Freedom of expression is the core political ideal undergirding American democracy and recent attacks on freedom of speech are a direct threat to the liberties and rights guaranteed in the United States Constitution. Freedom of expression is essential for participatory democracy, scientific progress, individualism, and civic education in K-12…

Meaningful source work is at the heart of social studies learning, but often a tall order for elementary-aged students. In this article, the authors describe the construction and implementation of a fifth grade inquiry on the Suffrage Movement using a focused version of the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) Blueprint. Using source analysis scaffolds…

This qualitative interview study explores the perceptions five USC Shoah Foundation Master Teachers who integrate Holocaust survivor and witness testimony via IWitness, a web resource from the USC Shoah Foundation, on students' development of empathy. Findings of this study suggest that the personalized nature of engaging with testimony in…

Here the author shares his attempt to add, without financial cost, substantive and dynamic international experiences to the secondary social studies teacher education program he facilitates. He provides thick descriptions of (1) the overarching goals of a collaborative, online, international learning project, (2) the curriculum materials he helped…

One of the most effective methods for teaching social studies events, concepts, and issues incorporates the fine arts into lesson plans. The fine arts, such as photography, architecture, paintings, tapestries, and sculptures reflect the core cultural values, political ideals, and religious beliefs of a civilization and offer excellent…

This article addresses the problem of how to best design authentic writing assessments in history that support learners in demonstrating the types of higher order thinking skills needed for effective citizenship. Recent research has primarily focused on curriculum interventions intended to build disciplinary literacies through various types of…

This article describes how elementary preservice teachers used four documentary films to think historically about the United States Civil Rights Movement. The author situates the descriptive case study within research about historical thinking and documentary film, identifying the need for using documentary film to think historically in the…

The Economics Across the Curriculum approach encourages the integration of economic concepts into various disciplines. This article features the essence of the approach built on best practices described in the literature. Several creative lesson ideas for teaching about money and inflation are showcased. These lessons were field-tested by high…

As pictorial-based social media (e.g., Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr) continue to encourage and sustain contemporary culture, the future success of America's democratic experiment may increasingly depend on its citizens' ability to critique visual information and take informed action. Promoting critical, historical analysis of…

This study uses interview and survey methods to describe the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme's (DP) development of students' "academic civic mindedness" and "model citizenship" at four public schools in California. Results indicate that the DP pedagogy enables students to develop many of the skills that are…

This article advances a continuing line of inquiry into an innovative teacher-support program intended to help in-service history teachers develop professional teaching knowledge for inquiry-based history instruction. Two prior iterations informed our design and use of professional development materials; they also informed the implementation…

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…

The author conducted research in Jordan, where he interviewed secondary school social studies teachers about their perspectives on teaching critical-thinking skills in their classrooms. All interviews were audiotaped or videotaped in Arabic and later translated into English. The author qualitatively analyzed data, including the translations of the…

During the spring and summer 1999, to increase his understanding of the mental pictures that young adolescents hold of their own nation and other nations, the author interviewed students from four sociologically similar urban-area New York schools and students in a junior high school class in Oslo, Norway. He used a semantic differential survey…