluate teaching a 'Modernization and Social Change' course in Vietnam as an experiment in co-research anthropology training. If for visitors, the idea of 'Vietnam' is nurtured by Hollywood action cinema, 1960s-1970s protest movements and documentary television, a…

Taking a lead from recent articles in "The History Teacher," the author placed history, popular culture, and historical literacy at the core of a history course entitled "Enchanted Capitalism: Myths, Monsters, and Markets." Drawing on folklore, literature, popular culture, and economics, the course explored the rise of…

This article reports on the efforts of a political science professor teaching a multidisciplinary course focused on New York City to develop an interdisciplinary class project designed to lead students to an appreciation of the immigrant experience in the United States "From Ellis Island to JFK" (Foner, 2000). The particular…

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…

The author has been teaching a graduate course entitled Envisioning a Sustainable Society since 1996 that seeks to explore the possible dimensions of a transformation of people's way of life and their beliefs about humanity's relationship with the planet. Designed for future teachers, educational leaders, and counselors, the course focuses on the…

Fifteen years after the "peaceful revolutions" brought about the collapse of communism and the reunification of East and West Germany, a heated debate rages over the legacy of communism and the continuing impact of 1989. This paper describes a new course that explores the contentious issues in this debate through the innovative use of…

Presents a teaching model that approaches sociology from an evolutionary perspective, maintaining that human societies are part of the natural world and their evolutionary dynamics are similar to other biological systems. Outlines the advantages of and student responses to the course design and approach. (DMM)

The Office of Education frequently receives requests for information regarding the educational developments in the Soviet Zone of Germany. This bulletin is issued by the Office of Education as another in its longstanding series of international education publications. Unlike most bulletins in this series that are based on firsthand interviews and…