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The article outlines important concepts that should guide history teachers in reorganization of their curriculum around movements and how these can help students develop a stronger understanding of the past. Topics include the need for teachers to emphasize the role of people organized in movements and collective action in the past and present, the importance of illuminating the role of intersectionality in movements for justice and the significance of the role of community and school context.

This paper explores the challenges for teachers in positioning them as independent curriculum makers. History teachers in New Zealand have recently entered uncharted territory with the abandonment of prescribed topics for history and a new-found authority to determine the selection of historical knowledge taught to their senior secondary students. This paper examines the complex nature of the teacher's new role and responsibilities and argues that curriculum achievement objectives and national assessment places significant constraints upon teachers' selections of historical knowledge. There is the potential for substantive historical knowledge to be downplayed in favour of procedural knowledge and the potential for assessment drivers to dominate or distort selection of knowledge for history. Local curriculum making places a heavy burden of responsibility upon teachers with implications for students' access to powerful historical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching history in schools can be a significant policy instrument for shaping the identities of future citizens. The Danish curriculum for teaching history of 2009 aims at strengthening a sense of “Danishness” which calls for theoretical analysis. Focusing on this particular case, the paper develops a political theoretical frame for evaluating such strategies. While David Miller sees promoting a national identity to be a legitimate strategy of citizen formation in a liberal democracy, this view has been challenged by, among others, Arash Abizadeh. Miller could answer Abizadeh's challenges if the debate is viewed in a pedagogical context where children are in the process of citizen formation. Their debate offers central elements to the evaluative frame; the final developed frame includes cooperative practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented in which the author discusses the relationship between what is identified as the study of history in an academic environment and popular history and how the differences between the two might impact history teachers, and his development of a college-level early American history survey course. The article discusses the understanding of history by the public at-large, how the survey course incorporates films and documentaries and linking current events to the past, and the interactivity of the course.

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative interpretive study that was undertaken to determine how in-service teachers at Great Zimbabwe University were able (or not) to translate a theory that they were exposed to into practice during history lessons. Drawing on a range of data, the study explored how the teachers, who were purposively sampled, reconceptualised curriculum through their pedagogical practices during lessons. Teacher’s utterances in the interviews helped clarify their notions of history teaching in terms of the theory they were exposed to. The study found that while the teachers could articulate the theory, they faltered and hesitated to draw on it when reframing their pedagogical practices. The paper argues that this is not because of exposure to bad theory. Rather, it reflects the need for teachers to be assisted to weave together curriculum theory and curriculum practice into one coherent interdependent landscape that reflects praxis and its dialectics and thus make the theory-practice gap difficult to perpetuate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]